cjm
Member
My life has been lived in fantasy. Sexual fantasies and philosophies, I end up accomplishing absolutely nothing, and it was that way even when I could go out freely. The real world is so disappointing, and people were so unwelcoming to me, that I can't say I even want a future.
The ruminating and abstracting are enormously effortful, plus they're paralyzing! What if you could re-direct these efforts? Fantasizing and abstracting reality can turn the brain into a "repeater" - like a dumb network device that just propagates the signal it's given from the router. So you'll clear your schedule, stop making plans, have all this free time, but you still find yourself on the couch ruminating, half-listening to whatever TV show or movie annoys you the least because the mental chatter is so prominent. If your mind wasn't so occupied with intrusive thoughts, what would it be doing? Probably sitting back most of the time, when it wasn't engaged in solving a problem or detecting a pattern, just enjoying unimpeded sensory perception.
It's not that I don't want anything, but why do I have to form long-term goals out of desires that my body has? I'm not my body or my desires. I know that desire is just a black hole, that a person wants more and more if they are given happiness, I don't care to promote that cycle.
Duality, eh? The body and the mind are separate in some sense, i.e., muscles and nerves are different kinds of cells, but they can't exist separately. The poetry of life is a verse best read by the whole class.
I guess I'm trying to say you're overthinking this, which is what I wish someone could have told me from the start. I just don't know how to communicate that yet or if it's even worth or able to be communicated. The things in our lives don't always work, but they kind of always do, somewhere, somehow. It's a matter of adaptation. You overcome the learned helplessness of the mental prison and become irreversibly open to solving the seemingly unsolvable problem of not enjoying yourself. You have to solve that problem first but it might be the only one you have to make an effort at, in the sense that you alluded to initially.