For the last nine months, I’ve been at home doing remote philosophy (also known as unemployment), trying to solve my personal problem of returning to the workforce without having to despise life and everything in it, and I’m forced to admit that it’s been tricky.
I had a video call conversation three months ago with one of my dearest friends, robokillerkevin (yes, that’s his legal name, not his gamertag). In this convo, we eventually got to talking about his draining experience with applying to med school, and to my pleasure, the topic of emotions and productivity soon followed. As a recent convert of the somatic processing online community, I saw this as an opportunity to strap my helpless friend onto my therapy couch and make him see that all his productivity woes were actually the tertiary effects of his mommy-and-daddy wounds. But my plans went astray. Not too far into our coerced therapy session, I found myself in deep dismay after my ill patient uttered the fatal phrase, “It ain’t that deep,” which was a straight dagger to my hidden ego. Deep beneath the surface, my system knew that most of the introspection and emotional work I was doing in my own time was playing into the hands of my avoidance pattern, but I hadn’t been able to truly see this for myself until yesterday. During these last nine months, I’ve been pacing around in the wilderness of my mind following the belief that if I can solve my emotions and motivation, I can solve my unemployment, but trying to solve myself WAS and IS its own hindrance.
How did this epiphany occur? It occurred in stages.
The first stage was coming up with the categories of “direct action” and “indirect action,” and I believe defining these two groups is best done through an example. Let’s say I have the goal of finding a romantic partner. Direct actions would be signing up for a dating app, asking a girl out in Walmart’s checkout area (and finding out she already has a girlfriend), or going on a date. Indirect actions would be looksmaxxing, watching videos on flirting, or going to therapy to realize that your obsession with looksmaxxing is actually a skepticism of love. Both types of actions can be productive, and indirect action is even necessary if you want to increase efficiency as you move towards goals, but indirect action can easily be exploited by an emotionally avoidant mind. If you have been pursuing a goal for a while and your pursuit feels unalive or you’ve been wondering “Why has what I want not happened yet?”, it may be time to review your actions through this lens.
The second stage was documenting and reviewing my behavior explicitly. For the last three days while conjuring up this first blog post, I started logging everything I do during my working hours, which are 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Having to type out and later revisit all those productive and unproductive choices you make is like paying with cash instead of credit: you’re forced to feel the cost. After just two days of documentation, I gained an immediate sense of all the time that’s slipping from my hands, and it became obvious that I was spending most of my work time trying to get myself to write the article instead of actually writing it.
Stage three was math. Yesterday after further reviewing my behavior logs, I decided to add up all the time I had engaged in direct action versus indirect action in the first two of the three days. The results were a maximum of 5 hours and 46 minutes for direct action and a minimum of 7 hours and 52 minutes for indirect action—a disparity that was expected but still disturbing. These figures made me even more conscious of my avoidance pattern, and they were enough to cause a much-needed shift in my motivational circuitry.
I asked myself, “Which kind of action do I want to take today?” Informed by my intimate experiences with somatic work, I knew I could only answer this question with my heart. The emotionally avoidant mind is such a smooth talker that if I had tried to answer this question intellectually, I would possibly still be pondering, “What’s stopping me from writing my first article?” Instead, I felt out the two possibilities of either returning to my writing or returning to the labyrinth of my mind and realized that the prospect of writing felt fuller and better, and soon after, I put my ass back in front of the WordPress editor to type away. Enlivened by my new personal breakthroughs, I scrapped my original idea and, alternatively, was able to write and publish this article by the next morning.
I’m now thinking there might be a job for me on the horizon.