I feel like you could really identify with the message.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Sort of. The theme of the song seems to be escaping from other people as a means of escape from neuroticism, but I'm not really any less neurotic when I'm alone; I just have different unpleasant emotions. In fact, I live alone because other people (or at least, the few I've lived with so far) disrupt my work. I don't socialize outside my home because I lack motivation.
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
To me though the protagonist in the song in clearly delusional about his overall well-being, hence the ridiculous comparisons he uses to justify his lifestyle choice ("a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.").
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
I have no illusions about my well-being—I'm acutely aware of my own misery—so I don't know what your point is.
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
So you don't ever feel the need to justify your lifestyle choice in spite of your misery? You have no motivation to improve or acknowledge any sort of problem? Or have you conceded the failure of any sort of attempts of improvement based on past experience?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
If I understand it properly, his goal isn't happiness; it's production of knowledge.
Sure I justify my lifestyle in spite of my misery. You've read the justification before: in a nutshell, to pursue understanding. I don't need to be happy to understand things. All signs point towards my becoming a productive scientist. So what's the problem?
[Please imagine that the caption in the below image is "Where's the problem?".]
http://www.lessthanwomprat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Old-Woman.png
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
You don't feel in any way, or at least wonder if, finding happiness and escaping misery will allow you to become more productive as a scientist, especially if it's a persistent emotional problem?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
No, how would that work? I know there are plenty of people who are so tormented with negative emotions that they aren't able to work or even to think straight, but I'm not that unlucky. I get a lot more done than most people, who are generally happier than I am. Indeed, this is in part because I don't spend so much time trying to be happy!
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
I've just accepted that he's a weirdo.
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].
I'm just wondering how long you'll be able to keep that up. It may work now, but what about 10, 20, 30 years in the future?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Seeing as I am in general extremely reliable, fanatically dedicated, and as steady as, yes, a rock, I would expect so. We'll both be PMSians in 2020, won't we? You can track my progress and answer that question for yourself.
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
Alright. I actual commend you for being able to maintain high motivation in spite of misery. How severe is this misery you mention...could it be classified as a form of depression?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Well, not major depression, because, as I understand it, part of the definition of major depression is that it impairs normal functioning. I do have depressive tendencies, according to the MCMI-III:
http://arfer.net/x/mcmi.png
(If you're reading the rest of that thing, bear in mind that the score for post-traumatic stress was probably, and the score for anxiety was possibly, inflated by circumstantial factors. I know all this is supposed to be confidential, but I'm sick of the stigma of mental illness. Can't we be open about these things?)
The subjective experience, in a nutshell, is that I'm always upset. Either I'm anxious about performing an upcoming task (which, in most cases, I know I'll do perfectly well on), or I have a vague and sourceless sense of despair, or I'm haunted by the memory of a mistake I recently made, or I find myself doubting the wisdom of my own actions without good reason, or I'm angry about small and insignificant difficulties. It's severe enough in breadth to span basically my whole existence, but not enough in depth to keep me from accomplishing what I intend to. (Actually, I've increasingly found that working helps to muffle my emotions. There's a possibly that I'm as productive as I am not in spite of so much as because of this misery. My attempts to play my neuroses off of each other may be bearing fruit.)
Maybe "misery" is too strong a word. It just seems appropriate to me because of the fundamental gap between most people, who claim to enjoy life, and I, who hate living. I despise flesh and all its psychological baggage. I don't want to live; I just want to think and work—and, I freely admit, communicate. Maybe anhedonia more than negative emotions is the culprit here. I feel that I experience pleasure just the same as normal people, I just don't like it as much; but the more I think about this idea, the less sense it makes. Isn't it a contradiction in terms to dislike feeling good?
Well, I always wanted to do the impossible.
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
Very interesting. Thanks for being so up front about this.
My only concern is that not having experienced or attempted to experience a lifestyle that would be deemed more "emotionally and socially healthy," you don't know whether you would actually prefer that lifestyle to your current one.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Perhaps I would. But:
- Trying to do that would probably require nontrivial investments of time, energy, and additional suffering. There are several ways in which I unambiguously have room for self-improvement; this isn't one of them.
- So long as I didn't succeed at being happy, I'd have no way of knowing whether I never could succeed or I just needed to keep trying a bit more. Thus the hypothesis "Kodi would prefer normal experiences." borders on being unfalsifiable.
- If I did achieve some kind of normalcy and the experience only confirmed my suspicion that it wasn't worth it, returning to my old lifestyle would probably be all the more difficult. (It's much easier to abstain from something if you've never experienced it.)
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
[This message was deleted at the request of a moderator or administrator]
Kodi, you spit in the face of hedonism bot.
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"...you should try reading my posts being getting all emo." --FoxMetal
Whoa there, who modded Cheez? Her post wasn't even as inflammatory as the posts she was replying to.
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
Yeah, that was pretty cool, I guess. I'll just say the gist of what I said again.
Aman, who are you to judge someone's lifestyle? What makes you think you know the "better way" to live a life? Also, the way you go about it is just...well, I'll just put it this way, Kodi has been WAY more polite to you than you deserve.
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Holy **** we're in the Matrix? - Willis
I'm not saying it's better, nor am I telling him how to live. I'm just curious about his unique lifestyle, that's all.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
You're basically right, Cheez, but at least he's granted me his grudging respect, which is a lot more than I expected. The discussion seems to have reached a point where Jordan and I are civilly talking about meaningful things; let's keep it there.
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez
As I recall, the last time this happened Aman was considerably more condescending. Despite how this topic kicked off, it really is pretty civil at this point, and a good read to boot.
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Ocarinakid
If you have no further questions, AMan, let me take a moment to raise an almost parallel concern that I have with more conventional lifestyles. What most disturbs me about how most people* lead their lives is the lack of a deliberate goal; most people are content to live from moment to moment without much concern for the eventual consequences, or lack thereof, of their time here on earth. Of course, I can't justifiably say that anybody else should be likewise disturbed, because you need to assume some goal to begin with in order to argue that one goal is better than another or that some goal is better than nothing. Instead I complain about what seems to be a common consequence of this lifestyle, which is the endorsement of a certain very questionable idea. It appears that by living according to mood—by trying to at all costs minimize pain and maximize happiness—people get used to thinking of suboptimal mood as a problem of paramount importance. They confuse success and happiness so thoroughly with each other that they imagine that an unhappy person can't succeed at anything, not even at something that has nothing to do with mood. They believe that anyone who attempts to defy their feelings will eventually be compelled to get back in line.
It should be plain that all of this is false. I am a living counterexample. Yet even I believe, or act as if I believe, that I have certain emotional limits. Every time I give something up, I experience a little nagging fear that the day will come when I've gone off the deep end, and I'll somehow find myself either binging on everything I avoid or unable to do anything but sulk. Worse, perhaps, I am cautious. I assume without even trying that the likely emotional consequences of some courses of action would be too much for me to bear.
Doesn't it all smell like self-fulfilling prophecy? It's clear to me that the strong form of the idea "you can't fight your feelings" is false and destructive. On the other hand, if I accept the obvious (and, to my knowledge, standard) explanation of how mood disorders work, I also have to accept a weak form of the idea. The truth lies somewhere in between. But where?
* Well, most atheists—these issues are complicated enough without religion, so let's leave religion out of this discussion for the moment. Does this essay make me an anti-atheist atheist, then? Somehow that sounds appropriate.
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"You blockhead!" -Cheez