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My desire pursuit is overly strong: I push routine and health aside to achieve.
The reaction is days of pain-enforced respite.
It is a balancing mechanism: the down time is roughly equivalent to the misdemeanors against the body.
The will forces attrition, and the bodily response is sabotage of goals that sustain the ego.
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The absurd is when your aim does not match your strength or ability, according to Albert Camus.
To charge a wall armed only with anger is absurd.
To expect success while ignoring reality is absurd in direct proportion to the scale of your goals. A situation becomes absurd when the odds are infinitesimal, yet the individual persists.
This defiance against reality is equal parts hopeful and bravery, yet also insanity.
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Spoken to me: "A little rain never hurt anyone, but a lot can kill you."
Of course, all excesses kill, but avoidance of discomfort is a smaller, rationalized death.
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In response to yesterday: happiness may be a choice, but it is a political choice.
We are socially compelled to be happy: it is a desire we must urgently pursue and sacrifice to achieve. However, to choose happiness when faced with the pain and suffering of others, or a global catastrophe, requires a convoluted contradictory stance.
Nietzsche says we should instead pursue "joy", which involves sacrifice and may include suffering over the long term to achieve a goal that is great and rewarding. Others, such as Timothy Brennan, say "pleasure" is preferable.
"Happiness" is now politicized and commoditized, enfolded within an individualistic imperative for emancipatory freedom. Our blind pursuit of happiness has become an entitled right.
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You’ve heard happiness is a choice, but don’t believe it.
When we pursue status and toys we lose happiness.
Happiness is fleeting and only arrives when you desublimate (cease to be self-aware).
Caught in your desire, you are engrossed in what "you" want.
Happiness requires you to lose yourself in the present, which is a choice to no longer want.
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A text from a friend:
Making a decision with finality is always difficult and necessary.
It’s the in-between that’s impossible.
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Any movement forces you to encounter the world and incur risk, which is to see the world as a trap. However, to remain still is to rot internally.
Knowing one outcome is always negative (standing still) means any movement has a better chance of success, and thus you are propelled from pessimism into optimism.
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There is an impulse to delay making hard decisions, which can be wise, but during the intervening moments, we convince ourselves that making a decision (getting off the fence) will relieve us.
However, because it is a hard decision, there is no good solution and there will be pain on either side.
Relief comes from a narrowing of options, not the "correctness" of your decision.
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Every choice is a forced choice. It is also a free choice.
We must be forced to choose, at which point it seems we have no choice, but that moment is a culmination of previous choices and external pressures (the frame in which we exist).
Once realized, we cannot unsee the potential to reject or reframe our choice, which is the choice: to choose how to see your choices in a new light.
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Do we have an innate fear of losing bureaucracy? We all claim to hate it, yet we are familiar with its convolutions.
Within the maze’s twisted containment, we become familiar with navigating the petty and having our excessive efforts casually thwarted. Yet, we don’t escape and we cease looking for the exit.
We prefer the dull corners rather than risk the jagged peaks.
We prefer the buttressing security of a system, choosing the intimate pain of common convolutions over the chaotic brute force of reality.
