Loss of Motivation

Then in the 1970s the backlash of social resentments and bitternesses[²] came and people re-appraised their new beliefs, usually becoming conservative and even right-wing in their politics. The hippie world vanished and many former hippies became pillars of the establishment.

This switch from left-wing idealism to conservatism sifted the dross and naivete from the new sexual movements and peace movements. What was left became the basis for permanent social change. In other words, the new ideals gave us something to aim at, and then the social backlash sorted out and got rid of the unrealistic aspects of our dreams. Though to be fair to the 1960s, the unrealistic aspects were only unrealistic for the times – they may become more socially acceptable in the future.

A person’s individual development mirrors this pattern of social change. Some people were battered by the backlash and ended up receiving psychiatric treatment. When I experienced the backlash, I fled into the exploration of religion (mainly Buddhism), yoga and theosophy.

Confusion in Our Ideals

The social sifting of new ideals occurs because the new ideals usually have aspects of psychological confusion hiding within them.[³]. The high ideals we set up are usually driven by our particular psychological limitations; the ideals become ways of trying to resolve those limitations. We hope that our new social and sexual ideals will resolve our existing social and sexual limitations, and we hope our new ideals of individuality will resolve the present limitations to our individuality.

In my view, whatever ideals we have as a young man, life tends to put us through the opposite experiences. In my 20s my main ideal was a free socialist society (not a state socialist society like Marxism) where I could practice gentleness. However, my life since then has been one where I have had little free choice and no chance at all to develop gentleness. My life has been very hard. In effect, I have learned what the psychological barriers are to achieving my ideals.

I tend to think of it by analogy to gold mining. When mining gold, you have to dig out a big heap of useless rock before you end up with a tiny amount of gold. Similarly, in order to be able to put our ideals in practice, we have to wade through a big heap of social and psychological constraints, fears and limitations. These obstacles exist both within our mind and within society. The obstacles harden us. But the biggest hurdle is our attitude to society. It becomes the easiest thing in the world to blame society for slowly eroding our hopes, and we may end up as a social misfit. However, this erosion happens to everyone to a varying degree and so it is nobody’s fault.

The core idea about psychological confusion is that when a person is confused in some ways, it is not possible to act in a “balanced” way. Whatever he does, it is either an under-response (if fear is present) or an over-response (if anger is in the background). Either way, he may feel guilt or shame about the way he reacted. He feels that he cannot behave in ways that create confidence in himself. He may end up by hating and blaming himself for his weaknesses. Or he may strive to be strong (in terms of will power) rather than balanced.

The way that confusion affects our idealism is that when we have good intentions, we nevertheless often act from the “wrong” reasons. Since we are confused about some aspects of our relationships, so when we try and help others, that confusion may well appear in the ways that we relate to them. We may end up trying to control others (for their own good, of course!) or we may abandon them after a while (we are not all that skilful at taking responsibility for ourself, so therefore we are uncomfortable with taking long-term responsibility for others), etc. All in all, we feel dissatisfied with all the good that we attempt. However, once we have removed much of our confusion, then we can feel confident that when we start pursuing our ideals again, we will at least have both the right intentions and the right reasons. We may also find that our ideals incorporate a new and deeper understanding of ideas about society, injustice and freedom.

Dissatisfaction with Life

When we feel dissatisfied with our life, it is often difficult to know what is important and what is unimportant. There are two general ways of viewing dissatisfaction, depending on the intensity of the dissatisfaction.

a). If the intensity is low, then we are more happy than unhappy. Perhaps we have reached a point in our life where we have satisfied all the desires of youth, and so “should” be content and quite happy. However, we feel for the first time a void in our life (which our previous pursuits in life hid from us). It appears that we have reached a crossroads in our life’s journey but there are no signposts telling us which direction to take. Without a clear goal to aim at, we cannot usually feel motivated.

b). If the intensity is high, then we are more unhappy than happy. When we become dissatisfied with life and cannot see any meaning in life, it is very difficult to identify what is the cause. The reason for this is that we do not really understand ourself and therefore cannot explain what we deeply need from life, nor can we explain our fears and any pessimism that we feel. We are struggling with issues that we do not understand, experiencing emotions and feelings that we cannot identify, and are not aware of the desires that are really driving us.

This dissatisfaction is usually an indication that our genuine needs and values are changing. We need to discover what values are ready to emerge from our inner consciousness. This is a process of trial and error. This is a process of separating imagination from reality, of finding out what are our true desires and values, as opposed to what we imagine are our true desires and values. Trial and error means that we try various options and analyse which seem to work for us and which don’t. If the intensity is high, then we need to make radical change in ourself, whilst if the intensity is low then we can be satisfied with more moderate change.

Drifting and Lethargy

If the intensity of our dissatisfaction with life is high, we may end up drifting through life, with little or no sense of motivation or purpose. We have been trying to live life according to the social beliefs inculcated in us from childhood. These beliefs instruct us to seek help outside of ourself, using family and community support, advisors of all kinds, and traditional values. But all we end up with is problematic relationships. We feel that our life is inauthentic.

