Skip to main content

listless

What is it that I want? I think I know. Maybe it's just that simple, and that's what is so disappointing. It is what it is and, at least for now, it's out of reach. Coming to terms with that is all there is to do in the moment. 

And the search for a substitute is just that. It's unfulfilling, not what I actually want, and also beyond my control. You can't make a fish bite. Perhaps if I wanted to try some different bait, but I really don't. The pond feels very empty, or more just like it's the wrong pond.

I want to be able to sit with it - but it's so boring. I feel boring. In many ways, I am boring. Maybe what I'm struggling with is just sitting with me. Maybe sitting is just boring. Maybe I don't do enough that I actually find enriching. Maybe this job, the games I play, the things I read - maybe it's all just treading water and I'm not actually trying to get anywhere at all. 

Do I need a destination? Can't the journey itself be enough? Do I have to be driven and goal oriented? Or can I just seek peace and contentment? I have so much to be grateful for, yet it's so easy to feel blasé about the lot of it while bearing the responsibility for keeping it afloat.

I'm particularly uncomfortable with the privilege of all of it. The privilege to feel this nausea, this creeping desperation for something novel to jolt me out of the rut of routine. Attempting ambitions that feel impossible, working for a team that feels ignorant, facing the reality of just how little I know about what I'm trying to do. Chasing dreams that might never be anything more. What a luxury that this is where why anxiety arises.

Am I seeking escape? Certainly. I don't want to face the pending possibility in front of me. Life is always shorter than we wish, especially for those we love most. Especially when we are scared to face just how much we're going to miss them when they're gone. When we can't fathom what it means to live in a world without them. No one deserves this life - no one deserves the chances they get, or the cruel twists of fate befallen upon their lives. 

My life is far more a result of playing the hand that was dealt me than me building something from scratch. So what? Isn't that actually the case for everyone? Guilt is what. The prickle of uncertainty that it could all slip away in an instant, that I'm a choice away from collapse, and that I've only avoided it because my cards were better than billions of others' riding out this existence on a spinning rock that bears an abundance of life.

I want to be wanted in life, and to want it in return. I want to feel the vigor I feel when I know I'm engaged, when I feel the energy of shared experience. I want that personally and professionally. I want it erotically, romantically, platonically, recreationally - I want to feel connected to what I'm doing and the people doing it with me. 

Let the privilege prickle. Pay attention to it. Don't be ashamed of it, but also don't take it for granted. Make what you will of it, don't flog your spirit with it. Don't rake your self-esteem over the holes in your foundations. Build around them, reinforce them, strengthen your position because you want to do it. 

If you don't like your job, find a new one. If you want something, let yourself pursue it, but don't let it consume you. If you're thinking something, give yourself the space to ponder it without losing yourself in it completely. Not everything has to be solved today, and most things will never be resolved, because life is this precious, perfect, ever-changing moment.

Your fears can serve you. Your anxiety exists to protect you. Your sorrow can show you what you're not ready to lose as well as what you will have to give up. Don't fight the negative feelings, learn from them instead. 

Everything is always changing. Use that to make things better. Improve what you can because you can, but don't expect yourself to do it all. You're only one man, but you are enough.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Unapologetic Paraphrasing of Bastiat's Apology for Landed Property

This is my admittedly snarky paraphrasing of Bastiat's rambling apology on Landed Property in his Economic Harmonies . I think by translating the verbiage into modern terms, which I couldn't help but do so with a pinch of sarcasm, it becomes clear he didn't prove much of anything at all. Instead, a reader feels underwhelmed by its points and overwhelmed by the verbosity of his rather banal parables. Even though he shows what actually causes land to increase in value when he describes the improvements of a city/town growing around land, he insists that all the gained value obtained by landlords by that mechanism is actually just the fruits of their past labors, ignoring his own supposition that value comes from the service provided, in the case of Land, by a better site to occupy, not labor. If it pleases you, enjoy the following: The economists of all sorts say that landlord's charge rent for value they did not create. Most say it is unjust, but some begrudgingly ad
Post a Comment
Read more

Our Dancing Universe: the Word and the Circle of Light.

The Word lets light and begets all things. I have composed the following in awe of the beauty and balance of our cosmos. It is based off of concepts connected by three pieces of scientific literature. The summary of each is as follows: 1. "A unifying theory of dark energy and dark matter: Negative masses and matter creation within a modified ΛCDM framework" describes how the existence of a negative mass fluid would result in the orientation and behavior of the cosmos as we observe it, removing the need for the hypothetical notions of dark matter and dark energy to describe the shapes of galaxies and the observed expansion of space-time. 2. "Negative-Mass Hydrodynamics in a Spin-Orbit–Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensate" describes how when matter gets extremely cold, approximately absolute zero, atoms condense into a collective fluid that behaves as if it has negative mass. 3. "On the origin of gravity and the laws of Newton" describes how gravity itself i
Post a Comment
Read more

Free Land, or the ideal mean for a Location Value funded Citizen's Dividend

If we want to liberate ourselves from one another, we can buy into the idea that we can more effectively share this planet. We can do so for the purposes of maximizing human autonomy and the experience of equal liberty for every citizen of the Earth, through each of their local communities. We have the means today to voluntarily buy into a federation of neighborhood scale land trusts with a global reach. Existentially, our birthrights are the greatest lottery of all of history. We can make that a game with winning odds for everyone. The desire to be free, to choose to live how we each wish to live, is strongly felt within each of us. But those who experience it most, unfortunately, value it least. They become so accustomed to protecting or jealously expanding their own experience of it that they have created a system of enforcing their own privileges at the cost of others. I believe all people ought to choose whosoever's service they wish to enter, but I do not believe any of
Post a Comment
Read more