I gaze at my navel because it blocks out the view

I sometimes wish I wrote and thought less about what’s going on in my mind, and more about literally anything else. I wish this blog was more about philosophy, or politics, or art, or science.

The problem is: I often find that my internal tangles block me from understanding, or interfacing with, the outside-of-me world, so I just have to deal with them. I have to go more meta.

Yesterday evening, I had some energy and no pressing obligations. I thought: what should I do with this energy? Previously I’d had an ambition to learn more maths. Or, maybe I should try to learn Mandarin again. Or some other language. Or I should write a post (about what?) Or read a book (which book?)

I realised: I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I don’t have a go-to project-where-I-channel-creative-energy. I really want one. But ‘just picking’ something didn’t appeal. So I had to go up a level: how to best use my creative energy? Maybe I should spend my energy now on answering that question.

And then I realised that I felt the creep of shame, escalating into worry and despair. I noticed my thoughts: “you should have sorted this out already” “you’ve wasted a lot of time” “why do you find this so hard?” I want to be a person who, when they’re filled with creative and intellectual energy and don’t have pressing obligations, has a project, or maybe a suite of projects, that the energy naturally gets channeled into. And I don’t. And I feel ashamed that I haven’t figured this out yet. That I’m so tangled.

So then, I realised that I had to go another level up: how can I approach this question without becoming self-critical, ashamed, regretful? Because those thoughts don’t help and they pull me towards depression, which makes it even harder to develop that sort of project, as well as just generally sucking. So now the quest/question is: how can people have large aspirations without feeling bad about the distance from where they are to where they want to go?

So then I sort of realised that, to do something more outward-facing, I would first have to sort my own head out.

I’m reminded of these words from Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates explains why he has no time for investigating the origin of myths:

“The cause, my friend, is this. I cannot, as the Delphic inscryption says, ‘know myself’, and it seems funny to me to investigate other things when I’m still ignorant about this. So… I investigate not those things but myself, whether I’m a beast as tangled as Typhon and more wrathful, or whether I’m a simpler animal, more domesticated, with a share of some diviner and humbler fate.”

Despite the apparently Socratic pedigree of my posture, it’s pretty frustrating to me! Other people seem to be able to Just Do Things Sometimes, even if they have poor mental health and the usual range of messy human hangups. I imagine a critical reader rolling their eyes, saying “stop overthinking this!” And I wish I could. But sometimes, it seems, I need to overthink before I can just think.