I’ve been really struggling this weekend with motivation. I guess there’s more important topics for me to write about, especially it being memorial day weekend so I should be talking about peace and my frustration with the whole rest of the country who seems to openly celebrate war and death and the us-vs-them culture that breeds hate for anyone who is not born on the same plot of land as you, and about how I, like so many other people attack the people who most reflect my own personality. I’ve spent my whole life with these fantasies of being in a war zone, picking up some big gun and mowing down the bad guys. When i was a kid that’s what I wanted more than anything else was to go to war where I would have the freedom to just take life after life after life without ever needing to feel a moral question, always knowing that I’m the hero.
But I’m not going to talk about that right now. Maybe tomorrow, if I can get motivated. Maybe it has to do with quitting marijuana. They always said that weed would destroy your motivation, that a stoner’s life would go nowhere, but that certainly wasn’t the case for me, but now I’m all sober and stuff and I wonder, well, what’s the point of these lofty, larger than life goals? Why shouldn’t I just downgrade and just have goals surrounding my immediate friends, family and household? I could help the local community, start going to church–gosh maybe that’s what I should do is force myself to get up and go to church tomorrow, just to see what it’s like.
But this is a long weekend and for the first time in a long time I have almost nothing to do for the weekend. Normally, almost every weekend I am going to or hosting some sort of party or event. It should feel like a relief, I should just sit back and relax and play video games–which that’s definitely what I’m doing. Signed up for Xbox Game pass yesterday and downloaded the new Doom and a few others that looked interesting, like–speaking of war and death, I downloaded Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 which according to ChatGPT is the one with the infamous controversial level where you murder a whole bunch of civilians in an airport. I’ve wanted to play that level for a long time, just because… well, hard to describe why… because I guess I have those violent desires just like so many others but I want to express them through fiction rather than through reality the way most people do.
Isn’t that kind of funny how that works, I wonder if it’s many of the same people who are all horrified by a level in a video game and at the same time, celebrate real world soldiers as heroes without ever stopping to think about the actual suffering they may be causing in war or all the innocent civilians they indirectly or directly kill. It’s easy to speak out against a video game. Not so easy to speak out against a whole culture. I guess it’s cuz the video game is honest about the love of death and explosions whereas when we celebrate soldiers and military, we hide behind this lie of “fighting for freedom” and this delusional, Orwellian notion that building and passing out weapons is somehow supporting peace.
But right now I’m trying to ask myself why I have suddenly lost my motivation. It’s not just for writing or CustomD. It’s also for my exercise. I haven’t done yoga in a week or two. I guess I tried lifting some weights a couple nights ago. Mowed the lawn today, which is about the only cardio I get (I use a manual mower).
Watched a couple YouTube videos on motivation but they didn’t help. Zuzka Light says I need a goal, which I guess that seems fair. Maybe I should just buy into her exercise program so I can use the sunk costs fallacy to motivate myself–you know, tell myself that I need to keep up with the workouts because I spent some money on it, but it’s only 20 bucks a month…
I don’t seem to have this problem with my day job–I mean, I’m not working 12 hour days or anything, well once in a while I do work all day from like 10 AM to midnight but then I slack off on other days. I mean, I feel fairly motivated to put in a fair 40 hour week for them. It’s a good job and they treat me well and maybe the human interaction, even if it is just over Slack and Zoom, that human connection gives me purpose, so maybe once I actually get some readers to my content or users for my app, I will perk up and really start working.
On the other hand, maybe I need to try to learn how to just enjoy dicking around. Like, it’s not evil to sit around and play video games, even if you’re doing it for most of the weekend, as long as it’s just once in a while. I mean, most weekends I’m out socializing and doing somewhat healthy things, so why do I feel so guilty about taking one weekend just to do nothing-ish–is that really so wrong?
I did get a massage today. 90 minutes and it went by really fast. It felt like less than an hour, and I think that’s because I’m not on the weed anymore. Time is back to running at normal speed.
Had a dream last night that I was coughing up shards of glass and my friends were like, “you should go to the hospital” and while I was worried about why this was happening, I just didn’t feel like going to the hospital and dealing with it, like I was just too lazy. “I’m sure it’s all out of there now. It wasn’t that much blood.” I wonder if that is another metaphor for how I’m feeling now–like I know what I need to do to make myself satisfied with my own behavior and not feel this sense of guilt that feels like shards of glass in my stomach.
I even last night declined a Red Cross call that came in. I should have taken it. I’m on call two nights a week but I hardly ever take calls when it’s not my night. I don’t know why. I know logically that after I’m done with the call, I never regret going out. It never feels like a waste of time, but still, I declined the call and just sat around watching Kitchen nightmares and I remember yelling at the TV “You’re paying your chef a hundred thousand dollars a year and he’s serving cheese sauce out of a can!?” Then I watched part of the next episode and realized I’d already seen it, then remembered that I’d actually watched the first episode a couple years ago and actually now remember yelling the exact same thing at the TV the first time. Such a freaking waste of time.
I’ve also been eating more junk food lately. It’s almost like it’s harder to resist now that I’m not smoking weed. There’s a bag of chips down in the basement that is just calling my freaking name right now.
I’ve been thinking maybe I should try to commit to quitting TV and video games in the same way I quit weed. Just get rid of it and commit to it. I guess logistically it wouldn’t be super complicated, just padlock the power cord of the TV and give all my roommates copies of the key and ask them not to unlock it for me unless we’re having a special movie night or something.
Now I’m really thinking about signing up for this Zuzka light program. It’s the same monthly price as Xbox. I guess it’s worth it just for the chance that it’ll get me up and back into exercising.
So now I’m signed up. Just paused for half an hour to look through it and so now I guess I’m paying 20 bucks a month to Zuzka Light and gonna follow her programs going forward. Gotta commit to this.
Funny how something can change so quick for me. It’s rather arbitrary. I only went to her website because I typed her name into Google just to confirm I had the spelling correct. It’s not like I did a bunch of research, as I think that may have been counter-productive, going around trying to find the perfect program on the best fitness site as I’m sure there’s thousands of them. Sometimes you just gotta pick something and go with it. Keeping this blog has such huge benefits for me, I think even more so than writing a private journal. I just sit down and write about my problem and it’s so strange and wonderful how just coming here to write in this blog will suddenly change my attitudes and bring me new pathways, perspectives and understandings of myself.
