Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: emotions

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    Melancholy as fixation

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    1–2 minutes

    Melancholy is being in love with your pain.

    What this looks like is a paralyzed state of holding onto the past: repeating the wanting for a relationship (or a time) that shifted. This plays out as a compulsive reenactment of the past, replaying the pattern, clinging to and controlling the uncontrollable through re-narrating. It becomes a favorite story, a mantra.

    To be fixated (unwaveringly focused) on pain is a recipe for insanity: sad or zealous, it narrows you out of wider awareness. It is more akin to suicidal self-hypnosis: replay your favorite movie until death.

    In part from Julian de Medeiros

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    sabotaging happiness

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    1–2 minutes

    We frame our happiness with conditions, such as, "if I have this job and these comforts, I can be happy." And yet, once we get them, we find a new required provision to amend the "I will be happy when" clause.

    We strike a bargain while altering the terms continuously. This is obviously sabotage.

    What we want is not happiness, but a goal to pursue: we want the struggle when we could stop at any time and simply be happy.

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    Start Small

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    1–2 minutes

    You will never accomplish something big, it is too daunting Your mind will trick you out of starting.

    Instead, start small. Pick up a pen and jot/scribble/doodle for 2 minutes.

    This will loosen up the open self who wants to create. By feeding this creative self, and getting addicted to the good feeling. You will gradually build up to an accomplishment, note by 2-minute note, until the mass self-organizes.

    Subsequently, bigger things are less daunting: they simply come out of lots of small things.

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    “I have never met a shallow addict”

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    1–2 minutes

    Addicts are complicated and deep people who don’t know how to deal with their emotions.


    This is why they often turn to drugs and alcohol (sex or ambition as well) and cannot quit them. Turning inward to deal with your complicated self is more challenging than dying.

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    death of affect, and it’s return

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    1–2 minutes

    As the human figure is replicated and flattened (allá Warhol) and enlarged (allá Oldenburg) the body loses affect. This representation mirrors advertised, commodified objects: objects without spirit or agency.

    Frederic Jameson calls this the “death of affect.”

    To clarify, it is a spread or dispersal of affect. Affect of the body (it’s agency to produce effect) is siphoned into the image and distributed ubiquitously. This is not profound, but a banal vampiric bleeding-off the affect of a real body into a sans-animate representation.

    Our true death is that we lose the ability to experience the real.

    But, let’s not be hasty: one encounter with the primal real, a real body, can reactivate the giddy potency so carefully neutered.

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    inferiority from grandiosity

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    1–2 minutes

    Your inferiority complex is because of your grandiosity complex.

    The reason you feel bad is because you think everything should be so good, so perfect.

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    don’t aim for happiness or you will destroy it

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    1–2 minutes

    We say we are looking for happiness, but we are looking for a marvelous life that comes from a great pursuit.
    Almost none of which appears as happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of doing excellent work.

    Furthermore, even if we achieve happiness we promptly destroy it agitating for a novel heightened level of experience or meaning: we destroy happiness seeking more happiness.

    (in part from Jordan Peterson)

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    Mutual strain: avoiding rupture

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    1–2 minutes

    Being in a relationship involves nerves: getting on them, both good and bad.

    We don’t fall out. Rather, our mutual capacity for tolerance is exhausted.

    The strain of caring, of good, of excellent excess, is a pressure begging release: it can turn positive or negative, but there will be an explosion.

    (Inspired by Alastair Reynolds)

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    the need for love to overcome

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    1–2 minutes

    Amidst real, detrimental, and untenable problems, we seek to overcome them. While desperation and survival may drive us, for emotional (psychological) overcoming we require a lack of strife, and preferably love.
    With an emotional foundation internally, you can more clearly react and develop the prowess and motivation to tackle the external.

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    reframing or revealing?

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    1–2 minutes

    Cognitive behavioral therapy invokes tools that allow you to pause and reframe situations into a less traumatic context or gain a broader perspective that will alleviate anxious ruminations.

    This is a fantastic tool for mental health, but what does it say about reality?

    1. Are we in a subjectively determined reality (that is, we make our reality) yet must constantly reframe it because our self-narration is so traumatic?
    2. Or does our stable reality generate antagonistic situations from which we must attempt induced blindness through escapist fantasy?
    3. Or is the world both cruel and kind, confusing and awesome, and we have been prodded into only specific ways of accessing it, and reframing is not re-framing but revealing?