Motivation for Improvement

My life often feel repetitive, mundane, and even futile…

spending most of my time maintaining financial, social, physical, and mental status…

while I work in a dark room with terrible posture in exchange for money…

that I spend for obligatory expenses.

What little attention I have left is bombarded with stimuli from all directions…

leaving no room for the people I encounter in real life, becoming apathetic to their otherwise genuine presence…

And when I finally put down the phone to sleep, I reflect on the decision to have eaten that cookie.

Dissonance

If you were to ask what I value, what I really care about — I would say reflecting/growing activities with people I love, and doing whatever it takes to sustain them. But if you were to look at what I actually do, my life is filled with meaningless activities, often with people I don’t care about. What I do isn’t what I truly want.

But to sustain my existance, I am compelled to work for money, pay for rent, and afford the required expenses to sustain a life away from home. Stress accumulates as to require vacations so that I can get back on the 9-to-5 treadmill.

This state of existence is well-illustrated by popular media of the past generation such as the Matrix, Office Space and Fight Club. It is a modern problem, but not a new one. What could be its solution?

Choices

I can take the blue pill, while trascending the mundane. My worldly observations will remain, but I can change my perception of reality. I can ascribe new meaning onto the status quo.

I can take the red pill, choosing to escape it. I can go Into The Wild or subscribe to Anarcho-primitivism to join the Fight Club between Man and Society.

The alternative not shown in the movie is to gradually repair the relationship between Self and the world that surrounds it. The stoic surrenders judgement outside of one’s own Circle of Influence. The Timeless Way of Building prescribes using “quality without a name” to identify what can be repaired. Seeing that the problem is complex, Set-Based Design highlights the order of repair operations.

Improvement

It may seem impossible to escape a cycle with no room to breathe. But what may first seem impossible without violent force can be done with the aid of mechanical advantage. In the case of splitting rocks, repeated momentum from a sledge hammer is combined with a series of wedges. It also helps to follow proven techniques employed by others. The same is in escaping the rat race.