Belly Button Lint

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Tag: motivation

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    Locomotive Ambition

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    1–2 minutes

    Motion, that is, movement or locomotion, is necessary to perceive our environment. Thinking evolved from mapping out space: finding what the environment affords and pursuing goals based on your previous location.
    The reversal is when we think we move: if anxious or neurotic, we compulsively fidget.

    We are (mostly) not coerced to move for survival. Instead, we have internalized the threat of expulsion and channeled it into ambitious energy, productivity, and discontent… often marked by a compulsive twitchiness.

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    Capitalism’s victory

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    1–2 minutes

    Capitalism allowed all men to be equal rather than blindly despised.
    The traditional tribal divisions of race, religion, nationality, and gender were supplanted by individual virtues of ambition, merit, and commerce. Necessarily, destructive tendencies emerge, yet trade made others potentially valuable. Thus consideration replaced prejudice.

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    The Energy of Combat vs Comrades

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    1–2 minutes

    Interpersonal conflict drains you. Anger and despair create desperate energy, which exhausts.
    The better path is to collaborate with comrades: generate creative energy, powering you for days with no hangover.

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    Incentives and Algorithms

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    1–2 minutes

    Social media is to blame because it perpetuates drama. If success is time-on-platform, not thoughtful engagement, triggering base impulses (shock and popularity) is expedient.

    Yet, corporations can alter algorithms to maximize time-on-platform by feeding in-depth conscientious debates.

    A contemplative public may have a higher price yet is worth incentivizing. Parading stupidity (until we live in an idiocracy) will be considerably more costly in the long run.

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    The Problem with the Hero’s Journey

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    1–2 minutes

    Fate must call you to become a hero, and you must draw forth your unique (separate and special) individuality to complete your journey.
    The question is: how do you motivate a mass of people (community or society) without falling into individualism, where every person believes they need to be the hero?Source: Acid Horizon podcast on Magical Realism

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    Trapped by passion

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    1–2 minutes

    You follow your passion into the art world, where your curiosity and ambition drive you to learn and grow. Soon every problem’s solution is more thoughtful art.
    Like religion or capitalism, every crisis is an opportunity to have more faith: enact more rituals, dig deeper, try harder.
    Your passion has trapped you. You have traded love for myopic fanaticism.

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    Doing things “to people” rather than “for people”

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    1–2 minutes

    Given our incentive structure our time is very valuable. Thus we are good at doing things to people, such as procedures, but we are not good at doing things for people, such as attentive listening and discussion.

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    Motivation is simply Avoiding Discomfort

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    1–2 minutes

    We are bombarded with the imperative mission to seek happiness, but from an evolutionary perspective we are motivated to avoid discomfort.

    Anxiety, ambition, and desire are discomforts from which we act: we re-act. There is no “carrot and stick” of reward and punishment. Our only motivating force is avoidance, which is a response., and the challenge is to harness our response as responsibility.

    Meanwhile, happiness seems to be a by-product of achievement or participation, not an end to be pursued unto itself.

    Merging these notions: “dis-traction” (avoidance) towards happiness will fail to bring it, because you gain no “traction.”

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    Vacu-suck Cycle

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    1–2 minutes

    We are a vacuum cleaner sucking up experience and chasing desired dust bunnies. Often we suck up the same desires over and over to be consumed again and again.
    What does it mean to be a vacuum cleaner on repeat, an endless loop?

    Is it possible to take a moment to feel yourself in the present moment and realize you are already full and fulfilled? What if this perpetual suck is hiding that we were good all along?

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    Pursuing purpose

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    1–2 minutes

    What if you should not seek meaning or purpose? What if that quest to find your passion keeps you chasing something that cannot be caught?

    Instead, what if you live as well as you can, here in the present, and one day awaken to find that passion and purpose have found you?