Lots of stuff I should be doing today, but I ain’t feeling it.

It’s one of those little adjustments I have to make now and then. Right now I feel sullen and lazy and self-indulgent. Just want to spend all day listening to music and playing video games and in general acting like I am on vacation.

A pretty shitty vacation, but still.

Like I have said before, summer brings that out in me. I guess it’s a sign of how much growing up I need to do. The longer, sunnier days still push me towards that “kid out of school for the summer” mentality. I want to hang out and have fun and enjoy the sunshine and blue skies, and not do anything that isn’t fun.

And take absolutely nothing seriously.

Basically, I don’t want to focus. On many levels, focusing requires effort for me, and I want to go back to being a happy little cloud floating wherever the wind blows, doing whatever he feels like doing.

And the thing is, I can totally do that. I have no actual obligations, in the sense of things where if I don’t do them, people will get hurt and I will suffer a penalty. I am perfectly free to live like that.

But I won’t, because that way of living is profoundly stupid.

It’s the sort of thing favored by the part of me I call the Jagoff. The one who has led me to my current profoundly unsatisfying life. The one who is always positive in a really negative way, like the enabling wife of an abusive husband.

The husband, I suppose, would be my overdeveloped superego.

The Jagoff is the one who tells me it’s not so bad, certainly not bad enough to warrant action or change. It’s the one that makes sure I have as much distraction as I can take so that I remain too absorbed and diverted to look at my life and wonder if this is all there really is.

Protip : It isn’t.

I really feel like that is how I have spent the last twenty or more years of my life. By brutally limiting my actual horizons, I make it through the day with the thing I already have, not happy exactly, but content.

I am beginning to see what Nietzsche was getting at when he railed against “wretched contentment”. For years, I thought that made no sense. Isn’t the whole point of life to become content? Inner peace and all that? It made no sense to me.

But now I get it. As it is with all things, an excess of contentment is poisonous. It poisons the will, strangles the spirit, and robs you of all your strength. You put up with things which are bad for you and make you unhappy because that Jagoff is always there to convince you that it’d not that bad, and that because you are not actively unhappy (or at least, not unhappy enough), everything must be fine, or at least, good enough.

My cure for that is anger. Rage. Dare to be discontent. Don’t filter out all the “bad stuff”, the stuff that threatens your soul-numbing contentment. The stuff that might conceivably wake you up from your dreaming state and make you actually want to do things. Things you don’t normally do. New things that involve the risk of change. The horror.

And it is easy to filter that stuff out because it seems like it leads to unhappiness and pain. And it totally does. To go from content to discontent is a downgrade when viewed on its own and through the lens of a very narrow kind of hedonism.

But the path to happiness is not a sliding sidewalk. You have to go through being less happy in order to go out there and get greater happiness for yourself. Enlightened hedonism recognizes this and is willing to work hard at being happy.

That’s why it is better to be happy than content. Happiness is the presence of joy. Contentment is the absence of pain. Obviously, it is far better to be happy.

Similarly, engagement is better than mere distraction. Distraction is the absence of boredom. Engagement is the presence of enjoyment. There is more to life that merely numbing the pain.

It’s the fear that holds me back. On a very deep level, I am afraid of the world. I spent years of my elementary school life living in a world where the only safety was in remaining hidden and/or unnoticed. It gave me a very deep-running sense of constant danger and a resulting tendency to isolate myself to calm my fears.

Safety in solitude. What a trip to lay on an innocent little kid.

Oh well, progress is being made. Tomorrow is my first actual Stand Up For Mental Health class, and I am, in no particular order, excited, nervous, stoked, scared, enthusiastic, and avoidant about it.

I don’t have any jokes written. I have a very strong feeling that David assigned us some homework at the end of orientation, but I don’t remember what it was. Felicity has ten jokes to present. I have, at best, two.

Although, to be fair, one of them can lead to a whole small routine. So there’s that.

I still don’t know how well I will adapt to adding formal structure to my comedy process. Ideally, I will simply absorb it and it will become part of my creative process.

But it will be rough going at first, I think. I have resisted taking formal external structure into my creative process for a long time. That’s why it is pointless for me to buy books about how to write. Deep down, I fundamentally reject the intrusion of anything external (and hence, to me, artificial) into the depths of my creativity.

But I suppose the formal stuff from the textbook is not the most important thing. The important thing is to write funny jokes and deliver them well. The exact path I take to get there is not that important.

At least, I hope it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.