Ennui

[andrewducker]

When I went out with Gina, and for the year directly following, I largely had to put my wants on hold.

This was pretty jarring for me, but you really can't carry on planning things and expecting them to come to fruition when the person you're with might, on the day you planned to go to the cinema, be incapable of leaving the house.

After numerous frustrating occurences when I had looked forward to events which I then wasn't able to enjoy, I discovered the only way to avoid this was to simply stop looking forward to things. If I anticipated a particular future and it didn't happen, I felt frustrated at a person who (a) couldn't help it and (b)I love(d). this was obviously intolerable, so I simply adjusted to a life of not looking forward to things. I either didn't plan things, or if I planned them I didn't actively look forward to them.

This, obviously, took a fair chunk of the fun out of life. It forced me through a growing-up period and out the other side, leaving me feeling like I was now more capable of dealing with other people like a reasonable adult, but less capable of goofing off and enjoying life.

Another natural process that occurred in a six year period around this was my investigation into how minds work (inspired by my year and a half of philosophy, my initial experiments with LSD and my realisation that people's minds mostly made stuff up). My experiences over those six years led me to the understanding that
a)The mind (of all creatures, not just people) has evolved such that it has certain urges. Those urges are there because, in the original habitat that the creature evolved in, they allowed that creature to survive long enough to produce more creatures.
b)Not satisfying those urges produced negative emotions (frustration, anger, boredom, etc).
c)Satisfying those urges produced positive emotions (contentedness, joy, orgasmic bliss, adrenaline surges and the like).
d)We were no longer in anything that remotely equated that original environment.
e)The entire entertainment industry exists to satisfy those urges better and more easily than they would have been satisfied 'in the wild'.

For some reason (and I'm not sure why) the thought that by playing Doom (or whatever) I was giving in to some internal part of me that demanded to be fed violence, gore and excitement removed a fair bit of the thrill for me. It wasn't that I objected to liking gore (good lord, no), but I felt like I was being manipulated by myself. In fact, thinking about it, I largely consider 'me' to be the intellectual, conscious, thinking bits of my brain - to discover that I was at the mercy of bits of my brain that cannot be reasoned with (although they can be trained) was not pleasant.

This was coupled with the fact that I stopped believing in any kind of objective morality, aesthetics or meaning. It's funny to think that I used to believe in that, but now can't think of any reason to do so - the explanation for which is almost certainly that there wasn't reason, I just hadn't been thinking about it for long enough to overcome my cultural imprinting.

Anyway, without objective meaning, I was left without reasons to do things. Despite any Vulcan witterings about "logical courses of action", there is no logical way to live your life. There may well be logical routes to take to a particular outcome, but there's no logical outcome to want (each time a logical outcome is proposed ask _why_ it's logical - you end up in an infinite regress that's only cut short by saying "Because I want it" or "Because it's natural" or "Because God says so" all of which are about as logical as an episode of Charmed.)

With no ultimate meaning to life, I was free to choose to do anything I liked - I could set my own goals to be anything I felt like. The trouble being I no longer believed that "what I felt like" was anything beyond a set of heuristics useful for surviving on the African Savannah (or possibly sea-shore).

The combination of these brought me to a dead halt in my life. I became incapable of setting any long term goals. I could still happily function on a day-to-day basis, because I had enough inertia left over for "things I enjoy", and when things happened that demanded my attention I could still get sucked into them, but I really need something that grabs my primal instincts so hard that my intellect is taken out of the loop for me to completely enjoy it. Anything which allows me to remember that I'm watching a film/reading a book/playing a game leaves me wondering why I'm doing it and then, shortly thereafter, not doing it at all.

The traditional solution to this would be Buddhism. Buddhists, after all, believe in detachment from the world, that one should want nothing, and that there is no objective anything to be found in reality. Surely it would be easy to slide into this and allow my detachment to rule over all.

The problem is that Buddhists do believe in one thing objectively – that the world is an illusion and that one must abandon that illusion until one’s soul can leave the great cycle of reincarnation and return to the infinite that is the true reality.

I, on the other hand, don’t believe in reincarnation, souls or that this world is an illusion (although our senses certainly produce one in our head that most people confuse with reality). I also still, frequently, enjoy life. So long as I can distract myself from thinking too much I can throw myself into something and it can be great fun.

The question, however, is how long can I do this for? I haven’t played a computer game for more than half an hour in months. My book reading has slowed to a trickle. I’ve had a copy of Visual Studio sitting on my computer waiting for me to get into it for weeks now. Some part of me wants to engage myself with these, but can’t quite pull off the necessary belief that these things are important enough to engage with.

Neil Gaiman once said that “Ennui was insufficient reason for suicide.” And I’d tend to agree with him – I don’t think that not caring about life is sufficient reason to stop living – but I need something long term to make the rest of my life seem like something I want to do, rather than something I’ll have to distract myself during.

Comments

[andrewducker]

You've taken me out of context. I said:

I could still get sucked into them, but I really need something that grabs my primal instincts...

i.e., in order to get sucked into doing something, it needs to really grab me.

I can get wrapped up in something fully, still, it's just harder than it has been in the past.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Why do you want to to be totally wrapped up in one thing? Rejoice in your capacity to think/do several things at once! It's probably a result of increased brain abilities that come with age.