Posts Tagged ‘self’
Perspective
Hindsight is, it seems, the only true sight, and only when we look back on things and discuss them with others do we tend to be able to truly put them into a reasonable perspective, something that sees their consequences and implications in the most realistic light. It is particularly amazing, I find, how much what we are doing right now or what we are involved in or what we are trying to read from other’s words and actions seems so amazingly significant at the time we are doing whatever it is we are involved in, compared with how insignificant they later seem. This is, I imagine, due to the hold that emotions seem to have over our ability to judge situations. It is always a worry to me how dependent we all are on such forces. I’d like to think that I am less susceptible than most, but how do I know this is not just because I hold positive feelings about the things I engage in? Maybe my perceived ability to ride through things that upset others is just because of a certain emotional set, not a lack of one. But again, this is something that changes with time. Our own point of view of events is incredibly significant in our ability to deal with them. The question is then whether or not there is a better set of views to hold in order to not be held back by emotions but only having them serve as bolstering, useful forces. For many years I have maintained that there is but while I’m still fairly sure of this I seem to make little progress towards it. Just maybe, human life should be something infused with passion for what is perceived to matter – for otherwise it seems we have little reason to do very much at all, aside from simple biological ones.
The worrying thing about all of this is that at the end of the day, I am faced with the arguments from pure utilitarianism that in fact any claims I make to be doing something with any kind of meaning and worth could always be derived from the positive emotional state that I seem to gain from such pursuits. It is depressing to consider the possibility that all of these high-minded claims we all try to make to living what we like to call rich and fulfilled lives in which we flourish potentially all collapse with startling rapidity into mere attempts to release certain chemicals in the brain. But I’m not sure this argument is quite so deadly as it sometimes seems. Perhaps happiness can be equated with something being ‘good’, as merely a definitional reaction to certain events which we see as either worthwhile, fun or interesting. I’m not going to try and develop this argument now as I’m not entirely sure why I sat down to write this post at all, but it is something to consider. I maintain my scepticism. I don’t know anything but merely work on through life according to my nature, and try to examine it as I go for if I did not, it would be just another life, even less significant on the scales of history than it already is.
So is there a useful conclusion from these considerations? One is, I believe, simply to keep such considerations in mind. When an event or person or idea overcomes the senses and dominates the mind’s thoughts as it twists through the day’s considerations, stepping back is a useful tool. Take things slowly, get other opinions, recognise the deficiencies of one’s own intellect as something that, when it cares, can let emotion get the better of it. Recognise unnecessary desires as something that experience shows will be fleeting but don’t destroy them, merely add them to an ever-growing list of considerations and ideas to be tried if life offers such opportunities. For you never know where you’ll go next, who you’ll meet, or what you’ll be doing – and if it will perhaps seem, at the time, to be of the utmost significance.
Some realisations and some conclusions
Humans tend to do well when they have a goal in mind and something long-term that they are aiming for – the only suitable replacement for this in ensuring that one progresses through day-to-day life is, I think, either having achieved said goal and spending one’s time in the results of that success, or simply making use of habits built up over wide expanses of time to continue plodding along in mediocrity. For example, someone who is maybe approaching their middle years and is just working and playing and sleeping through their time with no goal in sight is just following what they’ve always done and the human mind is good at this. A school pupil or other student who doesn’t know where they’re going and lounges around all weekend suddenly pulls themself into the classroom from some sense of duty born out of having done the same thing for the last eight years of their life. Then there is the contented retiree, bumbling around their garden and caring for the grandchildren, happy with what they have done in their years and what they have maybe created or sustained. Then there are those with a clear goal in mind who work to achieve it. The young person who, unpriveledged under modern capitalism, works for years to save for the chance of going to University or some other institution to fulfill their various dreams and who drags themselves to their monotonous, under-paid job every day where they are fed small reward that somehow pretends to consider them a person, all for that future goal. Those who don’t fit into these categories don’t seem to get a lot done in any respect. I am not referring to those hedonists who have chosen that way of being, but those who have fallen into it.
I don’t know how good a model this is for humanity’s collective number but I shall work with it for now, for I have a great deal that I wish to write about this evening that has been brewing away in my head for a while and is finally at a stage where I am prepared to let it loose upon that small section of the world that will read this. Bear with my seemingly unrelated thoughts in the hope that they come together at the conclusion of this text. I’m coming to the end of my two week Easter holiday and overall I have not had a fantastic time. I have gone to bed late successively due to not being able to put down and cease participating in interesting activities, few of which have actually had any real value. And following this I have got up far later than I ever normally would, ruining my sleep schedule. Losing this time in the morning has messed up my ability to get things done and as a result the holiday has been incredibly unproductive. And this has got to me a great deal. I seem to be naturally wired up to be fairly lazy and yet conciously crave more fulfilled time. Every night I have gone to my diary and written about how useless I have been and how I will try to make the next day more useful but overall this has been unsuccessful. It’s very easy to say such things before bed when you can’t be more useful that day, and far harder to put them into practice the following day when there are distractions to be had.
