So, I finally got my grades for the semester, didn’t do too well although I can’t say that I’m too surprised. I really let my last two papers go badly. I’m entering this weird cycle of: (A future in this field looks bleak) –> (I don’t know this subject matter well) –> (I don’t like this field) –> (I don’t try as hard as I could) –> (I don’t enjoy my classmates or class that much) –> (I get bad grades) –> (A future in this field looks bleak) –> repeat.
I’m not really sure where the starting point is or whether it’s all collectively happening at the same time and reinforcing each other. All I do know is that I don’t even really feel like applying to a ph d program next year or even really finishing this program.
I miss being surrounded by people who were dreamers. People who wanted to travel the world or cure a disease or become just anything beyond who they are conditioned to be right now. I feel like so many of the people I know are just controlled so much by their circumstances, specifically their job circumstances. It’s not so much what we really want to do versus what we tell ourselves we want to do based on what’s possible. I’m tired of hanging around people that just care about philosophers or money or sex or whatever. I’m interested in all of that, but I want to go beyond that too. Everyone’s a dreamer in college, the horizon is endless. Real life tries to beat that dreaming out of you, but I won’t let it. I won’t be a slave to my circumstances and won’t go to a Ph D program just because it makes the most “sense”. I want to live life on my terms. For those that have some great talent or have family wealth, this may not be such an issue. But for the rest of us 20-something year olds who are just as interchangeable in our jobs as anyone else and have to make our own living, this is a real problem. In many ways, I feel like I’m at the very bottom crawling my way upward, I’m below average in many areas and my dreams go further than those above me. And I can’t help but wonder am I the crazy one or are they? Maybe we both are.
There’s a quote in the Dao De Jing that goes those who know contentment are content enough. This kidn of goes completely against that. But the fact of the matter is that I’m no saint, stoic, or monk. I have certain expectations, needs, and desires I want satisfied. In a way, I know I’m going off the path but in a way I also know that lying to myself to stay on it is equally wrong. There’s a Nietzsche and Osho passage that goes those who renounce life are often not really that special. In fact, it’s usually life renounces the man and so the man renounces life. The point being that it’s one thing to renounce the pursuit of wealth out of ignornace and spite when you’re poor rather than to renournce the need for wealth when you’re already wealthy and know you could continue to be so. To say that you’ve stopped a habit when you never even had one or even know what it is is meaningless.
Hegel said that stoicism was a result of a slave consciousness, a weak person who has no control or happiness in this material world and so invents the idea that he is the master of his ideas, of his thoughts and then privileges his thoughts over his existence in the world. In a way I agree. And it poses a challenge because it would seem a lot of Positive Psychology, Buddhism, and other things I’m interested in are all techniques of being more sensitive to your thoughts and thereby leaving reality. It’s a real danger and temptation. Frankl said every man always has an inner freedom and choice that no one can take away. I agree. But there’s a difference between using your freedom to run away from life or to embrace it. In Frankl’s case, being in the concentration camp doesn’t provide you with too many opportunities to exercise your freedom in the world and Stoicism is a likely result but…we don’t live in a concentration camp except the one we put in our minds.
Those passages always struck me and made me really think. Was I leaving the world out of spite and failure or because I genuinely learned something. Did I stop going to the bars because bars and drinking are really bad or because I didn’t know how to socialize? Many times it was probably both. There’s a fine line, a middle path between the two extremes that I’m trying to find.
