500 Words — Day Twenty-Five: Shallow Saturday
It’s really hard to describe what I actually want to say, but I’ll just go with it and see where it goes. I’ve been struggling with how to describe this current feeling that I have. It’s like a vast emptiness that washes over me on the weekends. An immense realization of how meaningless and pointless and shallow most things I crave or desire actually are. All I think during the week is about how wonderful some free time would be. I work myself to exhaustion during the week and here I am on Saturday. Unhappy that I finally got what I wanted.
Perhaps, I am taking the wrong perspective towards this break in the action and maybe should have gratitude that I have the freedom to feel such purposelessness. Most people would feel the void with television or a nice meal or a glass of easy liquor, but those things don’t make the feeling go away. Actually, it seems that doing things I really don’t like doing makes that feeling go away. When I’m working, I don’t feel like the freedom is pointless, but the freedom is a reward. It’s pretty absurd. I complain about my Sisyphean chore of pushing against an unmoving wall, but that push satisfies some deeper need. If that wall didn’t exist, how could I be happy just going where I wanted to go all of the time? If that mountain wasn’t there, what would I climb? Why do I feel like I still need to struggle when it’s no longer needed?
Perhaps the modern world is too easy for me. Perhaps, I need to make my weekends harder. Does this make me a workaholic? I’m not sure. Perhaps the people that secretly root for chaos feel the same. They crave harder times, not because they really want harder times, but just feel so empty in easier times. Meaning is derived from the external world. When the external world removes any pressure and grants the freedom of passivity, what meaning is left over? You can’t feel content just sitting there watching the world rotate around the sun. You need to manifest yourself into the world. We crave the freedom but we don’t really want it. Or at least that’s how I feel. Some paradox that is.
My last post on Thursday came after I was very tired and spent the entire day working on something. There was very little downtime. I cannot say that I was enjoying myself the entire time, but oddly enough, it was a lot easier to find happiness in that workload. Even though, thinking about, a lot of that work is pointless. When I take the next step in my career, those hours toiling, worrying, and pushing will mean very little outside of the experience I take with me. Yet I somehow still find meaning in that struggle and from there can be content. Today, I have the option to do nothing and I do nothing and am discontent. What an interesting little curse.