I have realised, coming clear in my mind over recent weeks with the aid of some others but also added to greatly this evening, various things about myself that I don’t like but that I wasn’t really aware of too. I have long known that I have an inferiority complex and, horridly, am rarely happier (in the sense of glee) than when I outdo someone close to me or they fail through their own devices. I am also aware and have long been told by family that I have a tendency to be fairly lazy and to not follow up suggestions of things that I then find to be worthwhile and interesting. These are the things that I am already aware of and have written about on here before. But then there are other things. Internet colleagues who I get on well with on a personal and social level express their frustration with the fact that I tend to pick up jobs and interests fanatically, only to swiftly get bored of them but remain unwilling to let others in to take up the reins because, cynically I am unwilling to give up power, and more optimistically I am unable to recognise when I don’t have the time or willingness to continue to carry something through. Recently this has manifested in a steadily brewing mess over something I can’t really talk publically about yet which, in general terms, has other people at each other’s throats due to my negligence that I am now attempting to fix. This is something that I intend to work my hardest against allowing to happen again. I am going to rectify this particular mess and then continue in my role only if I genuinely have the time to and interest in doing so. But this is a general tendency I need to try and avoid – for my sake and more importantly those others it affects.
Perhaps more seriously in the context of my proclaimed philosophies is the fact that I have realised how dependent I have become on the opinions of others compared to how I used to be. The vast majority of this kind of thing is not, I believe, generally something that others are likely to notice although I imagine I have friends who are more perceptive than I am. But I have caught myself, with yawning horror, feeling from time to time as though I am missing out and want to be part of the common (that is numerically common) culture around me with all the activities that people tend to get up to, and as part of this, seem to have found myself caring more and more about what others think of me and how they see various aspects of my activities and personality. It seems I am in the middle of a crisis of self-confidence – that last sentence was difficult to write as it sits so juxtaposed with every other thought I hold dear. Essentially it seems I want, subconciously, to be more included – and this is the very antithesis of all that I believe in terms of the way one best lives one’s life, which is by no means an anti-social life, but one that is not in any way controlled by such interactions. More conciously speaking I remain outwardly confident of virtually everything and inwardly confident of everything except my own academic abilities and my lack of ability to use my time well as before. But this realisation, expressed not-so-fantastically here, has deeply shocked me. I do not wish to publically admit specific examples of what I describe here most generally.
Only one side of the story has been shown here as too often when anyone tries to analyse themself too far. While I might be someone who says strange things in an expression of the above subconcious social concerns, I am also someone who, I am told, listens to the views of pretty much everyone and tries to take them onboard intellectually as much as is possible. I have a hefty dose of rationality and employ it fairly successfully in the abstract sense, even if I fail hard at things of a practical nature in the real world, which fortunately concerns me little. I can pull out masses of enthusiasm and energy for certain things, even if it may trail off given time as described above. I think, I believe, fairly well – but I recognise that such a thing is never perfected in a life and I withhold my absolute assent from anything – even this. In these terms I have recently been described as a pyrrhonist by a friend and I am proud (after learning the meaning of the term) to have been addressed as such, and I intend to blog at some point in more detail about this world view. Conciously I am in a situation that I am content with. It seems that I need to reconcile my less concious self with these thoughts so that I move away from my recognised faults, and perhaps find others to be corrected. I don’t know how far the above recognised issues have infected my concious self.
So far I have expressed a series of realisations and opinions about my own, very human, faults and perceived strengths in what probably appears to be a very juvenile mental struggle traditionally associated with my age group, where I try to settle into one of the moulds that society has set out for me. So I should now set out the nature of this mould that I want to slot myself into; how I intend to try to work towards an improved state of being far removed from the problems I have now identified. How I can stop having holidays such as this where I waste my time away despite my claimed allegiances to mental activity and service. And what it comes down to is attempts to get into better habits and better subconcious processes in order to allow me to achieve what I conciously see as my goals as described at the beginning of this post. I need to slow down and think more carefully in common activities. I need to force myself to use my time better until it becomes something that happens naturally, given that I recognise that now it is a natural tendency towards wasting it that I seem to have acquired. I need to apply my reason even more commonly and liberally than I do now to be disciplined with myself. And I need to speak only when I have something genuinely worthwhile to say. And I suppose, additionally, following my various New Year’s resolutions wouldn’t hurt either. I have no desire to destroy my trademark intellectual faux-arrogance that is really pure enthusiasm, or to change from my forceful style once I have decided to pursue something. But by widening when I apply the essence of these and by more carefully selecting when to put forth their public fronts I think I can come closer to my various goals.
