High On Neurosa!

August 6, 2021

"Defeat the Evil Brain with the Good Brain!"

I have been looking for an organizational structure. I need a way to compartmentalize the time that makes up my life in order to allow me to accomplish the feats that are required of me (by myself.) These feats vary in character, intensity, and duration. Some of these feats require much working time; some of them require a dearth of working time. What I mean by the latter is that they require long stretches of time in which I do nothing. If I accidentally do something, the whole process is ruined, and I have to start over. As you may guess, finding a balance here is not easy.

I don't react well to discipline, whether it comes from myself or others. I am of a rebellious nature - I am rebelling against the whole world at all times, simply by existing.

…Or at least, so I thought. It was my belief until recently that The World had expectations of me, expectations that I was consciously rejecting, thereby making my lifestyle "significant." However, it has recently occurred to me that many of these expectations may not, in fact, have been imposed on me by The World. The truth may be that they were expectations I had set for myself - inflated, unrealistic expectations, and instead of coming to terms with the crushing disappointment that came from my inability to live up to them, I externalized such feelings of self-contempt to the World, growing to resent it for hating me for just being a normal, flawed, growing person, and by doing so hoped to give my resignation a more sophisticated character.

Which led to the me now that shies away from ambition of any sort, for fear that any goal-setting will repeat this cycle of hyperinflation (of ego) followed by a deep, dark recession (of mood), which is then relieved via resignation and apathy. This resignation and apathy is an attempt to free myself from the highs and lows of the expectation cycle, and it works. It works remarkably well, if you stick with it. You can learn to not care about anything! I'm not kidding! You can sit there and think up the most terrible ideas imaginable, and it won't bother you one bit. You can accept the most dire situations, choosing to do nothing to change them. You can even be happy sometimes, if you set your expectations low enough.

The only problem being that it sucks your life force away. You're tired, all the time. Any activity essentially ends your day by leaving you too fatigued to even think straight. Any desire or wish is instantly zapped, initiatives crushed; even abstract ideas start to feel like too much to be bothered with. You become so attached to this bizarre, warped sense of freedom from emotion and agitation that any sort of appeal for your time from the outer world is seen as an imposition. Minor obstacles become insurmountable. You can't even clean your damned teeth.

Eventually, even activities you enjoy start to feel like an obligation. Your desire to write becomes an obligation to perform for people you don't care about. And of course, if you see the beneficiaries of your actions to be strangers you don't have any attachment to, this standpoint even seems reasonable. This of course ignores the fact that you have to, at some point, do something, for your own sake if nothing else. Because while this resignation and apathy and stoicism is cool and mellow a lot of the time, every once in a while you get this funny feeling in the pit of your stomach, or the area just above your knees, or occasionally localized specifically underneath your left calf - this feeling of restlessness. Because you realize that these monks and ascetics that you idolize didn't just sit around for no reason; they were grappling with something. They were dealing with the agitation and turmoil of conceptualizing a religious experience, or performing a sacramental duty; they weren't just chilling out. They didn't do this for fun, and they certainly weren't free. They were, in fact, extremely restrained. That's the whole point.

All this to say that my previous form of self-discipline, which consisted entirely of the "don't want things" and "live on nothing" variety, is good fun and all but not exactly the point; and in fact, the self-discipline of doing is in fact much more difficult and, perhaps, important than the self-discipline of not doing; that is, if you are choosing to enforce this discipline yourself without the help of external institutions. And I don't trust any external institutions to have my nor anyone else's best interests in mind, so I don't have a choice. I must be my own boss, while also being my own best friend.

A problem with this being that the maxims "Know thine enemy" and "Know thyself" are, in fact, equivalent. I thought that the problem was other people not accepting my way of being, so I stopped interacting with people. I immediately noticed that I began inventing people to take issue with my lifestyle. I needed someone to have a problem with me in order to justify the whole thing at all, which sort of defeats the point of independence. If what I feel I'm doing is worthwhile, it should be worthwhile regardless of anyone else's opinion. The question is raised: Am I simply a contrarian, or am I truly upholding my principles?

I know I am the one who raised the question, but let's ignore it for now - it's not actually that important. The important part is clearly the part where I start inventing people on whom I can externalize my own disappointment in myself. Which brings us back to the beginning, with me vs "the world" ("the world" actually just being me again). What did I say before about cycles? Nothing? Well, let me say it now then, and next time we're back here you'll remember it.

That was a lot of reflexive psychologizing, and you may be wondering now whether that was the actual point of this essay or whether it was a prelude to some greater point. Let me answer that question by simply continuing along.

HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY

Everything I said above is accurate, to an extent. It is a highly condensed and abridged narrative recounting of the psychological trends most prevalent in my life from age 19-or-so onward, centred around my relationship to capital-C-capital-W Creative Work. Psychology is quite a tool for constructing such narratives; it provides an extensive glossary of terms and types ready to be applied to a wide variety of situations.

When it comes to historical research, the narrative you end up with depends on your scope - in terms of area, time, and subject matter - as well as the sheer amount of data you are willing to incorporate. The incorporation aspect is key here, because what data is deemed important or not important is highly subjective, and can have a massive outcome on the final findings. Thus, historical narratives are changing all the time: constant new data + constant re-interpretations of old data = no possibility of long-term consensus. And that is part of what makes history so fun - you can argue about it forever.

The same is true of psychology. You may think you understand the history of your own life and the workings of your own mind, but in all likeliness, you don't. When it comes to combining the two, i.e. remembering the thoughts and feelings you had during a specific event or period in your life, the results are even worse. It is simply not within us to know.

