This article is about a rarely discussed component that resides in the background of our lives.
No word clearly describes this phenomena as it’s a fusion of different ideas.
We blueprint ourselves according to media that display extravagant versions of winners and losers. The profiles on social media are facade created around individuals—Profile being a well chosen word as it misses the other angles.
All across those there’s an implicit demand of mechanized efficiency which slipped from our workplace to our interaction with ourselves. We are our own employee and are expecting results.
Hence there’s a special purpose market created for motivation and self-help, to push the ones that are prone to fall for the media comparison trap. It abuses them by extracting as much money as they can while never letting them achieve what they promised.
It is not surprising when you are selling a shortcut to happiness and fulfillment.
What is achievement, what is a goal, what is fulfillment?
A goal is defined by the way it achieves its premise within constraints, be it time limit or numbers as long as we can compare and know when it is reached.
Yet a goal in itself never leads to fulfillment, as it’s constrained and fades away once the results are part of normality.
What isn’t constrained is the intent.
An intent differs from a goal in its fixation, its concentration, and its purpose which is often a continual and never ending one. It’s fluid and humane, allowing to focus on the moment and on the ceaseless growth.
The self-help industry can’t teach you how to have intentions, all they can do is goal setting and keeping yourself in line to achieve them.
An intent is not tangible and there’s no control over it, the only one you can have is on the goals which might be on the path of your intent.
In the light of this it seems that wherever we look everyone is discontent with what they are doing, looking for more efficiency and ways to tackle with procrastination—a word so in fashion.
Why are we obsessed with this efficiency-rat-race?
There’s sympathy with the satisfaction and self-esteem issues, using goals as manners of growing, but why efficiency itself?
Maybe it is related to how we are born in a world where we are pampered and don’t worry about much. We may crave some higher purpose, meaning, and order, but there’s nothing our surroundings can offer.
It is an anomie and a nihilism crisis.
We live in a time where religions are slowly loosing their core of being doctrines that would be able to answer all questions and soothe the minds.
Globalism has regrouped all philosophies and everyone is free to make up their own version of what used to be a strict system that directs and orders all actions.
In most societies, the individual is now the generator of reality and meaning. A demand that makes us feel lost.
If we can’t have an imposed system of beliefs then the effortless choice is to paint our system based on capitalism, hence the efficiency.
Still we aren’t in power, nothing is and we know it deeply and it’s shattering. Injecting entropy deliberately via goal setting is a form of illusory control.
But this system is empty and many are attracted into nihilism, not as a position of comfort but as a position of stability.
Instead of opening insecurities they prefer to adhere to something they can be sure about, or at least believe.
In this stance they like to blame the surroundings for everything, nothing is their choice, everything is meaningless.
Nihilism and religions are one and the same: “eternalism”, a hope to reduce the fear of the unknown by inserting a stop sign to all questions, it gives us a narrow set of available options.
This invades our everyday life and makes us feel wonderful.
In video games we can “buff up”, “grind”, repeat the same reassuring tasks over and over again knowing that doing this will make us reach our goals while at the same time having nothing surprising interfere. Total control, and if anything happens we can pick from the limited amount of choices and get out of the virtually risky setting. The world is at our mercy and there’s no worry.
This is very satisfying.
Similarly with cartoons, be it Bugs Bunny or Rick and Morty (competencyporn ),
the main characters magically get out of chaotic situations by molding their environment like invincible gods. No responsibilities, no worries.
This is morbidly satisfying, pornography for the mind.
Now back to the real, being stuck in traffic for hours with no control and confined in a vehicle we can’t leave behind because it’s an expensive item we can’t afford to loose.
This is frustrating!
Isn’t it satisfying in cop movies when the protagonist throws his cars shamelessly?
In the traffic example it creates road rage but in general it creates a detachment with reality. Reality doesn’t ply to our will unlike in movies. Some can’t get over this and keep this sort of immaturity.
However, this ideal of perfect control where things happen just by wishing them, unconstrained by the rules of physics, where we have the highest locus of control , with no external forces is excruciatingly boring.
“Total control (which requires total predictability) is totally boring. Life needs some challenges, surprises, setbacks, and serendipity to make it interesting. Enjoyment and personal growth come only withpartial control.”
A place you wouldn’t expect to find this phenomena is inside our educational system.
When learning at school we go through the process of doing repeatable exercises.
Nature has patterns yet those are ambiguous. Humans are biased to recognize patterns, even when there are none, memorize and repeat them. Learning is much more than that and school stops here.
