Weeping Nude - Edvard Munch, 1913
My goal of reading and reviewing five books a week is not being met. The Interpretation of Dreams by Freud has been taking me much longer than I had anticipated. I have not been getting in as much work for pay as I would like, either, and I’ve been delaying blogging to try to make it through Dreams faster.
I should finish the book tomorrow.
I have been wary of scheduling and lifehacking in the past, as it felt like self-binding. While I have grown used to the freelancing lifestyle over the past year, the freedom that it has allowed me is not characteristic of the rest of my life. My days were once scheduled around the needs of people who had a strong interest in keeping me unhappy. When I rid myself of the assholes in my life, it relieved my depression, but it did not teach me urgency or discipline.
To use an only partly apt metaphor, escaping the lash was crucial to my survival, but that alone did not teach me to thrive.
Pain is a learning opportunity, but it teaches nothing on its own. Allowing personal deadlines to slip, being disorganized, avoiding using more efficient technology and, most importantly, making moral errors, all have consequences that may take months or years to be felt properly. The pain of missed opportunities and frustrated ambitions drains the blood from an otherwise healthy person.
Basic functioning has, historically, been an unattainable and externally imposed goal for me, because I was both saddled with depression and living amongst people that I despised, and rebelled against by underperforming.
Now, I’m supra-functional, in a “modern mental health miracles” turn of events. Perhaps it is not as remarkable as it seems. I don’t think that I was inherently miserable as I seemed, in the bad old days. The dysfunction was largely an effect of my relationships.
In the age before disinfectant, it was not the wound that usually killed a person, but the infection. My relationships prevented me from undergoing effective treatment for my persistent troubles. The moral infection endangered me more than the initial damage. Clarity purges the pus.
I want more out of this life. I want more from this world. Good people do not deserve misery, nor to cower before the micro-dictators that sap the pleasure from their lives as insatiable parasites. I want to build a world in which such creatures must scuttle under rocks to survive.
A true revolution must build a society so superior that it renders its antecedent a historical appendix.
2 Comments
February 23, 2009 at 2:39 pm
JC, did you hear my recent call (or weren’t you on it?) with Stef?
http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traffic_Jams/FDR_1281_Nagging_Goals_Convo.mp3
February 23, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Yes, I did. It does address this directly, doesn’t it?
I’m learning gradually, through the internal market of my emotions, which of my goals are unrealistic and those which push me towards something better and more interesting.
I can put an idea up for sale to myself. If it’s a hit, nothing can stop me from pursuing it. If it doesn’t work, I find out relatively quickly.
Thanks for reminding me of the call, Nate.