Will

It has been over two months since my last rant.


The biggest reason for the hiatus is a lack of new material. Being a hermit does not impart the level of inspiration that literary loners would have you believe. Another reason is that long impassioned diatribes against the follies of the world are ironically foolish. Cathartic, but mostly foolish. Perhaps the lag between entries means that I've become a much calmer person.


I do find it much more difficult to get angry these days. In fact it's much more harder to get happy, sad or even annoyed. Age seems to bringing with it an ever growing sense of detachment from the effects of day to day occurrences. What a long winded way of saying that life has become boring! But boring doesn't quite describe this most recent stretch of life. Numb seems to be more apt. A general numbness to stimuli seems to plague me.


At first I thought it was burnout from way too much work and excitement in the past few years. But then I took a very long break from everything and everyone and then even went on a nice long escape twice in the past few months. But still the numbness is pervasive. The need for instant gratification and stimulation overload are to blame. Perceptually there is too long of a lag between the exertion of will and desired outcome.


That lag is the explanation for why New Year's resolutions consistently fail. There is definitely plenty of faulty engineering with our brains. We perceive existence from one moment to the next yet if we are to achieve success on any meaningful level then we have to take actions for which there is no immediate positive feedback. In a nutshell that explains the power of chocolate cake and strippers over granola bars and 401k contributions. Luckily for me I'm allergic to chocolate and financial planning.


Free will is a grand notion which has very misleading implications. We all have to ability to choose a great deal of our own actions. Consequently most people believe that those actions have a disproportionately large effect on the eventual outcome. I'm going to avoid the obvious poker/life analogies that are springing to mind. The harsh reality is that while are choices may determine who we are, chances are what really dictate the action.


You can argue that chance is the aggregate result of individual choices colliding and collapsing upon one another in an ocean of whims and decisions, but that doesn't change the fact that a single individual has little to no control over randomness.


Where does that leave us?


Row row row your boat. The constant exertion of your free will towards your desired result is the only way to steer yourself towards your destination. But there's no guarantee you'll get there. There's even a chance that if you do nothing you still might get there. So why in the hell should you row at all? I don't know. You could just lay back and see where the currents take you, but that usually leads to some unpleasantness involving sinking or getting the boat repossessed.


Nautical themes aside, force of will is necessary, but not nearly as effective as I'd like it to be.


That's a very weak conclusion and it is leaving me most unsatisfied.


When will power alone isn't enough to achieve the desired outcome, what can you do to supplement your will? If I knew, I'd be out doing it instead of puzzling it over here on an idle Thursday night.


What do you do?