I am the cause of my own pointless suffering. It’s being generated within me. So I feel a sense of responsibility to try and reduce it. Because I’m the only one that can. Not that others can’t ever provide assistance. But they can’t fix me. They can’t save me. They can’t change me. I’m on my own, and it’s probably always going to be that way.
The problem is that I don’t feel like I have to capacity to effectively help myself. I feel exhausted and full of despair most of the time. Often it’s like I’m barely in control of myself. I wasted half an hour this morning trying to talk myself into getting out of bed, consciously reminding myself why I needed to start work. I clearly reasoned it all out, over and over. But I still didn’t move, I just lay there. Like my subconscious had just made the executive decision that it wasn’t worth it.
There’s so many little things I could be doing to make my life less shitty. But I’m not. Firstly I don’t have the mental capacity to organise myself to do it all, but secondly I don’t have the energy to actually follow through. I don’t have the motivation to stick with anything hard in the long-term, unless I feel at least a little better in the short term. For example, working out often makes me feel worse in the short term. I feel tired, sweaty, gross and sore. It’s only after a few months that it really starts to help. So I don’t do it. Because I can’t push myself into feeling any worse, even if it’ll help in the long term.
6 comments
Since you seem to be in a place capable of self reflection, I’ll be frank;
Maladaptive behavior serves a purpose. It does a sucky job of it (hence the mal, I promise this is the only language nerdery), but it has to do something.
So if you find yourself in bad behavior that you don’t even enjoy or want, a good place to look is to what it does for you. You may appear to be your own worst enemy, but under the surface there’s something your brain is trying to shield itself from.
This is where I’ve been focusing on my energy level issues. I get frustrated by the apparent futility of some actions, so I do less. but, I always have to question it. Maybe there’s more meaning there than it appears. Dealing with my fear, that of wasting effort, I think is probably a big part of the solution
there’s a rot in the soul, and once that’s rooted out it gets easier to choose health
I suppose it allows me to postpone or avoid things I dislike doing. Things that involve physical pain, or mental tedium, or both. And the realisation that tends to arise, that nothing in my life makes going through this worthwhile.
then can the factors that aren’t worth it be edited out? I think about the movie “Office Space” a lot, where the guy just wants to do nothing, that’s his dream, and his neighbor tells him he doesn’t have to be rich for that, then the guy has kind of a stress break and stops doing everything he finds useless. It works out pretty well for him, with some middle conflict
then dumping a bit of my story in the mix; I met an amazingly unstressed and satisfied guy my age while I was still working. He wasn’t working, so all he had to do was cook, clean, and attend to physical needs. I thought to myself “I could do that, even at my sickest, that’s an achievable lifestyle.”
still on that quest, but a year after quitting my last toxic job, I’m happier and healthier. It’s an ongoing battle, energy management and satisfying my current obligations, but most of those obligations are temporary, a stepping stone to a world where I don’t have to deal with anything that isn’t worth it.
I don’t think so, if I want to survive or be healthier. Got to make money somehow. All I really have to trade are my written language skills and my capacity to pay attention to monotonous volumes of other people’s writing. I believe that movie ends with him becoming a construction worker? I don’t think my body would stand up to that kind of strain, previous manual jobs having already done a number on my back. It would be nice to work outside though.
Remove the stress of earning a living and everything does get a hell of a lot easier. If you’ve got a plan to get to that level, then that’s certainly worth pursuing.
I wish I was better equipped, to pull people out of their dependence on the economy. But it’s an oxygen mask situation, I have to get mine on before I go back to trying to help others. and I hate being that selfish, it goes against all my values.
The guy could have been in management though, if he’d wanted to. I think he had too much issue with how companies are run, which I can relate to. It still seems to me that if someone else needs my labor enough to pay me, they need it bad enough to treat me with a basic respect I have only found in companies that are now gone, maybe I’m just a relic.
I think it’s absolutely justifiable to prioritise your own escape, if you can see a way out. I can also see construction work being preferable to the pressures of management, if one had those options. I guess the incentive for companies to treat employees with a certain respect only really operates in circumstances where it’s essential to retain a workforce, where the employees particular skills are scarce (doctors, lawyers, etc.) Whenever employers know that it’ll be easy to replace someone, the incentive will always be to squeeze the maximum performance out of someone, which often doesn’t involve treating them with basic respect.