Mental Dexterity

I haven't been productive at all in the last few weeks and as is typical there is a spiral of guilt that inevitably ensues when I feel like my life has been stagnant for too long. I've been thinking about this a lot lately but in particular it has been dwelling on my mind since I watched a video on YouTube, the latest episode of the Smosh Mouth Podcast which is normally hosted by Amanda Lehan-Canto and Shayne Topp, but as Shayne is currently on vacation Angela Giarratana filled in as co-host. In it they discussed vacations and what people are like to vacation with. Angela made an off-the-cuff comment where she said "If you have to ask whether you deserve something the answer is yes, because being alive is hard"

Those words have been echoing in my mind because as a creatively minded person there is a temptation to value your self worth in terms of the weight of what you have created and it can be very hard to escape that mentality. This is something that speaks to society more broadly though, capitalism ultimately reduces people to a means of production and their value is measured by what they produce. There was a time when that term, "means of production" meant agriculture and industry, when it referred to food and furniture and everything in between, but those are primary and secondary industries and we live in a world that has an economy that has developed far beyond that limited definition. Today service industries, tertiary and quaternary take us beyond physical production into the realm of intellectual production.

It's within this realm of intellectual production that I reside and arguably most people in the western world at this point. We don't hunt and gather to survive, there is the temptation then to conclude that life is easier now than it was for our ancestors but the truth is not that simple. My ancestors certainly faced a far greater physical burden but arguably the mental burden of their life was a fraction of what the modern world demands. You can be quick to say that if you threw someone back a few thousand years they probably would not survive very long but in truth if you plucked someone from that time and brought them to the present they wouldn't last very long either.

Mental dexterity is something we all possess in varying quantities but it is something we overlook, both in others and in ourselves perhaps this is the result of evolution, in the same way that we are hard-wired by evolution to focus on problems to be solved and threats to be neutralized and overlook that which has been solved and value that which is already safe. In any case, the idea that we aren't doing anything productive implies we aren't doing anything at all belies the effort it takes just to function as a human being.

The idea of a vacation, taking a break from your routine and doing something different to give yourself a chance to rest, recuperate, and recharge is something that is increasingly difficult to achieve. I try to remind others of the simplicity of the assertion, that if you can go to sleep for 8 hours and not respond to calls, texts, or emails, and the world doesn't end, then you can take time in your day to unplug and have time to yourself too, I try to remind myself of this too. Still of all it's hard to completely disconnect mentally from the world. You can physically unplug, switch devices to do not disturb etc, but the mental component where you disengage is something you have to learn how to do.

I've been trying to practice Qigong meditation to try and achieve this state but to be quite honest I've never had much success with meditation. When I ask someone what they are thinking and they respond "nothing" that is the most incongruous thing to me because a complete absence of thought is something I have never experienced.

There was a moment in internet culture in recent years where people came to the realisation that some people don't have an internal monologue, and the awe of people who do trying to grasp what it's actually like not to have one; for me I don't just have an internal monologue there's conference going on in my head at any given time where lots of different ideas and agendas are competing for my attention, meditation doesn't seem to work for me because trying to reach that point of stillness mentally just amplifies the flow of ideas - you would think this might make me incredibly productive but that's a bust too because honing in on one idea and focusing on it is near impossible to do, the only way that ever happens by chance is when my imagination runs away with itself and one voice overtakes all the others.

Being alive is hard, it's hard for everyone but not for the same reasons. Some people struggle with things I don't have to think about, I struggle with things that they don't have to think about, or that they can choose not to think about.