Another hangover on a sunny Sunday.
I wake up dead
and crawl out of bed, crawl
to the nearest water source,
a fountain of life,
and drink like a man who was just saved
from hell.
In hell, there’s no water,
but there are fountains you can drink from,
fountains of spirits that do not quench your thirst,
but dehydrate you instead
and dry up every stream of thought that once flowed
in your head.
Practicing philosophy is neither about the question nor the answer. It’s about experiencing a question that strives for an answer using you — your mind, your spirit. We can even say the following: Practicing philosophy is about forming and attempting to answer a question that is unresolvable. (Everything that falls outside of this, no longer belongs to the practice of philosophy; it belongs to science. Although, it is also important to note that all knowledge, including science and religion, belongs to philosophy.)
A philosopher needs a good amount of observable truths or facts to generate hypotheses as well as theories. But he doesn’t need to generate truths or facts.
A philosophy is always personal. A philosophy — if it really is a philosophy — can only disguise itself as being impersonal. When someone reads your philosophical text, a part of you replaces a part of him. He becomes a little more like you — a little more like your philosophy. You transfer (duplicate) a part of you into the other. We can call this the reproduction of ideas because it is how they survive, evolve, etc.
Reading philosophy is a lot like eating. Your mind will digest what it can (or needs to) digest. The rest will turn into philosophical fat or feces. Coming back to a philosophical text is a repetition that teaches you something new. It changes you differently. Rereading a philosophical work is not the same as relearning the same thing. You cannot relearn. You can only learn new things through repetition.
Philosophy is the love of wisdom, not wisdom. Loving something is different than being something. If you love a woman, you are the lover of the woman. You do not become the woman by loving her.
Philosophizing is not something you do to get somewhere. Philosophizing is something you do when you get somewhere. It is the child of boredom; and therefore, it is a leisure activity. In fact, this is what I’ve been doing for the last 30 minutes or so…
Motivation overdose is as hindering as sloth. The fetters of over-motivation are made of the same material as the ones used to make the fetters of idleness. Only the former is much more attractively designed than the latter.
Of course, it’s simply an excess or lack of motivation that I’m dealing with here — too full to work versus too hungry to work.
The idle man is one “motivation” (push) away from becoming productive. The overly motivated man has been pushed so hard that he finds himself outside of Earth’s stratosphere. The overly motivated man, so that he becomes productive again, needs to decrease the amount of burning motivation in him one way or the other.
Like a man who has thrown too many logs into the campfire, the whole forest is at risk now.
I’ve been experiencing over-motivation more frequently since the start of the year, and it’s becoming very frustrating. To solve this, I’ve been trying to channel this overabundance of energy into creative activities, such as writing poems, reading difficult books, and composing songs. But even this isn’t enough most of the time. My mind is like a hungry frog’s tongue, catching one flying idea after another and putting them inside me even though I’m full. How can I deal with this? It may feel amazing, but the end result is disappointing. Eating so that you have available calories during exercise is one thing, but eating until you explode is another.
I wake up with a list of self-improvement action items I’d like to complete during the day. I really want to do them, but I end up doing almost nothing about them. Why? Too much motivation.
Over-motivation is deadly; it can even impede the attainment of ordinary goals. You become so motivated that it becomes impossible to sit down (or go out) and get to work. You want to do everything at once; however, since that is impossible, you end up doing nothing instead. It’s an “all or nothing” kind of feeling. And it’s bad.
The energy flows in your veins like abounding electricity generated by vast amounts of fossil fuel. You may even feel like a nuclear power plant. But the electricity you are generating is going to waste. Your mind is flooded with ideas, plans, and objectives that seem so achievable, within a hand’s reach. But these achievable objectives are like mirages in deserts. The overdose of motivation makes you run towards the oasis, but when you get there, there’s nothing but hot sand colored by the blazing sun.
Bored Absurdist 