Im tired

Im tired. Im tired of endlessly thinking and trying and getting nowhere.
Im tired of the world and my own health continually getting shittier.
My days are growing shorter- sleep, drink beets, gargle silver, watch anime, sleep.
When I am not yawning for no reason I am freaking out for no reason. I’m on a tightrope walk between boredom and frustration, between clouded judgement and existential terror.

I know what the angels say: The hero’s story is not the journey they undertake or the toils in it, but the character they become in the process.

I plead: How does one build anything with the tools or opportunities I have been given?

Every day, almost, something happens to shrink my apparent horizon and make me feel like I can do nothing, cannot have goals, cannot make meaningful progress. I drove 4000 miles and for a month felt my horizon expanded, now, I’m back to feeling like 10 miles is too far to drive, too long to travel, too much to go wrong and no way back home. Every day is either a new or old anxiety symptom that seems to almost paralyze me. Every day my tooth hurts, my wallet grows thinner, and my labors yield less fruit. I am no longer able to justify what I have done with my time- it is all for nothing. I am no longer able to justify when I was patient with others- they do not respond in like form. I am afraid to go to the dentist. I wish i had a robotic way to pull out my own tooth. I rather would like it if god were to give me a new tooth for christmas.

All around me in my mind is an invisible wall. Well, sometimes it is. Sometimes the problems are too big to cross over. I can never have some of the things I want- even if i break them down into the smallest possible actions I could take towards that desire. Most of the time, however, I cannot approximate or acquire that smallest possible action. I do not know what will help me make progress.

Life is often frustrating or scary not because it offers us challenge but rather because the components of the problem before us have individual timescales and complexity hidden from view, where in retrospect, when the problem is solved, it all seems apparent and obvious, but in the moment, the information and leverage needed is not all available at the same time or same amount, but acquired gradually and painfully, and in the moment, all seems impossible or invisible, and there is no traction granted. The anticipatory perspective is one of quicksand or a bleak trash compactor wall.

Other times, it feels like there should be a way up and out, but I’m lacking an on-ramp signal: any opportunity that I can take, even if it doesn’t seem useful, which could still hypothetically provide incremental leverage or elevation towards a goal.

Such an on-ramp, in my opinion, has several desirable qualities: It creates an opening that yields future opportunities to take action that improve one’s clarity, peace, or confidence to act- in a way somehow relevant to ones goals- AND the resources needed to further act. These are often lowly opportunities- no golden ladder, no willy wonka tickets. But, when they emerge, they open a door to somewhere else, where another opportunity lies in wait, that is invisible to the one at the bottom of the ramp. They are the way into the apprenticeship that will lead to a lifetime of success. The characteristics needed to embrace those humble first steps, I would say I know to be humility, consistency, and sincerity. But also, the ability to commit to it fully.

If the opportunity doesn’t help you in one of those three ways, it’s not really an opportunity, it is a dead end disguised as one. I am afraid to commit to dead ends. I think anyone would be, especially those who are experienced.

People will say “well take what you can and work from there”. They will also say “be true to yourself”. You can’t do both. You can’t both say “don’t waste your life grinding away in a purpose that isn’t true to you” and at the same time say “take the opportunities that provide obvious benefit and work within them”. This is an effort to disguise non-committal mindsets in false commitment. It’s disingenuous and comes from people who are demonstrably false to themselves and unable to practice the advice they preach. I will be clear: I have no interest in working as a turkey inseminator, prison guard, school bus driver or gas station attendant. I am sure that none of these roles will lead to opportunities, openings, resource acquisition, that will help me. I have done some of them! I find all of them incredibly stressful. I have no desire for a career in them.

I have been told to shape my dreams. To set goals, to articulate what I want. And then I am chastised and told to be realistic, because the dreams I have are incomprehensible to others. And so the truth emerges, that what people want is not for you to have goals, but for you to conform to an expectation they have for you that is convenient, useful, and vicarious to their own expectations. That they have expectations is the most telling implication- bald men are plumbers, men with hair are executives, women are models, mothers, teachers, nurses. That you can achieve anything you want to achieve, and that you are simultaneously expected to achieve what is possible in accordance with their perspective of your ability, which is established by where you graduated from, who you know, what culture/tribe you belong to, and their perceived ability to exploit your skills to their aims. Their aims is mostly for everyone to be a prostitute- a gig worker and customer service rep at the same time. I am sure somewhere there is an uber driver who is doing customer service calls WHILE delivering food right now.

What if my dreams are too great or strange or orthogonal to the current zeitgest for this world to realize on any timeframe, save if I had the resources to do as I wished as a playboy who ultimately squanders my time in some eccentric pursuit?

It takes power to achieve what others think of as madness. Power you cant earn, no matter how hard you work or how good your work is.

If good ideas were obvious, everyone would already be doing them. If good work was valuable, everyone would already be doing it.

So, they are not obvious. No- they are not only not obvious, they are often unintelligible or considered pointless. “What we are doing right now is fine. We don’t need change. I don’t need any more complexity than I already have. How can you justify this expense? This will make our efforts less productive and profitable. We are engaged in a race against time and death to make our lives matter, and they matter when we have security against scarcity, which we can only have if we continue to make more money, make more money, make more money.”

I am tired.

I could and should articulate this further. Maybe one day I will.