Living without motivation is pretty miserable. Each day I wake up feeling tired, even if I’ve slept the night before. I get maybe 1-2 hours of having enough energy to function during the day, the rest of the time I’m just drifting through, putting off anything that takes effort. Every day is the same. Nothing ever gets better, it only slowly gets worse. I suppose that by definition this is depression – I have very little internal drive or pressure to get things done. I am literally de-pressed. There’s not enough inside my mind to force myself to function.
There’s so much that I need to do. I need to clean my place so it’s less of a tip when my landlord comes round, so I don’t get evicted. I need to find new sources of work before I lose my only client in October, and before my energy bill doubles. I need to figure out the tax stuff I have to file for self-employment. I need to fix my chronic back pain. I need to start exercising again. There is no lack of external pressure or reasons to get my shit shit together. If I don’t sort my shit out, I will end up homeless, or moving back in with family, neither of which seem acceptable. It’s not quite life or death, but there’s plenty of pressure there.
But I still put off everything for as long as I can. My life is incredibly messy and disorganized. I have no self-discipline. I do have the urgent voices in my mind constantly telling me “you need to do this!” But a large part of me just doesn’t care. Rationally, I know that it can get so much worse than it is right now. But emotionally, I just don’t care. Part of me wants it to be over. For it to get so bad that I have no choice but to end it. Because this isn’t a life worth living.
It’s not that there’s nothing that I want from life. It’s that it all feels incredibly unrealistic, and even if I did somehow get it, I don’t believe I would be able to really enjoy it. I don’t believe in a future for myself anymore. I don’t have hope. So I’m just drifting through life. There is no goal. Even trying to make things less painful seems pretty pointless, since my mind inevitably fixates on all the negatives. I would probably be miserable even if my circumstances didn’t suck.
So I have my endless list of things I should be doing, and pressing reasons to do them as soon as possible. But my heart just isn’t in it. In living. It’s not for anything. I don’t care enough, about anything, to force myself to really function day to day. I can force myself to meet a work deadline, because then it’s clearer to me that if I don’t, I lose my income. But anything more pre-emptive that might actually improve my circumstances long term just feels empty. Why exercise, or eat better, or take care of my teeth, or look for new work clients? Because it might mean less pain down the road? Fuck that shit! If the only future I can imagine is one more or less miserable, I want no part of it. I’d rather check out, and numb myself in the here and now.
Which is completely irrational and counter-productive. And I know that in a few weeks, or months, or years, I will once again be cursing my past laziness. But I just can’t bring myself to care. I can’t push myself to fight for a life that would be marginally less miserable. I can’t bear to face that reality 24/7. I would rather retreat into fantasy, addiction, and delusion.
2 comments
big goals and outcomes can seem daunting, and it’s easier to blow them off. If you really want to progress, do a little project. Like instead of cleaning the whole house, try cleaning for 20 minutes, then when you’re done do something you want, for me it’s get a piece of candy
is self employment the only option? I ask because I’ve been self employed, and it’s very much a self motivated world. Meanwhile a boss will provide you with projects, which you don’t have to emotionally invest in nearly as much. My boss isn’t giving me much to work on these days, and it’s nice to externalize that blame, get your act together boss, and he even feels guilty about it He really does provide a service
I’m also trying to start working out again, got out on my bike for the first time in months last week, and it was…. okay. the smell of asphalt made me sick, but the ride was relatively smooth, I can remember enjoying it more, probably need to do it more often.
That’s my remedy though, do something necessary, then do something you’d like to do. Reading is my goto right now, I’ve read something like eight horror novels in the last month. The last one was really good, sinister forces of a demon who is half plant stalking farmers in the midwest, and evil pigs… pigs are scarier than we give them credit, they really will eat anything.
I was kind of sad at the end of that one, I wanted him to keep terrorizing the countryside. Probably a bad sign, empathizing more with the demon than the humans in the story…. I mean but the humans had support systems, a purpose in life, the demon, he’s just trying to stay alive, I get that.
Breaking things down into smaller projects is definitely good advice. I think part of the problem is that there’s very few things that feel like a reward that aren’t addictive for me. I can’t really eat just one piece of candy, so I don’t buy it. I sometimes like playing video games, but only really immersive ones, so if I take a break and play as a reward then I’ll find it very difficult to stop and return to what I was doing. Weirdly, giving myself small rewards/breaks does seem to work when I’ve got a work deadline to meet. I think then I’m just so desperate for relief from the boredom/stress of work that even something simple like a coffee-break acts as motivation. The only way my motivation system seems to really work is if I know that there’s no time left to waste. Otherwise, I’ll procrastinate.
I don’t think self-employment is necessarily the problem, except when it comes to finding new clients/advertising myself. When I worked in retail I was also exhausted and stressed all the time, and never got round to doing self-improvement stuff at home. I may have to go back to that at some point, but it was worse than what I’m doing now. I’m not really qualified to do anything else, and working from home means I don’t have to deal with constant social anxiety.
I don’t really enjoy reading that much anymore – I think I may have ruined my attention span. I’m mostly interested in non-fiction these days, but I rarely find anything gripping the way I did when I was a kid. Pigs are indeed potentially scary – I remember them featuring as a plausibly sinister background threat in Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (although I believe they were genetically modified.)