Inner Warfare, or, It's Ishita Arora's World and I'm Just Living in It
Some thoughts about the global workspace theory of consciousness
One question you should ask yourself is, why do you not do the things you know you should do. Why do you persist in hurting yourself, constantly. Look: the world lies before you waiting for your input. If fighting for survival is so non-urgent that you can read my newsletter, you are probably fairly resourced. Some of those resources are untapped. So many obvious things would make you happy but you choose to be shrouded in melancholy. Satan is pleased by your behavior.
The answer is I have no idea why you do behave counterproductively. I haven’t even figured out the most basic elements of why I mismanage my own life. For example, why did I need to bet my Twitter friend Ishita Ahora $1000 that I would write two newsletters per week for the rest of the year? Why is that arrangement the necessary precursor to this text you are reading. It’s totally absurd that this should be necessary. Writing makes me happy, I do it almost every day anyway, and when I publish newsletters, I accumulate friends/followers/fulfillment/clients/money automatically, whether or not the newsletter is even any good.
However, there is just something obstinate in me that says, no, do not do the right thing. Some anxiety that says, this time maybe I would prefer not existing so much. Perhaps I would like to pretend that I am nothing. Maybe if I remain still, the world will also remain still, except for the dust attractively arranged in the air of a wasted afternoon.
On the other hand, while it’s relatively easy for me to disappoint myself, it's really hard for me to disappoint someone else. I don't even know Ishita Arora. She seems like a smart, capable, kind person, mostly based on, idk, her last 50 tweets or so, and a short DM conversation in which we set up our wager. (If I win, I get a steak and a bottle of wine.) But her implied presence is now motivating me to live my life in the obvious way that I obviously should. I won’t let you down, Ishita, even if you don't care at all.
In theory, it would be better if I were perfectly self-motivated. However, I think of myself as a somewhat overtaxed car with many miles on it. Some parts are falling off, and require immediate replacement. However, some other faults are deep—strangely-shaped marks on the chassis—and though they produce strange vibrations, they must simply be accommodated. Some things just need duct tape, which will be retaped when the old tape melts off.
Perhaps with ten years of therapy, or, like, 1.5 ayahuasca retreats, I could outgrow all of this. Until then, I can either gaze appalled at myself, or I can just compassionately accept that my machinery is not completely aligned, and create the highly artificial arrangements that will get me to do things anyway. You can debug yourself and/or you can learn to live with bugs, and neither solution is correct in all cases. I don’t have to totally tolerate my mind completely. I just have to pour it into the correctly-shaped container.