goals vs. laziness

I had started this bit in the previous post but didn't like how it jumped topics, so here it is on its own. Kinda.

One hindrance I keep running into, be it wanting to write more, learn more, do more, or whatever, is that any ability and desire that I have is more than compensated for by my laziness and lack of diligence when it comes to bettering myself. As I've said so many times before, my getting an engineering degree is a testament to my intelligence because I was too lazy and spent too little effort learning the material to have gotten my degree through the blood/sweat/tears method. Unfortunately this seems to have gone from a side effect of my dislike for my major course of study to a character trait that needs to be defeated before I can really do much in the way of further study or even hobbies and such. (In some sense it was always there I guess, but I can remember reading a LOT when I was younger and studying hard for classes like chemistry and senior English in high school, and even in college I spent a lot of time on interesting stuff like management concepts and statics. But anymore there's very little if anything that I really take a passion to doing.) I guess that's one of the consequences of my engineering education. I got what I was after, but the process beat out of me that drive and love for learning that I so desperately need these days.

Fred Reed calls this lack of enough motivation to improve oneself shiftlessness and I think that captures what I'm getting at. Not only does it cause trouble now, but it's a huge obstacle to any formal education that might otherwise be in my future. For example, I wouldn't mind trying to learn a bit more in my current field and maybe earn a graduate degree or two so I could get into more big-picture stuff that deals more with theory and new ideas. I also think I'd love being a contract lawyer of some sort who worked with patents or land deeds or association clauses or whatever, because I tend to enjoy the creativity behind legalese and word games. But such would require a heck of a lot of arduous effort and in my current state I'm just not up to that kind of work output.

Oddly, and mighty unfortunately, shiftlessness seems like an especially hard character trait to defeat. It requires what's on the other side of the obstacle to get past the obstacle, if that makes any sense. It's similar to depression in that sense. Both depression and shiftlessness require that the ends be used in the means. This implies some sort of outside interference, be it the Spirit, others, whatever. Otherwise the end goal could not be reached.* I guess that's why the whole accountability thing works so well -- it provides that outside influence that has to be there. It's also one reason why boot camp works so well. It doesn't matter how much motivation you happen to have at any particular moment if someone is right there to provide all the outside motivation and "support" you need.

So, back to the familiar position of staring at the same old problem. Maybe if I just sit here and do nothing things will miraculously change. Or maybe if I ignore it long enough it will just kinda fade away. Or maybe if I try to avoid it then it can be as big a problem as it wants and it still won't matter to me. But I've given each of those methods a few tries in life and I don't remember any of them working for me yet. Oh well.

Anyway, it's 2:41 AM and I'm out of ideas to keep blogging about or to even wrap up this post. I guess that one cup of sugar in that spiced wine has some serious effects. Speaking of which, I did the alcohol before blogging and it didn't seem to counter my standard negativity as well this time. The test sample must not be large enough. I'll drink more next time.

* This seems at first similar to the process by which we gain saving faith, but it's different in that someone who wants to be saved has already been interfered with, if you will. There's no barrier there that someone could want to pass but need outside assistance to actually cross. This would imply that there are people who want to be saved but are confined to hoping God throws them a lifeline of some sort, which is nonsense. If they want to cross it at all then they've already received the help they need.