Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“To nullify discomfort is to nullify your very ability to endure emotion; it is to nullify and erode both ends of life’s spectrum of experience. “

I’d argue that the most intense of emotions are inherently taxing. Not only do stress and frustration require effort to contain, but even moments of great joy can often be difficult to bear; they too are strenuous and demand enduring. I argue that both difficulty and joy are conditions of restlessness that are an integral part of the human condition. To subdue one is to subdue the other; the subduing of life itself.

 

 

You see, combat can be spent unknowingly. If you’re stuck, depleted or frustrated—despite your best efforts—it may be because you’re fighting the wrong guy.

I was. In what I call “cycles of attrition”, I would waver between periods of intense energy and exhausted apathy. I tried every trick in the book to get inspired, but somehow none of it ever came to fruition. I wasn’t objectively better at the end of the day. If anything, these repeated efforts eroded my sense of aspiration. What was the point of riding the waves of ambition only to crash onto the shores of failure?

And there was nothing for me, nothing there, nothing to hold onto to. Except misery and self-hatred, of course. But you can’t even hold onto that, at this point you’re too fragile, too empty; in this state motivation is altogether blunted, inaccessible. And you don’t know what to expect from a different course of action, you can’t even understand it, or distinguish what the alternative is. I can tell you of it, that it is a wild beast so ferociously eager to live, but it is inaccessible to you now. Though you need not worry about seeking or sparking it.

As I’ve said before, I believe that the only way you can reach this condition is if you have already a tremendous, deep-seated desire burning within you. This passion leaves you with one of two certain outcomes: it will bolster your efforts, or consume you entirely; achieve, or desperately suppress. Eventually I learned, that the difference between those two outcomes, is whether or not you are able to regularly confront your passion, to mold it, and learn to control it in its own irrational reality. To leave it ungratified by cheap stimuli, and let it rise and surge. To confront your frustrations rather than suppress them, to mold them, to discover yourself. As I pursued clarity, as I discovered myself, I discovered someone already driven. “My god”, it occurred to me, “there was no need to attain spirit, only unleash it”.

 

 

For my entire life, I’ve thought of motivation as the short-lasting bursts of energy one might get every so often. In regards to my ambitions, I thought it was impossible to consistently “feel like it”.

But in reality, passion was an innate sense of drive that could consistently called-upon and lived-by through the confronting, manipulating, and thriving off of stress.

See, stress is inherently there so it can be used for your advantage; this is the purpose of the stress response. When your brain detects a stressful situation, a series of interactions between your endocrine glands in the brain and kidneys (called the HPA axis) cause the release of the cortisol, adrenaline and norepinephrine hormones (among others) into your body in order to prime you for immediate action. This reaction is meant to benefit you by elevating your heart rate and giving you a burst of focus and energy—it even boosts your immune system[1]—so that you can better address the situation at hand.

But we don’t see it this way, do we?

The problem, as mentioned earlier, is that we use thought suppression rather than cognitive reappraisal to deal with our feeling this way. It doesn’t resolve anything, only postpones and makes matters worse. You get used to distracting yourself,