It’s very easy for me to sit here before going to bed and write roughly two thousand words on things that I want to do based on deeply held but assumed principles of what is valuable and ultimately meaningful in my life as I go forward. But I truly hope that by writing this kind of thing down I can take steps in this particular direction towards being more fully what I already hope I am in my better moments. I know I am never going to make a life entirely of these, but they seem remarkably few and far between these days and so maybe I can change that trend somewhat. And maybe I am just slotting myself into yet another pre-determined mould sat in by various other people who like to call themselves thinkers over history and am really just slumping into another mediocre life as with the rest of the world. But there is always the chance that I will transcend this, a chance that I know doesn’t exist if I don’t carry out this process of recognising and at least attempting to fix bad habits and practices that lead me astray and into despair over my inability to sort them out. If it’s all wrong at least I can move myself closer to a state from which I can head to a whole host of other destinations. Hopefully for once I have now made a firm step in a better direction.
Musical considerations
I’m not, and haven’t been for a long time, very good at listening to music. By this I mean that I have a very specific problem: at any one time I listen to a small selection of tracks over and over again and then feel very dissapointed that they no longer sound as good after I’ve heard them a ridiculous number of times over a few weeks. And then thereafter they are never really as good at they first were. This is not something I myself have really identified; my family have been telling me for years. I seem to do this in many areas of life: I get very very into certain things for short periods of time and then move on. It’s not something that I consider a positive trait in any way and I would much rather develop interests into deeper understanding but as per usual as soon as something becomes any real challenge I lose most of my interest in it. I’m not convinced that there is a lot I can do about this because if I am no longer interested in something then I’m not going to pursue it very successfully as I’ll be going against what I actually want to do. I don’t know if this is, though, me just holding my behaviour up to ridiculously high standards which I then inevitably fail to meet – something else I do very often. Friends tell me they have short attention spans and can’t believe how long I can spend on particular pieces of work, or certain specific interests which I do maintain. So maybe this is not too much of a concern.
To return to the originally intended subject matter of this post, I thought it might be nice to write a little about my music library. Since I got my iPhone, despite this forcing me to use iTunes which is possibly the worse piece of software ever, I have listened to a lot more music (although in the mornings on the way to school I usually listen to good old fashioned Radio 4 FM for the Today Programme) on my frequent and long bus journeys to and from school. This has meant that my library of music has tended to become a bit repetitive since it’s not really very big and it doesn’t get added to very often. Until a few months ago, my music consisted of soundtracks and computer game music with very few exceptions. While I still have all this music, it is a pretty static set. Unless I play a new game that I think has really good music, or see a good film that releases its soundtrack (my favourite music remains the Lord of the Rings film scores by Howard Shore, truly fantastic), it won’t expand, and I end up stuck with a small selection of tracks that means that they lose their appeal for the above described reasons. So I’ve since added to the collection a bit from old CDs in my parents’ collections, things that I can remember growing up hearing and liking: the likes of U2, Savage Garden, Gretchen Peters and the Lighthouse Family. I’ve also got a few other things like a couple of Brent Simon songs, and most of Jonathan Coulton’s lyrically powerful music. But this leaves me without a source of good music that I can draw from to keep a good flow of new material.
This has changed recently. On one boring Friday afternoon in Physics, my friend Tom and I exchanged lists of music to lookup and play. I suggested various tracks that can be found on YouTube for him to listen to, and he gave me some things to look up from his personal area of interest, Drum and Bass music. A complete departure from my usual content, I was told repeatedly that I wouldn’t at all like it and I didn’t really expect to, but was interested in taking a look. At first, the various computer generated tunes failed to appeal as anything more than background sound while working which I could definitely appreciate. But now, after listening to more ‘chaones’ (== tunes) and mixes, I think I should probably admit to the world, however much it pains me to do so, that I’ve become quite the Drum and Bass nerd. I’m not bothered about the clubbing (obviously, I don’t see why anyone would want to go to such places) and insufficiently restrained volume controls that tend to come with such music, but simply the actual creativity that goes into tracks. Finally I have something that I can add to and collect and enjoy. My vocabulary and knowledge of the big players and classic tracks is very much lacking at this point, but I seem to be leaning more towards the liquid subgenre which is melodic, tuneful work that is very much reminiscent of the soundtracks in my collection already. My two current favourite tracks that I would be happy to include in a classics playlist are Hurt You by Chase & Status and Beautiful Lies by B-complex, an unreleased track from an unknown artist that has really set off some shockwaves.
