Day 31

It astonishes me how often I am offered opportunities on silver platters to engage in petty squabbling with other people. Just about every day at least one person (different people all the time) makes it his or her business to drag me into the middle of something that will do nothing but drain out all my emotions.
And then there's me. I'd like to think I'm less guilty of doing this to others, but probably only a little bit less guilty sometimes.

The question is about motivation. Why do we seek outrage, strife, angst, argument, and all the rest of it?

The answer might simply be catharsis. We all have it in our heads how unfair life is, and as such we seek cathartic experiences on a regular basis, in the form of projecting perverted shadows of our real problems upon the people around us.

Or perhaps it is fear. We fear life, we fear failure, we fear death, we fear that others will think us bad and unworthy people. Fear causes us to lash out, or more accurately, to bring others down to the same level by attempting to exploit their same fears.

Or perhaps it is power. We want to win, to be right, to be the best and smartest at whatever we accomplish. As such we frame everything around false reasoning; if we're poor, money doesn't matter, if we're rich we're successful and happy. If we're single we don't need relationships and, if we're not single we pity those who are for their incompleteness. We attack whoever dares to disagree.

Or perhaps it is entitlement. No matter what we get, we think we deserve more; we believe that life should somehow always be fair. We arrange our relationships such that we get just exactly what we think we want and deserve, and use our negative language and action to squeeze out all the excess.

Well, anyway, I'm wondering if the problem is simply our detached sense of individuality. Hell, people as rugged individuals - islands, as it were - is a notion we're taught to believe right from infancy. We're told that we create our own morality, that we should vote our personal preferences, we should spend our money on what we happen to like, that the function of a relationship is to make us happy, and so on. We're really just getting exactly what we've wished for, and as it turns out, it is horribly, horribly unfulfilling.

Oddly, I'm not in a bad mood at all, despite the sound of it. Things are actually pretty great these days.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Maybe we are all just numbed to our normal feelings of contentment, happiness, etc. Perhaps we feel a need to excite our emotions so that our lives more closely resemble the stories of drama that are abound in the media. Or could it be that we have invested so much of our time into understanding and following the emotional lives of fictional characters that we fail to understand and identify our own emotions? Is it so that we must create conflict, angst, etc. in such a concrete way in order to feel something and be passionate about our own lives?

(Yes! Blame the media...it's the easy way out)
10:55 PM
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