The Apathy Thing
I think I've known for a while that it really can be apathy, not despair, which destroys a life. My life, in this case. Of course, eventually apathy and despair get sort of all mixed up, and start causing one-another.

I can often recognize when I'm going to hit a little bit of a blue patch when apathy starts to seep in. I recognize it sometimes in the little decisions in my life--what to have for lunch, whether to do laundry and then go to the store or vice-versa. When these little decisions are difficult to make, a big red flag pops up.

Through experience, I've discovered that with these sorts of decisions, when I feel apathy seeping into the process, it's best to just pick something and go with it, to end deliberation. The process of deliberation, once apathy settles in for the duration, is an apathy-engine of it's own. If I can't even decide what to have for lunch, my brain tells me, then what, really, is the point of deliberating at all? What is the point of anything? (This is partly the effect of having taken too many philosophy classes. As Steve Martin once said: "In college, you learn just enough philosophy to fuck you up for the rest of your life.")

Then there are the day-to-day decisions which, though they also seem small, are what life adds up to sometimes. For instance--taking care of one's home. I get home, put my keys and wallet down, take off my backpack and...look around. The place is a mess. Or, even better, I wake up on a Saturday, take a shower, eat a bit of breakfast and look around...the place is a mess. Do I clean the kitchen or the bathroom first? Well, neither, because it's tough to decide.

Monopoly Money
It's strange the sort of games one learns to play with oneself. Good games. Positive games. Giving yourself little rewards. Sunday I knew I had to get some cleaning done, but apathy ruled. I had a bunch of tv-dvds that I could watch, and vegitate, and wait out the apathy (which isn't a bad strategy sometimes--sometimes apathy and depression are a sign that some recharhing, some holing up, need to be done). But I know from experience that the apathy would go away more quickly if I did something. Anything constructive at all. So I told myself, clean this space (a little space) and you get to watch something. Then you clean something else (slightly larger space). Then another. And you can get your vegitating in, but you can also wake up tomorrow to a cleaner living space.

It's a meta-game, and I am well-aware that not everybody has to play it. It's like putting monopoly money under the board. There are those to whom cleaning up and keeping things organized comes as second-nature, as a pleasure (to some, an obsessive pleasure, but still).

Big Apathy
But I think, while I'm happy to have developed some of these meta-game skills, I am still worried about the larger apathy picture. The larger strain of apathy in my life most likely informs these little apathy episodes. And the larger apathy feelings--I don't know that there's a meta-game to help me past them. I suppose one example of a meta-game would be falling in love, or having a kid, or any of the 'big' things that people do in life. (At some level, the meta-game is just the game, perhaps--not to get too lamely-ex-philosophy-student abstract on you.)

The thing is, I recognize that if I want some happiness, then I have to have wants. (And, most days, I do think I want at least happiness.) You can't want happiness in the abstract. You have to have some things you want and you have to go after them--and some of them you'll get and some you won't. But you'll be happier in both cases than if you don't have wants at all. I know this. And yet...the older I get, the less I seem to want.

And that can be pretty scary, thinking that you don't want, well, anything. And it's not true, of course. Take some things away and it will become clear I still have wants (i.e. food, shelter and the like). Then whence the apathy at all, I sometimes wonder? I think, sometimes, that this is all a product of my inability to process all of reality. There's just too much. And I shut down. Given too many choices, I can't make any.

But it makes me sad. When I was a kid, I begged for a TI994a. Eventually, I got it, even though it cost 200 bucks or something ridiculous. And I lived with that thing for a long, long time. I stayed up all night learning to program in BASIC. I talked about it at school. When I was first in college, I couldn't wait until the first day of classes (dork). I would lay awake all excited.

Somewhere along the line, as I grew older, I began to realize that any of these things that mattered to me, pretty much only mattered because I made them matter. And the older I get, the less I make an effort, I suppose, to make things matter. Whine, whine, whine. Why should I be suprised that the same thing that has happened to generations of people is now happening to me?

Oh, and it's really weird to recognize that this feeling will likely go away in a few days...

Filed under:Therapy