In a related note, but on a personal level...(from 3/12/11)

The relationship between motivation and desire.

When we are motivated to do something, we are determined to see a task completed.  When we desire something, we are also motivated to do what it takes to accomplish it.

I’ve always felt like ambition was a dirty word.  I have watched my mother work so hard to provide for her family, and here at a point in her life when her body needs to slow down, she is unable to stop.  She has become a workaholic out of necessity, and that survival mechanism has made it difficult to have what she still believes she actually wants.  Few people I know live a life comfortably—free of debts or tragedies befalling their sense of stability.  We work to earn money so that we don’t worry about money.  But with more money, there is always more consumption.  Something that needs to be repaired.  Something that needs to be replaced.  Something missing from the fridge.  Something to wash clothes with.  “The things we own end up owning us” (Fight Club). 

There is this materialism that it seems we’ve come to believe is innate.  But I don’t believe that excessive want is anything more than the manifestation of the ways which we feel incomplete.  How much we do that reveals our sense of inadequacy, discontent, or anger.  I don’t take consumption lightly.  And for every plastic bag I’ve used and failed to recycle, I feel a remorse as real as if I had taken someone’s life.  For every stitch of clothing I’ve purchased at a discount price, whose tag says “made in Mexico,” I’ve felt sinful.  And I keep doing these things.  Because there is always something more I want, because my ambition can never truly be satisfied when it is the result of industrial conditioning.

Obesity—such an interesting issue.  On one hand, it symbolizes our gluttony, our love of excess to the point of disease and ruin.  It also represents how unhealthy we are—and that’s the aspect of the issue that is more significant to me.  Not because for decades we’ve been fooled into thinking the way and things we eat are healthy, but because our concept of health hasn’t caught up with the increased pace of our “busy” lives.  In an agrarian society, families worked on farms, growing crops in fields, moving throughout the day completing manual labor—sweating under the sun.  Before the advent of modern farm equipment—the result of industrialization of food—a farmer worked within the limitations of his physical abilities, and succeeded based on natural circumstances.  Natural—a good farmer followed the cycles of the earth, kept the soil healthy, and did what was necessary to produce a healthy crop—one which would feed a family and the community.  It was natural.  It was local.  It didn’t require the implementation of any machine to increase a yield.  And people weren’t unhealthily overweight to the degree they are now because they were working throughout the day.

This is an oversimplification of a time period that I know little about.  There are still plenty of farmers out there, but few who do things the old way.  Few who don’t rely on a profit so huge as to outweigh a subsidy that they are living comfortably.  Our traditions of multiplying and going forth have ultimately led to overpopulation, urbanization, the depletion of natural resources and wildlife, unforgettable violence in warfare, and ultimately this sense of discontentment that forces us to find ways, methods, things to fill the holes in our psyches.

I was so struck by what Marin said, because I felt that way too, and she was the first person I’d heard say it just as I had felt it:  She had no ambition, no long-term career goal.  She was content working in a flower shop, providing emotional and financial support toward couplehood, toward her boyfriend opening his own place.

It was like a relief heavier than an ocean wave had rushed through me.  But I said little more than that I agreed with her.  She couldn’t have realized how profound a moment it was for me.  But the more I thought about it, the more it made me resent the fact that I was single—because I had to find the same way to earn what income the two of them pulled in together, just to have what they had—which wasn’t fancy or bourgeois (blech), but was sensible and attractive.  Comfortable.  So it felt like she had the luxury of not needing to pursue a “career” that provided a higher income because she had a man who earned a decent wage to keep them both afloat.  That bothers me, but I can’t deny how appealing it is.

It isn’t that I don’t want to work.  I just don’t want work to dictate my life.  I don’t want to have to wait years and years to earn a high enough income to take care of my debts, having acquired more debts by the time I am making more.  I don’t want to have to commit to a career.  I don’t want to compete within a struggling workforce.  I don’t want to sit at a desk all day turning food into fat.  I don’t want to rely on coffee to wake up in the mornings.  I don’t want to turn to my computer five nights out of the week for some sense of connection.

I don’t know what happened this break.  My sister got strep and spent the week home, except Friday.  My mom’s car got repossessed.  I’ve had to clean up smeared, dried dog shit and piss from the kitchen floor a few times.  I’ve had to confront the fact that I probably won’t be able to move out when I want to.  I tried to clean and then realized how constantly I’d have to clean like I did to keep the house truly in order.  I keep reevaluating, and reevaluating, and I can’t figure out what it is I’m supposed to be doing.  I always say that I don’t need much to be happy, and that’s true.  But the happiness I rely on on a daily basis to get me through the day has a hard time staying near the surface.  There are things that I must do.  To earn money.  One is noble and required a degree.  One is not noble, but provides me with a degree of help should something go wrong with my health.  The society that has helped to make me unhealthy is the same one that can’t offer me help to correct what it causes.

Sure, some people might say, “Well, if you want to farm, then farm.”  But I don’t.  I wouldn’t want to work in that post-industrialized version of an originally sustainable system.  And I don’t have the time or motivation to even work on a small plot.  In some strange way, I feel like I was meant to do what I’m doing for now.  I just worry that its novelty will soon give way to the point where I have to decide what will be the next step.  Do I remain where I am, unsure of how I will pay bills in a few months?  Do I move onto another institution?  Do I go back to school to get a doctorate so I can work at a four-year institution (accruing more of that debt I spoke of, and competing within the politics of academia—which I am disgusted by)?

What do I want?

I want to earn a paycheck that is consistent throughout the year.  I want to earn enough to cover my bills, allow me some fun, have a buffer for emergencies, and still have some saved for long-term travel. 

When I teach four classes, I earn enough money to pay my bills and play.  Not to save much, and not to pay rent.  I need twice what I earn when I’m teaching four classes, twelve months of the year.  Enough to move out.  Enough to buy healthy foods.  But not so much that I’ve sacrificed all of my time to a job that will wear away at my soul and sense of joy.

I’ve written myself into a headache, but the original point of this was ambition, and how I felt like I had none.  It isn’t that I don’t want to better myself, or to reach a state of more frequent contentment, but sometimes I get so stressed out that I feel immobilized by my fatalistic/cynical/realist outlook.  I never want to give up, but, as I have said I don’t know how many times in the past, though usually during my dark times, I am already tired.  I am tired of the game.  Tired of the system.

Free would be disappointed.  He didn’t understand what was to stop me from accomplishing what I wanted.  I felt spoiled complaining to him about the difficulties of my life.  But the problem was desire.  The things motivating me usually have nothing to do with what truly makes me happy, and more to do with what I am forced to accomplish in order not to be a waste of space and resources.

I am going to stop now because this headache is only getting stronger, and I am working myself into a dizzying brain frenzy.