A Few Words of Motivation
Ever had one of those days where you don’t take a shower, binge eat junk food all day, scroll on Instagram for three hours straight, watch videos on YouTube that you regret watching anyway? Sometimes those days can turn into weeks, months, or even years. This post is dedicated as pick-me up for those days when you feel a tad bit nihilistic. A reminder to keep up the spirit during remote working when you feel like life is a bit meaningless. A few words from Dr. Peterson.
“What remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life?” If you actually ask that question, you’ll figure that out so fast it will make your hair curl.
If you orient yourself properly, and then pay attention to what you do every day, it can work wonders. That is also in accordance with what we have come to understand about human perception. What happens when you do this is the world shifts itself around your aim. Because you’re a creature that has an aim, you have to have an aim in order to do something, you’re an aiming creature. You look at a point and you move towards it; it’s built right into you. Let’s say your aim is the highest possible aim. That is going to set up the world around you, it will organize all of your perceptions: it organizes what you see and you don’t see, it organizes your emotions and your motivations.
You can say that motivations determine where you are going to aim. For example, if you are hungry you are going to aim at something to eat. And then that will organize your perception so that you zero out everything that is not relevant to that task, which is almost everything. You concentrate on that few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward, when you encounter those things that produces positive emotions. As you move through the world towards your goal and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward, those things cause positive emotions. And if you encounter anything that gets in the way, then that produces negative emotions.
So, the world is framed by your motivations. Motivations set goals. In a way, the world has to be framed. Motivations set that frame by which goals, emotions, perceptions, and actions track your progress. When you feel good (experience positive emotions) it means you are moving forward properly towards your goal. Now, during your progress towards your goal you might encounter something you do not expect. When that happens, you stop. That is call anxiety, “We are not where we thought we were. So, we do not know what to do. We should stop. Because we do not know where we are and what we are doing.” And then the more powerful negative emotions like pain kicks in, they might make you get out of there. So, emotions are like your GPS: Forward, stop, reverse. That is your emotions, within that motivated frame.
When you organize yourself around an aim then the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems. And so, you can point into the distance, the far distance but you can also live in the day. And it seems that by asking yourself “What remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life?”, it makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning, because if everything that you’re doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize. Well, that’s the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life.
