No, really. Tell me. What ARE you waiting for?
Because odds are, it ain’t coming.
What got me back onto this subject is this vid :
Very interesting stuff. I would say I never quite made it to the moratorium stage, probably due to being defunded out of college at a crucial stage of my social development and ending up back home in my old bedroom and basically regressing back to childhood.
And there I have stayed.
Anyhow, let’s talk about that twentysomething Sisyphus talks about in the beginning.
Because I have been “lost at sea” just like him for decades. Facing that ocean of near-infinite possibilities with no idea which way to go or what direction leads to happiness.
It’s my “infinite corridor of infinite doors” via a different metaphor.
A slightly better one, to be honest. Captures the analog nightmare of indecision better.
And like that young man, I have found myself to be waiting for rescue. And not out of any belief that rescue is actually coming.
Like with him, it is more like a default position you find yourself in when you are lost at sea with no idea how to rescue yourself, let alone any belief in your ability to do it.
And no matter how hard you stare out over that endless see, all directions continue to look equally good…. or equally bad.
And I know how absurd it seems to go nowhere due to indecision. It makes a Buridan’s Ass out of me. The argument can be made that it would be better to pick a direction at random and go that way blindly than to stay where I am, mesmerized by the horizon.
And that is as true as it is unhelpful. Makes absolutely no difference. Knowing you “should” do something does not necessarily lead to wanting to do it.
Or being able to overcome one’s strong inner friction to do it.
Inner friction. That’s good. Got to remember that one.
What particularly stood out to me in the video was how neatly it fit with my own observations about how there are so many people like me who are both a. convinced things will get better for them eventually (they will get their dream job, land work in their field of study, break into show biz, or whatever) while b) doing absolutely nothing to move towards said future.
It’s like thinking you’ll be in Chicago any minute now when you didn’t even get on the train or even buy a ticket.
In fact, you never left home.
It’s like these parasitical dreams are mirages painted on the horizon, always comfortably the same distance away in time in that cozy category called “some day”.
The main purpose of these illusions is to soothe our ambitions to sleep. We don’t have to worry or strive or try to get somewhere in life because we will automatically get there “some day” with no effort or sacrifice whatsoever.
And so we live life in a waiting room of our own devising. And we wait. We wait for rescue without ever truly believing in it. We wait without even knowing we are waiting. We wait for our ship to come in when we’ve never been been to the shore.
Well rescue isn’t coming. You are on your own. Nobody is going to adopt you and do all your thinking and deciding for you so that you only have to do what you are told.
That ended with your childhood. You are on your own now.
And the decision is starkly clear : either do what it takes to pursue your own happiness, or rot in place till the day you die.
There is no third option.
More after the break.
Why we wait
Let’s dive a little deeper into this whole “waiting” thing.
Like I implied above, nobody chooses to wait. That would be impossible. If you actually said to yourself, “I am going to passively wait for some unknown person or force to make all my dreams come true”, you’d immediately know how absurd it was.
It is, instead, a position one falls into unconsciously. When one is stranded in the doldrums of the sea of possibility mentioned above, and lack the will or motivation to start off in a random direction, waiting for rescue is your only option.
Compounding the problem is the fact that striking out randomly may not solve the problem. You might row for hours and never catch sight of land. Never get a single indication of where to go. You will remain in existential hell.
But where does this indecision come from? Clearly, on the cognitive level, the indecisive person has a method of making decisions that cannot handle the task in a large and common set of circumstances.
There’s a clue in the times I have muttered “Too many variables!” to myself. That suggests that the problem is in treating decision like an equation to be solve – in treating it as a purely intellectual exercise.
Pure intellect can do many amazing things, but it simply cannot handle complex situations that exceed its limited working memory. A lot of the decisions of life are simply too complex to be processed by the human intellect.
This leaves the indecisive intellectual in a real bind, though, because odds are that is the only form of decision making with which they are familiar, and the idea of trusting something besides their reasoning capacity with important life decisions seems like the definition of insanity.
So you get stranded in indecision. Stranded by your inability or refusal to consider that there are many ways to reach a decision and rational analysis is only one of them, and not necessarily the best one either.
After all, if rational analysis is so great, why are you lost at sea? Why does this indecision not strike most people? What do they have that you don’t?
In a word : instincts. Instincts they trust and follow. The same instincts you filter out and suppress harshly in order to remain “objective” and preserve “mental clarity”.
That’s great for tests but not for life.
Life, I am sad to say, is not a test. If it was, I would ace it.
But my whole point tonight is that in order to be a happy human being, you need to learn to use more than just your mind to make decisions.
You also have to go with your gut.
Yes, just like stupid people say.
They’re not always wrong.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.