I want things to get done. Things will get done is by me doing them. As a consequence, as soon as I experience something joyous I turn it into a task to be repeated. This makes it instrumental and thus makes it lose that joy it gave me. I now have a solid object, but it’s dead.
This is because there is a contradiction here: I am aiming to do what gave me joy. But what gave me joy was not aiming. So I’m aiming to not aim. A conceptual contradiction.
I think this is a sort of core action concept confusion and that a bunch of actions are ultimately self-defeating for being of this kind: aiming at something they *logically* cannot achieve.
Another example is “How to become a writer?” You can’t act on it. You can only write. There's no “become a writer” action that you can take such that you become a writer. You write, and then you’re a writer. You weren’t before. So now you’ve become one. You can’t *do* becoming.
The original concept is also confused: where I was most doing whatever I felt like is where most things happen. I don't need to make them happen: mere being is active! It has *as a consequence* that things get done! Not as a goal!
Thus it is conceptually possible for something to get done without being actively done *by*. There is an extra square. This move https://brianlui.dog/2018/05/19/dimensional-decoupling/ by @brianluidog is what is missing.
A similar conceptual confusion is the the doing and not doing vs doing and doing-not and neither-doing-nor-not-doing that @m_ashcroft illuminated Twitter on before.
Relevant https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1253707703681253381
I think these experiences have a distinct phenomenology:
- deadening of activities
- pressure
- space diminishing
The deadening is the original robbing the joy of spontaneous acting
The pressure is *time* pressure. Feeling behind, or overwhelmed, as opposed to being on top. Living by the clock instead of losing track of time. Felt time abundance vs felt time pressure: I have more than enough time to do everything vs THERE'S NOT ENOUGH TIME!!!
Spatially it feels like being TRAPPED or CAGED. Other good words are oppressed or clustered or coerced or frozen or immobile or immobilised. As if one were being physically squished.
P.S.: Your original confusion is that you're not looking retrospectively and measuring what actually is or isn't productive but that you're instead using your feeling of what "things that look productive" ought to feel like when doing them. Good luck
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