Monday, April 27, 2009

Depression?

Okay, so according to one's standard eldritch-horror type view of the universe, nothing makes sense, nothing matters on any larger scale, and the entirety of all humanity ever accomplished will be for nothing. 

Got that? Cool. 

Now, naturally since nothing is of any particular importance, and you could die in about two seconds after reading this, you can pretty much choose yourself what you want your life to be about, what is your purpose, basically what you want to do. 

Which is your basic "You are the main character of your life" spiel.

I've been looking at my motivations for a while now, trying to see if they're the reason for my lack of, what I see as accomplishments, in my life, thus far. And....

I am indeed lacking in motivation, in drive, in the need to get things done. 

Sure, there are things I wish for - for good things for everyone, for nice, hedonistic things for myself, and, and I do care about people, at least on some level. It hurts when they're hurting and all that.

It's just... I don't really care for things, at least, per se. I've practically trained myself to NOT care for items. I mean, I love stories quite a bit, but I do not need to own any sort of physical media for them, or to even experience them twice... and I don't particularily care which of the various good stories I get to see... or, at this point, with the amount of stories I've already digested, if I even experience further stories.  

Other material goods seem equally pointless, I cannot really think of any I cannot do without. 

Personality-wise, I'm an introverted recluse, so while I do actually enjoy human company, I can do with a very frugal amount of it. 

Relationship-wise - well, okay, I'm a bit lonely, but I'm quite accustomed to it, and to be in a relationship would once again be, most likely, an equal mix of, well, various things.

I have some self-esteem issues, so it's hard to see myself ever accomplishing anything relevant, but I might have some interests there. Still, at best I would accomplish the same things thousands have before me.

I do like having a warm, dry place to sleep, eating, sleeping and washing regularily. Although it would be somewhat less bothersome if I didn't need to do those things. 

I'm sorry, I guess I'm just feeling particularily apathetic right now.

So, what's my motivation in this scene?

3 comments:

Ben Oliver said...

If you draw it, they will come.

Danny said...

I have problems finding motivation, too. It is quite difficult when you don't want much. I think that the basis of motivation comes from want.

I find it especially challenging because I derive pleasure from being thought highly of. I'd say a good portion for doing something creative, as opposed to fulfilling basic needs like eating, sleeping, doing laundry, etc, comes from wanting to show off what I think is cool to other people. However, I have a lot of social anxiety and find it quite difficult at times to be around and interact with people.

Doing basic actions required for living are pretty easy. These can be put down to basic drives to keep you physically healthy.

Creative ventures, I would say, are an attempt to fulfill some basic need to be recognized socially.

About self-worth, I'd say that in the cosmic scheme our physical size is extremely small. What we affect is limited by immediate physical interaction on macro and microscopic levels.

On a microscopic level, it is infeasible to predict all the effects our actions may have. Particles we interact with on earth are actually highly connected. The elements in the air you breathe have the possibility of coming from somewhere very far away. For example, you could take a jar of pollen and throw it into the air. The breeze could pick it up and waft it to some far away place where there was a sensitive diplomatic meeting between waring nations. We could imagine that the pollen would get into the nose of one of the diplomats and he would accidentally sneeze all over the opposing faction, thus insulting them and causing the war to rage on.

This is a silly example of how you are important because everything you do can have far reaching consequences. In this particular example, even though something you did has wide reaching consequences, the amount of control involved is very slight.

When working with people you can see more direct consequences of your actions. These people in turn have people that they interact with and influence and it ripples out so that your interaction with one person actually has far reaching consequences for society as a whole.

I suppose this doesn't help with personal self worth in the sense of being skilled at something in particular.

I would say that a lot of what everyone produces is junk. Photography, for instance. I would say the majority of pictures taken are junk. You try to set up a scene as best you can, but there are a lot of variables that change and end up in a picture being very "meh." So you have to take lots and lots of pictures. It's one of the primary rules of photography. If you take 1000 pictures of something while at least vaguely trying to capture it in an interesting way, the chances that at least 1 of those photos will have the perfect configuration of variables is actually pretty high.

I suppose that's only for creative things, though. For skills that have a set procedure, like doing taxes or building a car, I would hope that it wouldn't take 1000 tries to get it right.

So, I know it's kind of a roundabout way of saying it, but what I actually wanted to say is... I... Hate... Sauerkraut...

Esa Karjalainen said...

Danny, that was just, beautiful. *sniff*