Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: motivation

  • Theme:

    Asking the question: the myth of the authentic self

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    When you ask yourself anything, you are already shaping and imagining an outcome into which you will lean. By asking, we instill a manipulative motivation undermining what might be the "authentic" you. On the other hand, the fact that a question arises may be your subconscious means to redirect you to your authentic self.

    This quandary highlights the impossibility of finding an "authentic core" unmediated by the dictates of survival, which is based on external context. The more you engage in the world the more "compromised" your "self" becomes, but this alteration is precisely what makes the resultant self something beneficial and worth having.

  • Theme:

    shedding aspirational values

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    People cry out at the injustice of America and Israel’s wars in a way they don’t for Ukraine versus Russia. In the West, we claim it is hypocrisy for colonial empires to claim civilized, liberal values while destroying innocents.
    Of course, there is a more profound truth behind the motivation, which is that liberalism announces aspirational values, but ideals are not principles.

    Any civilization that can survive genocide and withstand the brutal attacks of religious fanatics must foundationally exist on an earlier primordial law; which is evoked under stress and sheds the aspirational.

  • Theme:

    proximity to passion thwarts compassion

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    There is an “uncanny valley” of caring: something close enough to your passion but distant enough to be at odds with your taste. You can’t pretend to care what you carefully despise.

    Something completely “other” is a field/subject/person you can not have a desire for, so the introduction is fascinating: the distance makes it easier to care, and yet you do not have enough care to hate.

  • Theme:

    Break your compulsion

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Perhaps the core of any wisdom tradition is a framework to be aware of yourself: meta-awareness judgment.

    We often condemn others for not being self-aware (or not having the discipline to stop themself when they demand too much), but inevitably, we replicate the behaviors we recognize in others. As if, by seeing it, we cannot help but enact for ourselves, try it on for size.

    The compulsion to indulge strengthens, and to break it is to displace it with an alternative. Which requires recognizing and then indulging in something new.

  • Theme:

    Dropping ambition to return to reality

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    The drive to find purpose, to fulfill ambition, is a misdirection forcing you to disconnect from reality.

    Sam Harris says ambition and purpose are imaginary friends; there is no reason that reality is insufficient.

    This is true, but also privileged nonsense. Having the ambition to achieve lands you in a place soft enough to consider purpose, where before it was clear: survival. Many people are hip-deep in reality (aka survival), from which our ambition can drag us free.

    The irony Harris brings to light is that achieving the comfort that allows us to consider "purpose" is to overcome survival, that is, to escape the nagging confrontations of reality. Once free (free of reality, free to consider purpose), we should turn off our ambition to return to reality.

    Yet overcoming requires such persistent effort that humans are conditioned and are dreadfully afraid to return to the state of survival. It is not that Harris is wrong -we should reconnect with reality and drop illusions- but it requires a mad overcoming or padded life before such returns to reality are wise.

  • Theme:

    uniqueness, happiness, and capitalism

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Our uniqueness is at hand; it is merely a matter of believing in its value.

    The rub: People say “Follow your passion,” but that rarely provides payment (which is tangible value.)

    Over time we undervalue uniqueness by aligning it with what the market will pay, devaluing it, and, therefore, ourselves.

    Capitalism, mostly, pays people for things almost no one wants to do: painful chores, abnormal skills, or sociopathic cruelty are well compensated.

    The intersection between your passion, how you are paid, and your unique ability becomes the overlapping Venn diagram: what you care about, can do happily, and get paid for is a very tiny cross-section.

    Consider instead of getting paid and narrowing this range of happiness, you can freely and complicity contribute to the “invisible hand” that keeps society moving.

    The economic side will attempt to take a bite out of the hand that feeds it, that is the hand of passion and uniqueness.

    Still, you can refuse to devalue yourself by separating your passions from payment: you can forego bland contentment and false subjugated uniqueness. Instead, save you for yourself.

  • Theme:

    Artificial intelligence: the return to being human

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Artificial intelligence, like any tool, reaffirms the difference between utility and humanity.

    The impulse is to flee or join: regress to a nostalgic, barbarian state, or merge into a techno-cybernetic future that will dissolve humanity.

    when we see ourselves as machines (tools), aligning our goals with their production, we forget that we are uniquely human.

    Being displaced by AI drives us to return to ourselves: dismantle our machinic adaptation and reveal what it is to being human.

  • Theme:

    superior me

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    The real me is superior to this situation.

    If only the actual, authentic self were revealed or unleashed, success would be at hand. However, we are often inferior; if we cannot admit this, we will continue to be lacking.

    Our dreams of being secretly superior are, at first, escapist fantasies. Yes, we should dream, but lest we indulge in our unmaking, we must utilize them to inspire action.

  • Theme:

    can you live without attachment?

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    If you love to have your desires fulfilled, you will never be satiated. Humans are desiring machines, designed to want more, crave the chase, and never be fulfilled.

    Your only chance to be satisfied is to re-wire your desire.

    Extended to love: can you love without reciprocity? Is it possible to be fulfilled without receiving in return? If you can rewire your attachment to your own fulfillment, life can be full of love.

  • Theme:

    The repression desire loop

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    We once repressed our desires, channeling energies into capitalist production and some neurosis or dysfunction.

    Yet to liberate those desires is to offer them more fully to manipulation and cooptation by Capitalism. Today your freed desires feed the machine that once repressed you.

    In this sense, there is no more prolonged repression to access and no angst or will to motivate sublimation: we have released the slight whim, the smallest grain of sand before it truly aggravates. Each urge is liberated instantly through desire and consumerism. And yet, we are still troubled, aggrieved, and chaffed.

    The reaction is a resuscitated burrowing into stoic asceticism, where self-governance is a fad amongst the most hedonistic.

    We now look to rediscover how to control and repress ourselves to build up the tension: a recognition of internal pressure as power.