I’m not entirely sure what it is about DnB that appeals to me, but I have been known to laugh at those who attempt to pin down, particularly in classical music, any kind of specific meaning in work. Uncharacteristically, I shall simply state that I like certain bits, certain notes of songs and leave it there. With few lyrics in this genre and with track and artist names that are essentially whatever sounds vaguely memorable, there is very little else to go on. So I’m trying to add some more variety to what I listen to, and I think I’m succeeding, aside from finding myself playing certain favourites over and over as before. And I very much enjoy laughing at the culture and vocabulary: ‘massive’ and ’shout’ and other such nonsense that I’m not convinced anyone actually buys into. I would also like to add some more classical music to my library, so I need to find a friend to feed me suggestions. Maybe instead of getting better at listening to the music I already have, I’ll just get as much as possible and feed the roaring furnace of consumption of it in my mind. Excellent.
A farewell to nonage
I’m not quite sure what I want to write, but I feel I should make some sort of post this night before my eighteenth birthday. As I type this I have roughly five hours until this collection of cells other collections of cells like to refer to as Sean will have been around for eighteen years, the age at which this reasonably liberal society decides that one becomes responsible for oneself and one’s own life, when some rights end and others begin. What will I have achieved in that time? I’ve been fantastically lucky to have been born into the rich western world. I’ve had every opportunity slung at me by enthusiastic family members, I’ve had a pretty good education, and I’m supposed to be planning for a successful career in the eyes of this utilitarian society. I seem to have set myself up as someone who questions and questions and never stops, occasionally suggesting an answer to the mix, and I am proud of the fact that I don’t let myself be influenced quite so heavily as others can be by social tyranny and confirmity. I try to improve things around this plane of existence where I can. In the end I may only be another human and I may be immensely insignificant in the eyes of eternity, but at least I can pretend otherwise and write away on this blog as if I am penning an epic tale.
But this is the point. There have been a thousand eighteenth birthdays like mine, there have surely been equally as many who will have realised this and thought themselves to be philosophically superior. As Charlie says in my favourite passage of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his friends sitting in a cafe arguing over some issue are merely replaying a conversation had a thousand times before by similar groups. There is precious little originality, and there is precious little variety left in our lives. We laugh at the same jokes and we slot ourselves into the moulds available in society: our education systems turn out doctors and lawyers and managers who then pick from a similar choice of family circumstances. And then we lose our fervour, and become dull and routine, never changing as we plod away at the lives we have chosen. It is oft said that the young are idealistic and unsettled, and that we have ridiculous, ignorant ideas of how we want to shape the world. But this is something we must keep. If everyone just does something that’s gone before and occasionally something new is thought up, why bother? If we settle for what is practical and easy and we don’t instead try our hardest to bring variety and difference and change then you might as well collapse all generations into one and stamp a historical label upon them all as a era of repitition.
The above is probably full of fallacies and I’m sure I’m a hypocrite in so many ways here. If what we have right now isn’t good enough, and never will be according to this model, what is it that we are trying to reach? Why have variety if actually it doesn’t turn out to be very much different for individuals? Maybe by sticking with a routine and what one has one has merely reached the ideal situation. And maybe it is all irrelevent anyway as we all die, and it all ends. Maybe instead of worrying about trying to strike out we should try to achieve that fabled balance between the extremes of progress and conservation, and be satisfied in the knowledge that we’re never likely to divine some sort of eternal meaning, but trying makes us understand things better.
The above is what goes round and round in my head on a day to day basis. When I see a tired looking worker on the bus or a bored school pupil, when I see a stereotypical student or teenager or toddler just going through their lives, I consider these issues. I’m not going to try to pick a side here on the question of what the answer is here. All I would like to hope and set as a goal is that I keep thinking. If we ever put aside questions as unanswerable, there isn’t much point in having the questions at all. And in this again I’m just another would-be philosopher who likes to play around with questions, just someone else who secretly thinks themselves better for doing so, but knows they’re really not. So I’ll keep trying to be original and new, and I know I’ll never likely be happy with how that comes out, and I’ll never be satisfied with the quest. But a life with no certainty and permenance and purpose is infinitely better than one of false surety and contentment. There has to be something more than mere happiness. I suspect I’ll always hold that belief.
I won’t be any different tomorrow morning, but this was worth saying, even if it was a bit garbled and unclear – but that’s sort of the point. Good night.