The tools we use to get us through periods in our lives can lose their purpose. Once we have moved on, there is a tendency to maintain these practices because if they provided safety and security once, they might do it forever.
Sometimes, the challenge is not maintaining your edge but letting go of your knives.
Tag: purpose
- Theme: Growth
blunting old survival strategies
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Growth
Decoding Flows: Form Without Function
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1–2 minutesDeleuze & Guatarri speak of "decoding flows" of information.
Once information does not flow along channels and then breaks into subsidiary functions, it is rendered useless. This "code," if not "decoded," becomes ineffectual.D&G discusses "the body without organs," which can seem horrific if taken literally. When organs cease to decode information flows, they lose their former purpose, leaving a "body" (a form) but without functional components (intent/utility). As a human, not decoding flows renders your form and intent purposeless, a vague blob of decohered information.
- Theme: Growth
Transcending Material Goals for Sublime, Unattainable Fulfillment
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1–2 minutesWhen pursuing a goal, motivation falters as you’re haunted by dark fantasies of failure. These fears obscure the path, and success becomes elusive: you are nearly there, but cannot see it. You need a guiding light beyond your objective.
To overcome your doubt and dissuaded fixation, shift focus from tangible objectives to abstract, immaterial goals—commodities that transcend physical limits.
Unlike material achievable goals, which deteriorate and shift due to their finite nature, the commodity can never be fully attained. It is eternal and avoids capture. This echoes the logic of capitalism, where commodities are fetishized into the sublime, approximate to God, and the pursuit itself becomes divine.
This animating motivation stems from a base, subjective desire, which can now be elevated to transcend the original, objective need. In so doing it offers a long-term stable, albeit unattainable, path toward self-fulfillment.
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– - Theme: Growth
Harmonizing Presence and Purpose
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1–2 minutesAcute awareness in the present allows appreciation, while achievement requires purpose-driven action.
These are not wholly incompatible, yet the search for meaning employs a mental state (intellectual focus) fundamentally at odds with the enjoyment of inherent beauty (open relaxation).
The interplay can create harmony, where deliberate purpose propels us into meaningful action, during which existential angst recedes, leaving us free to feel deeply.
- Theme: Growth
manufactured meaning
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1–2 minutesThe quest for meaning or purpose is misguided.
Meaning is intertwined with intellect and rationality spawning from the mind’s attempt to comprehend. (What is the meaning of this?) In truth, what we seek is experiential.
Joseph Campbell’s advice, “Follow your bliss,” suggests that genuine meaning emerges from attentive interaction, not through logical construction.
This exemplifies the error of mistaking an outcome for an attainable objective, of intellectually fabricating a resonant motivation arising from engaging with the world. Such artificial self-development leads to dueling schizophrenic difficulties, paradoxically producing the necessity for therapeutic intervention and realignment.
- Theme: Self
Discarding Meaning and Systems: Living
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1–2 minutesWe seek understanding and purpose, motivators that lend meaning to our work and life. Yet, could this desire be misplaced, a faulty attribution, leading us further from life?
As a driven individual, each life change—be it adopting a new scheduling tool, relocating, or job switching—ushers in a phase of engaged positivity (a kind of stressful happiness), until the novelty fades into routine, diminishing your passion, which leads you to seek more novelty.
Consider that true aliveness may not stem from new meanings or intentions, but from relinquishing old ones. In this brief interlude, free from old systemic constraints, we engage with the world as it truly is, before new routines and purposes obscure our view of life.
- Theme: Self
tyrannical reaction to the competitive instinct
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1–2 minutesThe competitive instinct is the desire to excel and be honored for it, not the power to dominate.
– In a confused overreaction, clamping down on any who would want distinction through winning is a means to dissuade a possible tyrant.
Ironically, those clamping down are tyrannical in forcing egalitarianism, which enforces fragility and similarity.The competitive instinct is not always about dominance but the pursuit of excellence and recognition. This drive for distinction (excellence) is often misinterpreted as the potential for tyranny.
This reaction itself can become tyrannical, as it enforces a rigid egalitarianism. Ironically, this approach fosters a culture of fragility and homogeneity, stifling the very individualism it seeks to protect.
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– - Theme: Growth
Shielding yourself with social intent
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1–2 minutesA clever and increasingly common rhetorical device is to claim intent, despite reality.
For instance, a specific person argues against health studies on obesity, claiming they are to shame people. If prejudice can be assigned, medical studies and their real-world repercussions (death) are invalid. If you get in trouble at work for stealing, it is the deviously ill-intentioned underling who is to blame, not your actions.
The fascinating part about assigning blame, or labeling ill-intent, is it allows one to reassert protagonist status; it dodges responsibility for actions. After all, disciplined behavior is an obnoxious remnant of "tradition" that should be discarded.
Yet, more troublesome is when actions cease to count and intent overshadows outcomes, we begin to notice intent shifts to victimization and societal injustice, expanding the shield of intent into nobility.
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– - Theme: Growth
Considering Violence
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1–2 minutesViolence, often dismissed as puerile, is a fundamental aspect of human nature.
The urge to violence plays out as high-risk competitive learning, both social and physical, as a means of domination or a swift corrective for injustice. Beyond establishing pecking order or encouraging cleverness-over-might, humans also have a horror fascination for destruction. When this grizzly aspect is folded back into the culture we establish voyeurism, acclaim, and romance centered around risk; a strategy providing the dare-devil access to both manly comradeship and sexual partners.
The attempt to shame or train violent impulses out of humanity has a complex risk/reward problem: we can (and do) set up regulated channels (violence outlets) and we can sublate (transference) violence into economic and academic ambition. But to mediate or pathologize can lead to repression, and to invoke authoritarian intervention as the only corrective is to rely excessively on de-humanizing bureacracy.
- Theme: Growth
Achieving is not the achievement
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1–2 minutesMuch of our fear (that produces laziness and impatience) derives from results orientation.
Rather than focus on the “quality of doing,” which will generate its results over time, we fixate on an endpoint that must be measured, prompting not only anxiety over failure or success but also requiring you to pick another point afterward.
Focusing on the quality of the process and steadily doing the work is achieved with the achievements bestowed as an afterthought.