It’s been a while since I’ve written (again). And as usual loads of things have happened. Marte is ill (again), Michael is well though, but I’m starting to see where he gets his stubbornness from. :P Courtesy of the Barrera Family.
Anyway, there are so many things I want to do! I want to improve http://cf.fbarr.net, I want to move all of my sites to a FreeBSD machine (courtesy of a friend), I want a week’s vacation with Marte and Michael, I want to learn Perl (god knows how many times I’ve tried that), and simply (or not), I want to be happy.
I had a real bad day last night. My regular weekdays fly by incredibly fast. I get up in the morning, shower, get dressed, head to work, stay there for 7+ hours, get home, see my son for an hour, feed him, put him to bed, feed us, an hour in front of the TV, then pretty much to bed. I feel like I get nothing out of the day. And like I said, yesterday was bad because I feel that I have nothing that I do for myself. I don’t have any real life friends to hang out with. I live like an hour from the city, and have to get up at 5.30 in the morning to be at work at 08.00. I’m at home at around 17.30. So that doesn’t leave me with much time to do things. On weekends I’m exhausted, so I don’t do much then either. Sometimes it feels like it’s just me going through this. Anyone else out there in a similar position?
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always wanted a family of my own, always. I just feel that I don’t do much to cheer myself up.
What do you do for yourself, to keep your spirits up on a rainy day? Give me a couple of suggestions, I really need them. :)
I don’t think the problem description is very accurate. The keeping up of spirits is not really the problem. Being annoyed with living a robots life is really not the problem. This frustration and discontent is really a good thing.
When it comes to this happiness thing it’s a bit weird. I don’t think it’s a thing one should want. Happiness and not pain or discomfort gets one deeper into automation. No consistently happy people ever accomplished a damn thing.
It seems like you enjoy figuring stuff out.
So start by figuring out how this life of yours works.
How come this way of existing is so distasteful to you?
What do you want and what do you need?
What is the relationship between the two?
What do you enjoy?
What is your son interested in?
How does this little human work?
What gets his eyes glowing?
How does his stubbornness work?
What does Marte like?
What is she interested in?
What does she want in her life?
What does she need?
Now you’ve got this frustration and discontent to fuel your work. Investing in understanding and learning is the very best investment you can ever make. This exhaustion results from you thinking you’ve figured everything out, and not being curious. See these problems in your life are just such opportunities to learn. I think Michael can teach you a lot about this.
It’s really weird how organizing an unproblematic life gets us into problems.
Comment by Magnus — April 6, 2009 @ 14:02
I hope my last comment wasn’t too disorganized and cluttered.
I feel I should give you a proper comment or no comment at all. What I was trying to say was that it is the search for happiness that is producing this state of affairs.
That is, somehow we’re convinced that happiness is a thing you can have and that having life organized or structured a particular way will give us a something called happiness.
As life is always moving, the particular perfectly organized life should be called it’s proper name, a patterned and automatic life. So the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of automaticity. If I solve my problems I will be happy. Here “problems” refers to having life organized in a particular way. It cannot be otherwise so long as it assumed to be contingent on a state of affairs.
So what happens to organisms when they are surrounded in automaticity and particular organization is habituation. That is, you cease paying attention, after all, it’s all predictable, and drift through the days.
Now there is also another mechanism. In searching a particular state of affairs you almost completely go blind to what is going on. Whatever happiness is it surely will be a moment. That is, any state could only be realized in an actual moment and never in the future. Moments like this one is all there is. Some day, death will come in a moment like this one.
Now the search for happiness is a searching for a something which cannot be had. It’s the search for something abstract. It’s a running after a tail which cannot be bitten, because it’s not a something.
It has you not pay attention to any of the things that are going on. It has you focusing on what is not actual. Instead it is compared to how it is not, and the result of the comparison is taken as the state of affairs. And then we do violence to it by trying to make it this something which it is not.
In truth there is always stuff going on. Life can only appear to be robotic and automatic. There can be no such repetitious phenomena, only the appearance of repetetiousness. Why would nature repeat itself?
So it’s the search for happiness that is driving the automaticity. Now don’t take my word for it. And certainly don’t try changing it.
The only problem is that you are searching that which is not your life. Changing stuff is just more of this mechanism. Search and want what actually is your life.
Just see that you’re hitting yourself in the head. Only an idiot would not think he is an idiot. This will stop all on its own when you see how silly this stuff is.
Don’t fix. Fixing and solution is the problem.
Comment by Magnus — April 8, 2009 @ 21:40