Reconquering the Mind
Some days, I find it exceedingly difficult to do anything at all.
I have given up on the idea of stress and worrying about things due to this affliction. I always get my work done on time, or reasonably and excusably late. Could I get things done faster? Probably. I think that I could likely work at about twice the rate I do, but what is my incentive? I am reminded of Office Space... the reward for working hard is, you guessed it, more work for the same pay.
The point is I feel as though I am at war with my own mind—strange, considering under most interpretations there is no "I" to extract from the mind. It is frustrating regardless. By and large I "ought" to want to do the work. I value productivity. If I am productive at my job, I will preserve my job security (very valuable in this day and age.) But I sit at my desk and write useless things like this rather than actually work. The work is tedious, yes. I do not feel fully utilized, no. I do not feel "challenged," no. The clients are insufferable, yes.
I think it is rather poisonous (and potentially insidious) to diagnose this as a problem of willpower or anything like that. A smattering of the world's greatest minds are hard at work (intentionally or not) every day to create an inexhaustible buffet of algorithmic "content" designed to capture every waking moment of attention (this includes time spent at a job, and of course this knowledge is no revelation.) These are experts in their field, and the campaign against individuals' minds has been largely successful. Thus, blaming one's own attention deficit and apparent refusal to focus on them begins to feel much like the "individual carbon footprint" grift...
So it's simple: disengage myself from social media, and dark patterned websites, and generally all forms of advertisement that are reasonable to avoid in the Current Year. This, however, may not be enough. I would like to mount my own campaign for my mind, skirmishing with short-form video through meditation and mindfulness. As an aside, it may sound utterly ridiculous to use this sort of hawkish terminology to describe the simple acts of "uninstalling Instagram and Claude," and "sitting and doing nothing." But I don't know, it feels suitable. I aim to "starve out" LLM chatbots by keeping my mental faculties "onshore."
I have always found it relatively easy to focus on tasks that others find meaningless—my preliminary goal is to focus intensely on my breathing and my physical experience when I notice myself reaching for my phone. I have long kicked myself for "wasting time," so this is a sort of exposure therapy, as time wasted in contemplation is infinitely more productive than powerwashing my brain with thirty-second videos. You, reader, are only granted this text because you are a stronger force in my psyche than the pages of a journal.
So: disengage and meditate, in that order. The goal of this two-front offensive is to avoid replacing these digital habits with other equally mentally corrosive ones. Human beings have a long and complicated history with self-destruction, so I'd prefer not to take any chances with acoustic life-ruining. I think it more likely, though, that I will find something within myself, regain some of the mental fortitude I've seemingly squandered, and reinvigorate myself in my profession.
Currently
I'm reading Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, the uncut edition. Kurt Vonnegut's review reads:
“A brilliant mind-bender...Wonderfully humanizing......Some 60,000 words that were cut from Heinlein’s manuscript for economy back in 1961 are at last taking their rightful place in the body of world literature.”
And for the first 200 pages or so, I agreed. It really captured my imagination, this idea of a man completely new to his own humanity stumbling around understanding nothing but being forced to adapt and to live. But as of page 250 or thereabouts I find myself increasingly fatigued by Heinlein's odd Poconos harem fantasy, and characters taking a dozen pages to re-explain what just happened. Jill, whom I originally thought would be the "main character," has essentially been written out completely. I think the major problem with this book is that it's really just two or three smaller, more focused, and thus better books in a trenchcoat. One of them, I'm sure, would be a science fiction masterpiece. Unfortunately, you have to slog through a middle-aged-man's half-baked gender-theory manifesto and legal power-fantasy to get there.
I digress. All this is to say that sometimes I wish I could retreat into myself, partially discorporate, slow down my perception of time and take the initiative to truly grok the events of my life. To drink of them and allow them to drink of me. "Thou art God," and all that.
Editor's note: all em dash characters present in this post were lovingly placed by hand using ALT+0151.