“Madness is doing the same thing in the same way repeatedly while expecting different results.” Someone far more original than me said that once, and while the particular person who said it has faded from my memory their words found a way to stick. I was thinking about this because I realized that by this definition I have compulsions that exhibit this form of madness. I check my email and facebook with a frequency that borders on obsession. It is as though the moment boredom or a lull comes into my life I simply sign on. The odd thing is that I am looking for the same thing there repeatedly that I never find. On the surface level this compulsive behavior stems from curiosity and boredom. I want to see what other people are doing. I want to be amused and entertained by voyeurism into the trivialities of others’ lives. But underneath the compulsion is a hope and desire far deeper than that. I’m actually looking to these sources for relationships, affirmation, and validation. I want to feel connected and involved in other people’s lives. I want other people to reach out to me. I want people to find me significant or interesting. I want people to encourage me. It’s as if I’m looking to my email and to facebook to fulfill the deep relational desires that I have. This presents two serious problems. The first is quite simply that there is almost no relational satisfaction in those areas. I’ve never had a wall post that made me feel significant. There are some emails that have been significant to me, but it is usually months between these emails, not minutes. Looking to these sources for meaning, significance, or relationships is like drinking water one drop at a time. It isn’t enough to satisfy. The second problem it presents is that compulsion feeds desire and desire feeds compulsion. The more I check my email the more I want an email, the more I want an email the more I check my email. This becomes a vicious cycle of narcissism and neediness. I want validation constantly and continuously. Even when I receive it, it isn’t as good as I expected and hoped. But instead of placing my hope in something different, something more meaningful, I return to the comfort and disappointment of my compulsion. It’s comfortable be cause I know it, and there’s no real risk of pain or disappointment, because it’s passive behavior. I sit back and wait for the world to come to me, instead of taking bigger risks and facing larger disappointments. That’s my madness.
Archive for January, 2011
My Modern Madness
Posted in All, My Thoughts, tagged compulsive, email, facebook, my modern madness on January 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Posted in All, My Thoughts, tagged no good deed goes unpunished on January 21, 2011| 2 Comments »
Somewhere in my misguided life I picked up the notion that if I do the right thing, good things will happen to me. Not only will good things happen to me, but I will deserve for good things. If I am patient searching for a job I will be rewarded by getting an amazing one. If I give money to the homeless, I wont get pulled over for speeding. If I am kind to strangers, I will be rewarded with a beautiful wife. If I call my grandparents on their birthdays, I’ll get straight As. I bought into the silly little notion that the universe will balance out and if you put good into the world it’ll come back to you with interest. But the truth is far from that… good deeds often fail to bring any reward in fact many times they bring suffering. You pet a dog and it bites your hand. You pay all your taxes and it tanks your business. You give money to the homeless and he follows you for an hour yelling. You workout, exercise and eat right, but you still get cancer. You patiently wait and diligently search for a job you never get. You tell the truth and it destroys a friendship. You do volunteer work and get injured. Not only do you seem to get punished for your good deeds but others seem to be rewarded for their bad deeds. The manipulator always seem to get the girl. The thief’s business always seems to prosper. The jerk always gets promoted. Despite My Name is Earl’s attempt to prove otherwise, Karma just doesn’t seem to correspond with reality. Now its true that the villain doesn’t always win, the hero sometimes gets the girl, but there’s a reason why we think of those type of stories as fairy tales or stories for naive children. Its because the harsh reality of life is that my good deeds don’t earn or entitle me to any reward. If I do a good deed, it should be because I think I value morality and virtue over reward. In fact I must willing to put myself at risk in doing what is right, because it is often accompanied by pain. The true test of character is not then the willingness to the right thing, but rather how much I’m willing to suffer for doing the right thing. To be a man of virtue I have to care more about character than consequences.
Self Improvement
Posted in Uncategorized on January 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »
So I’ve been thinking about change lately. Can we change ourselves and if so is there a limit to the extent we can change ourselves? Or does it take something outside of us to change? If so, is the is our ability to change contingent upon our ability to change our circumstances?
Robots and Death
Posted in All, My Thoughts, tagged creepy, death, robots, uncanny, valley on January 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »
It’s time I give the people what they want… assuming the people want more blog posts.
There is a strange phenomena which basically boils down to this if there are really realistic portrayals of humans can be really creepy. The odd thing is if it is either not realistic at all it can be cute or if it is convincingly realistic it doesn’t bother us as much. The area of realism that seems to creep us out which is not fake enough to be cute and not realistic enough to be convincing, is called the uncanny valley. Supposedly the reason why these robots give us the heebie jeebies is that they remind us of our own mortality. I guess inanimate objects that look human remind people that eventually there will come a day when they will be inanimate objects that look human. So, what do you think of the uncanny valley?
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