Someone wrote something this week and it reminded me of this thread.. Honestly I think it's one of the reasons I left T'internet in 2018.. (Still wondering why I came back TBH)
I am honestly so bored of cynicism on the internet. I might just start a Toxic Positivity trend to try and offset it.
I'm sick of seeing comment sections just filled with self-defeating, world-hating nihilists who are adamant that the world is against them and it's people who have goals that are the issue.
Cynicism is a guarded response. You're setting yourself up against disappointment. Its role within the system is to protect you against experiencing anything bad.
It is a pre-emptive strike against a perceived threat. If I tell myself that 'all women are bad', then I'm less likely to seek a relationship with women and, as a consequence, I'm never going to feel the pain of rejection.
If I tell myself that 'everything is ****' or that 'things will never get better', then I am excused of ever having to try at anything. It's more comfortable to get fatalistic and call it pragmatism.
The cope is framing hope as pathetic and embarrassing and optimism as delusion.
It’s “sour grapes" at an existential level.
If everything sucks, and everyone is horrible, and reality is disappointing and you know that for a fact, it's the people acting like things can be better that are dumb, delusional and the problem.
The upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure.
Yes, that's a decent summary.
I've been thinking a lot about this topic recently, as over the years I've worked with people who sit all over that motivational spectrum.
I think that overall, self-motivation is something that goes beyond purely external rewards (money, status, achievements and so on)
That self-motivation is powered by being able to visualise what is important in life to you personally - that could be a desire to learn, the satisfaction of completing a task, the state of being fully immersed in a topic of interest - you get the idea.
There have been psychological studies on students of similar intellectual levels - those with a positive, motivated mentality set higher goals, demonstrated a higher degree of flexibility when overcoming obstacles to achieve those goals, and were more effective at breaking down tasks into smaller and more manageable steps.
It's a bit like the saying "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time" - if you see a task as too large, or in some other way unmanageable (odds stacked against me, system is rigged, no chance of "winning", odds of failure too great, I'm no good at XYZ, I cannot do ABC etc) then the tendancy is to either bug out or just not bother at all, in the manner Fuzz describes in his quote above.
Having a negative mindset limits your thinking ability - a large amount of your mental resource is consumed by focusing on the limiting factors described above, stopping you from processing information, thinking of potential solutions/opportunities and so on.
You find yourself in a state where failures are caused by those unmanageable or irremediable factors I mentioned above, and that mental state affects your ability to think clearly.
Having a positive or optimistic mindset allows you to self motivate. You're able to rationalise that failures or setbacks are almost always caused by factors which you can edit/modify/influence/improve in a subsequent attempt, which will give you a greater chance of success next time you try something. You believe that you can control the course of your life by taking actions (repeatedly) that influence that course.
I honestly think it's well worth investing time in understanding what motivates you. A mate of mine struggles in this area, and whilst the idea might sound laughable to some, he's had a few sessions with a life coach/therapist and it's had a noticeable impact on the way he thinks about his life.
I guess the exec summary for me is:
People do not inherently lack self motivation or drive.
Thoughts control feelings, and those feelings influence the actions people take and the decisions they make.
Those thought processes are what lead people to make poor assessments of situations, which subsequently manifests (in this case) as a lack of motivation.
You can control your thought processes if you are sufficiently aware of them, and if you are not already particularly self aware, you can learn that to. In fact, self awareness and EQ are a great place to start in this topic as a whole.
