A comment on my internal illogic

When I get to worrying about problems in my life, I seem to be most troubled not by the problem itself but instead the possibility that I've been denying or underplaying the problem. Thus, recalling for myself that yes, it is something I've admitted as a problem already helps me to calm down.

That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. I'm not going to complain, though I suppose there's a risk that eventually I'll be gripped by a panic that maybe it is actually a way for me to minimizing and avoiding dealing with my problems.

Biding one's time

One's goals cannot be accomplished in an instant. They must be pursued with patience, building up from a base that for a long time little resembles what it is meant to become. It is pointless, if not impossible, to try to do this long work without break. During the necessary lulls, it makes sense to seek distraction. But if the goal is so distant as to be out of sight, how to recognize the line between seeking a distraction from the pursuit of it and trying to fill up one's time while, in reality, the goal grows no closer? At some point, it is difficult to dispel the fear that one is biding one's time in a hollow life that is not destined to become full. At that point, what is one to do? Continue on, now distracting oneself from that fear as well? But if not that, what, as long as one remains convinced that one's is fundamentally the right one?

A metaphor from middle school

I don't actually remember when exactly this thought comes from, but in school, as a kid, I had a tendency to draw on and poke holes in erasers with a pen. This of course turned the eraser into an ugly mess, which it was impossible to fix. I would then be struck by the fact that some things, once ruined, never heal or grow back. It's actually kind of weird how vividly I remember that feeling, especially considering how little else I remember from before high school.

Airline bureaucracy

On Monday, after our original flight was cancelled and we were told we'd be put on a later flight from another airline, my sister and I tried to check into our new flight but were informed that although the seats on the plane were reserved for us, we had not been ticketed by our original airline. We had several hours before this new flight was scheduled to take off, so the fact that it took an hour and a half to straighten out this bureaucratic snafu only meant that our time was spent standing at service counters instead of sitting and reading. So I had little else to do but to reflect on the situation:

1. Our situation was a typical bureaucratic problem: the airlines need to keep track of hundreds of planes carrying thousands of passengers each, making sure each passenger gets onto the correct flight, and those who aren't supposed to do not. (In part, the system needs to be rigid because of security requirements put in place by the federal government, and behind it public political pressure.)
2. The airline thus develop procedures for categorizing individuals as belonging or not belonging on a given flight, and these procedures have several steps that are supposed to be carried out in a particular way: (apparently as we discovered on Monday), first the seat on the plane is "reserved"; then the individual is issued a "ticket" indicating that they are allowed to be on the plane; and then ticketed individuals are issued "boarding passes" that are the final marker that lets them get through the gate and onto the plane.
3. Problems arise when for whatever reason the regular procedures can't be fully followed. What happened on Monday--what is probably the most common cause of trouble--was that weather (in this case high winds) disrupted most of the flights on the entire east coast in the middle of the day, requiring the rapid reshuffling of hundreds if not thousands of passengers. The problem is particularly bad when the reshuffling crosses from one airline to another. What happens then (and if the attitude of the employees of both airlines on monday were any indication, the problem is quite common) is that there can easily be a mismatch of procedures: one side thinks they've done what they need to, but as far as the other side can determine, the status of the individuals who are being processed by the system hasn't yet reached a point that is expected and required for the next step to occur.
4. Usually, when dealing with bureaucracies, if one finds oneself stuck in between steps of a procedure that isn't proceeding like it's supposed to, the simplest response is to make a stink until one gets kicked up to a higher level of the bureaucracy. The hope is that one gets set to an officials who has the authority to override the regular procedures and arbitrarily attach the correct categorization to you.
5. The problem on Monday was that there appeared to be no such person with the prerogative to just, as my sister put it, write out a ticket for us by hand. Is this a result of security concerns? Downsizing in the airlines (there did appear to be insufficient staff to deal with the mass of delays from the win)? Irrational rationalization in which the computer system becomes the final arbiter, which regular desk staff lack the capability to override?
6. Oddly, one thing did work: even while we were being sent back and forth trying to get "ticketed," the text message flight status notification system was somehow correctly informed that we were on the new flight, and sent us regular updates on its status.

"Truth can be reduced to the smallest step; what is true is what is nearest, not what is farthest"

That is Adorno's characterization of pragmatism, in the context of an essay on the critical consciousness of Veblen. Adorno's objection to this is that it consigns the individual to eternal "adjustment" to existing conditions, because it rejects any concept of the (suppressed) potentiality immanent in the totality of a situation (basically, in his discussion, the elimination of scarcity). The difference, he notes, is a "nuance" ("like every distinction in philosophy"--wonderful!), but its consequence is that the "seriousness" of Veblen's pragmatism is "the seriousness of death."

I've always been a bit sympathetic to pragmatism, and accordingly skeptical of the dialectical "concept" that Adorno accuses it of lacking. However, it occurred to me for the first time just now that this describes how I go about approaching problems in my life, as well. If I'm feeling overwhelmed (i.e. more or less always), I list out the issues I'm dealing with, and I sort them into 3 categories: first, things I can't do much about, which I do my best to ignore; second, things I can break into steps I can put onto my calendar for the following few weeks; and third, long term problems and projects, which I tend push into the background, assuring myself that with the bite-sized steps I've scheduled for myself, I'm "being productive" and "making progress." In other words, I focus exclusively on what is "nearest," which can be tackled immediately, trusting that as a result I'm moving towards a good outcome in the distance, but with only the vaguest sense of how I'm going to get there from here, or even what "there" is going to be (whether, as it were, there will be any "there" there). This also creates a problem in that I end up doing things somewhat half-assedly, just so that I can "put it to sleep" and move on to the next step.

So concludes today's weird hybrid of philosophy and insecurity.

Down a rabbit hole

I've decided I need to come to a decision, but I haven't decided what are the choices I'm deciding between, and I decidedly don't want to discuss it, which means I can only guess at some of the decisive factors.

Mental and physical space, or lack thereof

Spending the last 2 days surrounded by my family practically all the time, I've become intensely aware of how much being alone with my thoughts is a core piece of my everyday experience. Not only because of the particular stressful situation we're dealing with right now, but also simply as a result of the fact that my family has been constantly, physically, present, it's like my entire thought process can't proceed in the way it usually does.

The thing is, I think I like my usual feeling of solitary mental space. I also think I'm usually half in denial about that.

I'm going to refrain from taking this line of thought any farther. (Which is only partially a surrender to the exhaustion arising from the aforementioned stressful situation.)

Sometimes I get to thinking about death

. . . and it's frankly overwhelming. It feels like a pit in my chest, and I can hardly think of anything else. What seems amazing at those moments, is that I'm ever able to go about happily not thinking about it, even as I know that this feeling will, as it always does, pass before long.

What's funny is that I vaguely remember this happening occasionally as a teenager and in college, but it feels like in the years since then, I've avoided it until the last few months. I'm not sure what that says about where I am in my life right now.

I remember though, from those times before, that the best way to get a hold of myself was to think through, and to try to put into words, what I was feeling. I think, in fact, that that was the original instance of a much more general pattern for me, that my worries somehow became less powerful if I fixed them as words. Once I can get myself thinking about my process of thinking about something, it distracts me from thinking and worrying about it. By turning my worries into objects of analysis, I gain distance from them.

This is surely an admirable tactic to break out of feeling overwhelmed by the idea of death, because as far as that goes the only option is to not think about it. But for other things, for worries about work and relationships, there is perhaps reason for concern, because it would be better to confront and respond to them, instead of merely finding a way to not worry about them.

This post, of course, is an instance of what it is describing . . . I think I'm getting dizzy from the reflexivity.