We learn artificially easy problems, created by our teachers and bound by the set of formula that can be applied to solve them, more often by swapping some values.
Those are also satisfying, as the number of buttons to press are limited, even though the insights and what is learned is narrow, we believe we’re getting smarter.
Outside of school problems require both a baggage of knowledge, ingenuity, and creativity to be solved.
This is one reason why many who were doing great in high school are struggling at university with critical thinking or with open ended problems.
Memorizing hundreds of formula and techniques doesn’t create a genius.
Intelligence is then an ability to face the void, the unknown, and try, imagine, and link thoughts in unexpected ways.
Total control or the opposite doesn’t occur, they happen at the same time and this discussion brings this to light.
Think about revisiting the way you learn and set your intents.
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I’m not sure this is the kind of content this community likes to read.
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More to read:
I’m downvoting this post because I don’t understand it even after your reply above, and the amount of negative karma currently on the post indicates to me that it’s probably not my fault. It’s possible to write a poetic and meaningful post about a topic and pleasant when someone has done so well, but I think you’re better off first trying to state explicitly whatever you’re trying to state to make sure the ideas are fundamentally plausible. I’m skeptical that meditations on a topic of this character are actually helpful to truth-seeking, but I might be typical-minding you.
Can you clarify those points:
What’s the issue with having a post that is meaningful but not blatantly explicit about its “goal”? (If you’ve ever read rationalist philosophers most of their works are similar) I would argue that in my post there are many ideas and those ideas in themselves are explicit.
What part of the content did you not grasp and how do you not find them fundamentally plausible?
Where are you basing your statement that meditations, here in the sense of linking different topics in a thoughtful manner, are not helpful to truth-seeking?
I guess the main issue that the readers have with this post is that it doesn’t have a principal explicit goal to define something it’s more of an intent to pass a thought about links between ideas. It might be hard to read if there’s no obvious “end-game” at the end.
All and all, thanks for the insightful comment, I truly appreciate it.
Essentially, I read this as an attempt at continental philosophy rather than analytic philosophy, and I don’t find continental-style work very interesting or useful. I believe you that the post is meaningful and thoughtful, but the costs of time or effort to understand the meanings or thoughts you’re driving at are too high for me at least. I think trying to lay things out in a more organized and explicit manner would be helpful for your readers and possibly for you in developing these thoughts.
I don’t want to get too precise about answering the above unless you’re still interested in me doing so and don’t mind me stating things in a way that might come across as pretty rude. Also, limiting myself to one more reply here since I should really stop procrastinating work, and just in case.
That’s your personal opinion about their works. Continental rationalists have been useful to so many.
So you’d dismiss any work based on the return on investment ratio?
Not all thoughts need to be explicit, especially when describing links between ideas.
Have you ever watched the series Connections <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections (TV_series)>? If not I would highly advise watching it.
What is the alternative? Reading and thinking about literally everything is not an option, because time is limited.
If your ideas are difficult to read because you are not good at writing clearly, you have my sympathies. But if you want readership, you have to learn to write better.
However, if you write unclearly on purpose, well… I can imagine various reasons to do so, but I have negative reaction to most of them. For example, making your ideas less clear can be a defense against falsification (if you never say “X”, only hint towards it, people who agree with X will give you credit, while people do disagree with X may give you the benefit of doubt that perhaps you actually meant something else). Or it could be a blatant status move (I am so important that spending 3 hours trying to decipher my article is still the best use of 3 hours of your time).
Thanks for this post.
I’m not sure what is your central point, what is the component you announce at the start of the post. I understood that life contains a spectrum of situations we have more or less control over, that perfect control or perfect lack of control all the time is not desirable, and that we ought to have a wide range of experiences along that dimension to have enjoyable lives.
Did I miss something? Can you clarify your conclusions?
It has different names depending on how you perceive it, though none encapsulate the concept completely. Some call it “the extension of the self into the world”, as in getting so attached to objects (physical or not) so that you find stability to look into the world further. Some refer to it as immaturity, aka the opposite of Enlightenment. Some refer to it simply as control or hope for control.
To clarify the conclusion, it was a hint to the definition of Enlightenment given by Kant plus a bit of developmental psychology.
This post is more of a meditation on a topic rather than a redaction on how to seek truth about the topic (Which in my opinion is a start). This is why I wasn’t sure this community would be as interested in reading it.