xix
prev.cont.Certain things can only be seen out of the corner of your eye. Staring directly at them will do you no good.
Maybe I can look to the natural world for clues. If I stare at a colony of ants long enough, I’ll start to think like them.
It seems like they’re all doing the same thing. It looks like they don’t specialize in the same way humans do. Humans have a psychotic urge to hyper-specialize, even within our chosen professions. You’re going to be a doctor? Are you going to be a surgeon or a psychiatrist or a pediatrician or a neurologist or or or or? Do you want to work in a hospital or start your own practice? A whole host of meaningless micro-questions, evidence of our psychosis. It’s not enough to just be human and do what humans do.
Humans, interestingly, also seem to be the only ones who spend so much of their lives miserable.
It’s impossible to be a lover of the natural world, an appreciator of ants, and pursue a career in medicine with a straight face. It’s the most absurd thing imaginable. We should just be wandering around, picking up debris, moving it around, and going back into our holes.
It’s weird how trees don’t move. It seems like nothing bothers them. If they were bothered, they’d move, right? Do I need to stop moving, and then the world won’t bother me? Maybe they’re so unbothered because they aren’t wired with the same infinity of neuroses that we are, and that’s because they’re not forced to live in a sick and twisted society. I guess I shouldn’t assume; maybe they have their own neuroses, and their society is sick and twisted in its own way.
My ability to spend minutes and hours thinking about ants and trees disgusts me. I don’t have to worry about matters of survival, so I can spend my time bouncing around ideas with no practical applications. I turn my nose up at the thought of actual labor, sitting on my throne as the lower classes do the work that actually needs to get done. I indulge myself in debates about ant specialization and think endlessly about whether or not I should become a doctor.
Any hope I had that the weird year would be better than last year has been sucked out of me by God Himself and subsequently pissed into the winds of fate. The hope I had for better days was naïve. Every day is more pointless and exhausting than the last. And God laughs.
At one point in my life, I was on a roll. Basic needs met, striving toward self-actualization, and catching glimpses of it. I was perfectly happy-go-lucky.
I don’t feel happy or lucky anymore. Is this just what happens when you get close to self-actualization at a young age? Is it a kind of homeostasis that you have to maintain, and it can come crashing back down at any moment?
I prefer to delay my self-actualization by sabotaging myself with things that are wrong for me. Maybe it’s because I’m worried that my eventual actualization will be undone in some tragically catastrophic reversal later in life. If I keep myself in cycles and rat races like the weird year, I can hover just below self-actualization, busying myself with basic needs. I don’t have to worry about catastrophic reversals of fortune if I don’t consider myself fortunate.
The truth is I’m unable to step away from this path because I, too, have a psychotic urge to hyper-specialize. I also have a sick need to prove that I’m smart, and that I suffer. I make myself suffer psychologically so that I don’t have to feel guilty that I’ve been insulated from physical suffering my entire life by class.
Maybe this is the catastrophic reversal of fortune I’ve been afraid of: I was born into a life of privilege, walked the prestigious and universally respected path to doctordom, and then got stung by the bug that makes everything meaningless. I got so close to the end and lost the ability to go on. I fell to the ground, unable to get up, the finish line plainly in sight. How could I ever explain that to anyone? How could the universe ever forgive me for looking it in the eye and telling it that it’s not good enough?
Maybe I can avoid the reversal. I can just look at the universe and say, simply, “I accept.” I can keep fighting for my place in the above ground, find a way to trick myself into caring about my education. Continue on the path laid out for me by the American healthcare system. Continue indulging my fantasies of oppression by complaining about how a surgery resident was mean to me and return underground at the end of the day for a hot meal and a warm bed. The stakes are low, but they become high in this theater of imaginary oppression that I’ve created.
But if I do stay, would I really be able to buy into the things I find ridiculous, like going on the computer for hours and answering questions about hypothetical people’s obscure medical problems?
Jesus Christ, dude. Do it or don’t do it. Just pick one and shut the fuck up about it.
exit