Motivation

So today I thought I would take some time to write a piece on motivation. A subject I have had to deal with in many various facets of my life. Because what is motivation? Motivation is the drive that makes you productive. It generates the energy and the want to do a certain thing. It is the fuel for your machinery and it is evidently needed throughout the globe to make this and all other races viable for survival. We quite simply rely on constant motivation in some form to keep us going.

Evolutionarily males are hard-wired to try and be accomplished so they would attract the better females and secure healthier offspring. Now I do not know what presumptions you enter into this debate with, but if it comes as a surprise for you that this has residual presence in the society of today, then I am afraid you may be in for more surprises as you progress through this post.

Since man has lived in scarcity for most of our time as a species, it is quite understandable that our brains have evolved into working in a way where we associate resource acquisition with success and thriving. It might be far fetched to say that most of us today look for economic success in a partner, and I assume it would seem derogatory to say that women especially would do this. So what am I saying?
I could be saying that women biologically were driven to look for these things in a partner, but underline the point that no one has to be a slave to any biological drive. We can starve ourselves to death if we put our minds to it, so certainly we are capable of not adhering to all tenants of our human drives.
So perhaps our biology is a bit too conservative and maybe even outdated? It would certainly seem this way, as people are trying to break out of these bonds and claim freedom from any societal influence on their preferences. People do not like being told what they look for, they want to establish that for themselves. At least in our culture.

What we are interested in is to maintain our own motivation. Especially in the consumer culture where we are constantly under attacks from fizzy drinks, junk food, noisy entertainment and informational overload. Our physical blood sugar and our attention levels are jumping up and down all day, and this tires out the brain and body and causes us to lose motivation towards generic drives. It makes people lazy and perhaps it explains why online dating is such a growing phenomenon today. Even the most basic need for physical interaction with the opposite sex has to be sated from the calm and comfortable position of your own chair.

But this is just a symptom. The real enemy is the lack of motivation. The massive increases in anxiety and depression in most if not all of the western countries over the past 50 years, could be explained by the fact that we are the first few generations that have no goals. There is nothing to fight for. Only to shop for. And only having things to shop for leaves the human body and mind in an unhealthy state where we begin to perform a sort of social apoptosis. Depression takes hold of a person when he or she feels useless and unmotivated. A psychiatrist would probably disagree with this and explain it chemically, but there is no denying that the younger generations today are the less motivated generations and they are also the more anxious ones. The correlation could be unrelated, but I doubt it. Multitasking at the level we ask people to do it today quite simply should not lead to anything good. We have not been underachieving as a species so far, so why do we need to go so much faster now? Have you ever tried hyper-motivating an animal? They go crazy and start running around in circles not knowing what to chase, do or act upon. This is more or less the constant state for a normal western person today. Everywhere marketers are trying to get to you, and your solace is broken by the fact that you own a television that will allow the continuing of the mind-invasion you offer to your insurgents. All in the name of getting the carousel to run a little bit faster to allow for a little more growth.

It would seem then that this culture did wish for a greater knowledge of and capacity for empathy this year. We require the managing institutions of this world, the media and the law makers, to start paying attention to the fact that we have to slow down or we drown in our gluttonous intake of rapid social expansion. You will note that it also becomes increasingly difficult to scout a system or construct, social or otherwise, for errors if you constantly add more and more parts and modules. So we never know if sub prime and interest free loans undermine our economical strengths, or if artificial sweeteners act as carcinogenics, or if it destroys a generation to have Kanye West as a role model, before it is too late and the damage has been done by this free flow of seemingly innovative additions to our partly determined, partly ever-adaptive life styles. And the industries do this with a double standard, defending to the best of their lawyers' capability their corporate rights to avoid telling the consumers which products are genetically modified and which are not. Because they do not want to scare the consumers from buying their products, before it is 100% scientific that consumers, formerly known as people, dig their own graves with them. And if you ask me you can disregard the last part of the prior sentence actually.

The intrinsic motivation for all of us beyond water, food and a roof, is that we want to be socially relevant, as we have discussed prior. When it comes to what we get the most out of it is certainly a widening of what is socially capable. If you look at this study showing which nation is the happiest in the world, you will notice that resource acquisition is far from relevant to such happiness.

Luckily we have pills for postponing the solution of this social decline a generation or two.