I’ve been getting more hassle online for being gay in the last month or so than I think I’ve had in the preceeding couple of years. Mostly I’m deleting the nasty ones, arguing with the clumsy ones and ridiculing the stupid ones, but it’s starting to get me down a bit. Core problem spot at the moment is some idiot whose IP originates inside Manchester City Council who has been posting on this post: On Belle de Jour (he really should check out his employers discrimination guidelines). But also I’ve had the arguments about my hypothetical business card, been called a faggot a lot by American teenagers and just this morning found another happy little deposit from some idiot on my last Supplementary links post. It’s all so bloody depressing… I thought we’d started to move on from this…
So I got the first block of my thoughts around media hubs out of the way before the Apple keynote, so that’s good. I’m happy about that. For anyone who’s interested, we’re all ‘watching’ it via IRC on irc.apple-x.net and via the low-bandwidth stealth reporter at macrumors.com. Ping me on IM as well if you want to joint the tiny UK coterie of freaky geekniks who are dribbling at the thought of yet another glorious keynote. Vive le Steve!
So I’ve been thinking about the term to ‘force yourself to do something’ and kind of reeling at the absurdity of it all. I mean how can you force yourself to do something? Somewhere in your head you have one version of yourself pushing another version of yourself to do something they don’t want to do? Presumably kicking and screaming? But they’re both you, right? Not just the one that’s doing the forcing, but also the one being forced. So you might as well say that you were, “trying to resist forcing yourself to do something”. That would be equally bunk, right? I mean it would make as much sense, and realistically is a feeling I’m more familiar with.
So both the forced and the forcer ‘you’ are component parts of you. You can’t just identify with one of them. Which makes me think a bit about free will and which parts of the mind are genetically encoded and whether the part of the brain that needs to be forced is somehow being characterised as base matter – like we used to think of the body as being – with the forcer being our animating spark of divine will trying to get the corpse-like flesh of the body moving in a useful direction – the lightning to our Frankenstein’s monster of lethargy? Wow, that was a long sentence.
So basically saying that you had to force yourself to do something is a bit like saying that a rock is in constant battle with itself about whether to sit there or whether to get up and go for a walk. I mean, realistically it just stays where it’s put because that’s what it does. Whether you do things or not isn’t about internal conflict, it’s surely just about following your dictates – either dictates to animate yourself or dictates not to do so.
So why does it sometimes seem such a bloody enormous battle to convince oneself to even start doing a piece of work? What kind of stupid fucking evolutionary process ends up with procrastination, paralysis and apparent indolence? I mean, what kind of creature does well in the world by sitting at home in front of a computer for three hours in the early evening trying to motivate itself to write something about set-top boxes?! Where’s the reproductive advantage there?!
Stupid bloody world that should make me be this way and then make me neurotic about it.
