I clench my jaw.
My stomach is tight.
I can’t quite seem to relax.
I have a drink to ease into the evening, to keep my mind calm. I flit from one activity to the next with superficial engagement. For this is a mind impinged upon by anxiety and blind to it’s source.
I look out into the world – try to find the origin. Maybe it’s the negativity in the news, or those supplements I started taking? I feel particularly anxious today – what did I do this morning? Where does this anxiety come from? What external thing could be so directed at my being so as to affect me thus?
Looking inside is never the obvious answer.
When I’ve exhausted the external search I’ll take a superficial peek beneath the surface and quickly rule out any internal process being so active so as to cause my teeth to wear down. Sights back out into the world…yeah – the problem must be out there somewhere. Not in here beneath layers of deceit & confusion, a cacophony of facade in which truth is dispersed and strung beyond grasp.
But then something happens.
I am still for a moment and the world fades away.
My mind says plainly:
“You’re the problem”
I shudder.
It’s scary to hear the self make such an admission of guilt.
There’s no-one else in the room. I follow the voice down the rabbit-hole. The hubris & debris is pushed aside – I see clearly now, as if for the first time the source of my anxiety:
I’ve been neglecting my work.
Been lazy & browsing the web when I should be working.
Shirking my responsibilities.
Someone has given me a job and I’m acting in a way that affects them or their company negatively. And I realize how that might seem the most mundane revelation ever. Seriously – not doing your job properly is causing you so much anxiety? It seems so – and especially so when that act of neglect is symbolic of a deeper struggle that permeates humanity (or, myself at least) in the modern world.
This is how I see it:
Not doing my job properly is an act of rebellion or defiance. I’d like to get paid more, I’d like certain things to change…basically, from my perspective – I don’t feel like I’m entirely happy with my job. Now – maybe that’s because I feel I’d rather be pursuing some notion of ‘true calling’ that I’ve yet to hear, or maybe the job has it’s problems, or maybe I’m just full of shit. Either way – I implicitly justify my act of ‘defiance’ because that act, feels to me, like some misplaced manifestation of an act of self-preservation: I ascribe to myself a particular value of self worth, and should my job not sufficiently reimburse that value – I feel within my right to do those things which allow for a sense of self-preservation.
And I realize that self-preservation here seems more like a bunch of lies I tell myself, but I think self-preservation has typically been that outward act which makes one feel most comfortable in the world. Out in the wild in the face of danger or discomfort – unguided by the structures of society & morality – a creature can only act in a way that distances itself from the stressor. If I perceive my job (and by extension the work assigned to me) to be that stressor infringing upon my well-being – then I see it as justified & natural to position myself further away from it. And in the modern age, in the context of a job – that moving further away takes the form of avoiding duties and doing the contrary: Browsing the web and doing anything but that which I should be doing.
This age old sense of self-preservation, however distorted in it’s modern expression, is engaged in a tug-of-war with it’s polar opposite: The ethical imperatives of society – those guidelines that stand in stark contrast to the ‘anything goes’ mantra of an evolutionary environment unconstrained by aspirations to do good. I seek to be a good person, to point the finger at myself first – and here I find myself acting contrary to the way I know I should live.
This is the struggle.
Between two aspects of being: On one hand the part formed by evolution, on the other the part formed by culture & morality.
Self-preservation says: “Do what you need to survive”.
Morality says: “Be a better person”.
I aspire to be a good person.
Yet I do things which aren’t good.
The plainness of the act (like being lazy at work) doesn’t matter. These acts are representative of a struggle that runs deep within us – that struggle between how we are and how we want to be; the struggle between the phantoms of evolution and the will of intellect. So long as that conflict finds expression – growth will be stunted.
It’s a liberating feeling being aware of the struggle.
It’s freeing knowing the source of anxiety is within me – that it has woven through it’s fabric the interplay between two powerful forces. With light shed upon the mechanisms, the arcane machine becomes less mysterious. I invoke my will, and choose henceforth how to act. I might falter, I might fall – but I’ve seen the path and cannot forget it. The truth cannot be unseen, and it is now the dragon of habit I must slay, for it seeks to drag me back into that mode of ‘self-preservation’ which went unchallenged for much too long.
Notes:
- This topic of work isn’t the source of all my anxiety, it is a source.
- Work and jobs aren’t of some profound importance, but neither are milkshakes. Yet if drinking milkshakes is something I do regularly – I need to be aware of the cavities they might cause.
- The topic of work and jobs isn’t particularly interesting. What is interesting is that struggle between evolution and intellect and how it creeps into our daily lives.
pixels trees and sprites 