You think of a past relationship during a moment when you are sad and lonely, and it seems so nice. "I was happier then," you think. "Sure, there were bad times and all, but remember when we went to the aquarium? Remember the feeling when she told me she loved me? She was so nice, so caring; I was such a fool to let her go..." etc, etc. The next week, you wake up from a dream. Forget the content of the dream; what is important is that you wake up, for whatever reason, with a memory of a party you went to. A party where you had a fight. You fought in an absolutely stupid manner; you fought in such a ridiculous way that you can't even believe you continued to date someone who would even conceive of fighting in such a way. Perhaps, this memory brings with it many more memories of many more fights, insecurities, and little niggling feelings that burrowed within your psyche for months and months, never quite enough to bring up but always there, in the back of your mind, making you wonder why you were bothering with any of this at all. And you think, "Thank goodness that that's over! What a relief! I'd rather be alone my whole life than go back to that!"

Remember what I said about cycles?

The content of the relationship has not changed during the week. Most likely you did not even see your ex. You didn't even hear of them, or see a picture of them. And yet, your opinion of them turned 540 degrees.

And yet you claim to know about your own life, and your own feelings! You can not return to the past; you can only bring the past into the present. And once it's here, it's corrupted; it gets all mixed up with everything else that's here and now, and no longer bears any resemblance to its former self.

Whether we mean to or not, we create a "canon" of our own life. Anything so unimportant as to be forgotten is essentially "non-canon." This obviously applies to dull or mundane memories, but also applies equally to any memory that goes against the "theme" of the narrative. If someone were to provide proof, we would have to admit that such an event or such a feeling did, in fact, exist; however, we would probably discard it as an outlier or aberration: "I'm not sure why I did that. It's certainly not the kind of thing I would normally do."

The trouble here, of course, comes from the fact that the narratives we form w/r/t our own psychology are determined largely by our own psychology. If you are inclined to give up easily, you may look back on your life and all the times you've given up and say, "Ah well; I guess that's the way I am." If you are particularly obstinate about this practice, you may develop a set of values that prizes giving up easily, thereby turning the act (or non-act) into a point of pride. "All these people chasing after things they will never achieve! Ha! I will not fall into such traps!" You may look back on your life, and all the things you started and never finished, and say, "The end result wouldn't have been much good anyway," or, "I would have stopped enjoying it eventually," carefully de-canonizing all the (perhaps few) times when you persevered and actually gained something thereby.

Of course, there's no way to tell where your values came from. Whether they are a result of subtle neurotic tendencies or healthy retrospection is beyond your ability to know. It's almost a "free will" sort of situation, where when you start to delve into the deterministic factors that led to the current situation of your life, you realize that it's impossible to tell where you begin and the world around you ends, in terms of influence. Like many human beings, I find myself in the unfortunate position of holding political views. Where did these views come from? Do they reflect what I want for myself only, or is there altruism in there too? Are they a result of my psychology, my research, my environment, my innate personality?

It is becoming clear to me that this is another one of my essays where I open a bucket of worms and then say, "Let's not go fishing after all." Perhaps this is my resignation speaking, but I simply do not feel any drive to pursue the rigorous philosophizing required to come up with a definitive system regarding such questions. Always, in the back of my head, would loom the possibility that after it all I would end up disagreeing with myself.

SLIDING BACK DOWN

We're not here for philosophizing anyhow - we are here to solve a problem. The point of the above self-analysis was to solve a problem. The point of the above philosophizing was to ignore the problem. As always, the problem involves a cycle. I've basically covered this cycle above, but let's just review:

1) Work on a project because I want to

2) Turn "want to" into "have to"

3) Externalize the "have to" into "other people want you to"

4) Say, "I'm not going to let other people tell me what to do!"

5) Do nothing and feel okay about it

6) Do nothing and feel guilty about it

7) Externalize this guilt/disappointment in myself onto Planet Earth

8) Feel miserable about the whole Earth

9) Give up on everything and die

10) Undie and re-build self

11) Work on a project because I want to

If this sounds stupid, that's because it is. It's a colossal waste of life-energy. I'm not one for efficiency or productivity, but even I can see that things could work a bit better here. More important than the lack of work being done, of course, is the sheer amount of self-inflicted misery involved. We could do to cut that all out. Let's just do that, shall we?

1) Work on a project because I want to

2) Continue to want to

3) Keep going

4) Maybe take a break if I'm tired

5) Keep going again

This is a much nicer cycle, wouldn't you agree? This is what the cycle should look like. This is where we want to be. No resentment, no externalization, no guilt, no dying - this looks great. I could see a bright future for such a cycle.

And who's stopping this cycle from being a reality? It's not you. It's not my mom and dad. It's not the government. It's me! Ha ha! Oops!

Okay, I'm being facetious. This isn't going to be quite so easy. If I set an expectation of ease, I'm just going to disappoint myself again, and then we'll just be in a different, weirder meta-cycle. I'm not here to add cycles; I'm not a CPU engineer. I'm more like a Buddha. I'm here to transcend cycles. My goal is inner peace, or at least an approximation of it. Cycle 2 above is what a cycle looks like when inner turmoil approaches a limit of 0. To get there, I just need to keep adding decimal places.

I've recognized a problem. I can look at it, with my eyes. It doesn't become any less real for being looked at. I’m on step 0. Step 0 is the time when it becomes clear that there is going to be a necessity for steps. To use a military analogy: I have just received notice from my reconnaissance team that the enemy is lying in ambush. It's less likely now that I will just straight up die, but the possibility still exists. It remains for me to figure out how to actually defeat them.

I'm done ignoring my problems! I'm done accepting my problems! It's 2021, my name is Balckwell, and I say it's time to deal with my problems! It's time to ascend!

BALCKWELL RISING!!!!!