People who are drifting, or who are outsiders, nearly always have difficulties with forming and keeping significant friendships and relationships. The main reason for this is that, because we are so immersed in our own confused troubles, we cease to be interested in the daily ephemera that makes up “normal” living. We therefore have little or nothing in common with most people, and so cannot communicate with them or make interesting conversations. We cannot make “small talk”. Hence we think other people will find us stupid or boring. This lack of communication breeds loneliness and desperation in us, and so we sometimes go over-the-top in our attempts to find new friends. Then we may transgress our moral principles and engage in new sexual adventures which we will eventually deeply regret.

What we need to do is to re-orientate our life. We need to bypass social conventions since we have our own path to follow. We will get our happiness from being who we are, not who other people want us to be. We need to develop our sense of being an individual and reduce our reliance on other people. We will only benefit from advice if it is capable of pointing us in the right directions, such as stimulating us to ask the right questions, explore relevant ideas, and bring up from within us the right answers (answers that are right for us). This whole process can be summed up by saying that we need to develop self-awareness so that we can embark on the journey of self-discovery. Once we have developed an adequate degree of self-awareness it will eventually enable us to pinpoint the reasons why the quality of our life is so poor. Once we know the reasons, then we can make choices about what to do. The reasons reside within the subconscious mind, and hence we have to get to know our subconscious mind.

Drifting often brings with it the problem of lethargy. In the past, being lethargic was usually my response to the feeling that I’m going nowhere. I function best when I am trying to attain some ideals, but if circumstances block any progress then I become lethargic for a time. The level of lethargy may correspond with the intensity of a person’s desire to achieve his ideals: the greater the desire, then when it is blocked, the greater is the feeling of lethargy.

Lethargy often makes me sleepy. A lot of sleep is necessary when we are in situations which make us feel vulnerable. I used to sleep a lot when I was a child, and still do when my world turns upside down for a while. The long sleep time allows us to release our internal tension by dreaming and phantasising. In other words, we need a long sleep time not because we are physically tired, but because we are mentally tired, mentally exhausted.

Meaninglessness

The issue of meaninglessness comes up when there is no or little sense of quality to our life. Life becomes meaningful when something significant can motivate us and give us a worthwhile goal to aim at. Too often nowadays the jobs we have offer little, if any, sense of satisfaction and fulfilment. Additionally, we may be feeling that our relationships with other people are not going anywhere. Our relationships may occasionally be exciting, but they are rarely a source of long-term happiness for us nowadays.

Meaninglessness appears when we believe that our social values cannot provide us with happiness, and our individuality is too weak to satisfy us. The only purpose to life appears to be that of survival. Why have we sunk to such a depth of unhappiness? The sense of meaningless is built on fear and guilt. The fear indicates that society and our social relationships create deep fear in us. The guilt, in self-pity mode, signifies the loss of social meaning. The emotional moods underlying meaninglessness are prolonged episodes of fear and guilt (self-pity mode).[4]

If the sense of meaninglessness becomes very deep, then a mood of futility takes hold of us. Then we begin to embrace nihilism. When we feel that nothing has any permanent value, then what is the point of valuing anything? We may even go mad.

In a world of meaninglessness, sanity has no more value than insanity.
Sanity is neither better nor worse than insanity.

Is there any meaning in meaninglessness? Yes. It forces us to question all our deep beliefs and values. When times change, we normally prefer to patch up our beliefs to meet new situations. We avoid radically changing beliefs that don’t really fit into the new situations. However, once meaninglessness takes hold of us, we have no option but to radically change our beliefs if we want to survive.

The purpose of deep self-questioning is to enable us to sort out our values, beliefs and ideals. This is the only way to remove confusion from them. For example, consider a psychologist: he may have ideals of wanting to help people. However, some of these ideals may incorporate subtle desires of wanting to control people or make them dependent on him. How does a person remove these limitations? Only by understanding all the ways by which he is controlled by other people and how people unwittingly create a sense of dependency in their subordinates.

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.

Ian Heath
London, UK

If you want to contact me, use the address at the bottom of the Home page.

Also, since there are numerous articles on this site, please include the title of the article if you want me to clarify or discuss particular issues.

It may be a few days before I can respond to correspondence.

.	Unrealistic Ideals Like many youths of the 1960s, I was a hippie with ideals of a better life, a better society. And like many other hippies my ideals crashed in the 1970s. Where idealists like myself went wrong in the 1970s was that our skills and abilities did not match our dreams. We all, perhaps, had our own dream of a good and perfect world but we lacked the skills to put such dreams in place. Hence, in retrospect, such dreams were a mixture of what was attainable and what was not. In the new world of possibilities that the 1960s spawned (a time of social catharsis[¹]), some of the new ideas were good and some were shallow and naïve. But we didn’t know which were the good ones and which were the bad. So we experimented, which is the only way to test ideas. The main testing was with new sexual identities and with peace movements.
Sub - Headings
Confusion in our Ideals
Dissatisfaction with Life
Drifting and Lethargy
Meaninglessness
References