how to beat abulia

how to beat abulia

“But what is causing you to suffer like this?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. I just think that we got out of the jungle I don’t think I’ll mind going back to New York where nothing is wrong.”

Skipping the detail of the Abulinix, I revealed to Brigid how I’d come all this way to set about changing my life, but in the end had resolved that my life was just fine as it was. “I didn’t want to tell you that at first. I wanted to surprise you with my new decisive ways. No one trusts a convert.”

“But a convert to what do you mean?”

“I don’t know. To action! I was tired of doing just maintenance on my life. You know, put on clothes, do laundry. Eat food, brush teeth. Excrete waste. Go to work. Have or seek girlfriend…”

“You did have a girlfriend?”

“New York is a really tragically unfair city—there’s such a surplus of attractive women that frequently they end up with people like me! And in addition to maintaining a romantic entanglement of some kind, generally I’d like to keep my friendships. And …”

“But what about Alice? You enjoy her.”

“Listen, a mediocre person can only be so close with other people.”

“But who is mediocre? You are quite unique. You are even very strange.”

“What I’m trying to say” – I felt a little annoyed with Brigid that I wasn’t arriving at a point—“is that I was eager to change or be converted or whatever. But my tastes, my interests, my relationships and beliefs are all really mediocre and typical, okay? And so as of today, what I’ve decided with utter decisiveness is just to resign myself to mediocrity and being totally clichéd.” She looked a lot more concerned than I felt. “No, it’s not so sad. Right now I’m twenty-eight. If a young twenty-eight. But I’m going to be ugly if at forty-two there’s still this like holy grail that I’m longing to trip over—“

“I lose you.”

“Well, I’m well lost okay? Even if I get rid of my hair, off my body I mean, I’m still only kind of good looking.” I was hurt that she didn’t contradict me. “I’m arguably intelligent in my own secret way, but not really very.” Still nothing. “Furthermore I’m misinformed as you constantly inform me.”

“You have made a study of philosophy.”

“You want to know what my study of philosophy is? It’s one enormous elaboration of increasingly total ignorance. You know what Otto Knittel said? He was like ‘Philpsophizing ultimately means nothing other than a beginner.’ He actually said that.” I shook my head.

“I like it.”

“No.” I met her eyes. “For a long time, Bridge, I’ve been thinking of myself as just a beginner who’s some kind of novice at life. But the fact is that I’ve developed a system of mediocre habit as if I’d been working on it for like two hundred years. And it’s in the rut of never learning or changing, but always feeling like you’re about to—that’s where I live, and that’s the rut where I’ve decisively decided I am now content to go on living.” Jolted with feeling I said, “And can you guess what the result of all this will be?”

“You will go on a shooting attack with a gun?”

“No.” I was suddenly calm. “I’ll become just as happy as I’ve always been tempted to be.” An image or vision came to me and I said, “I plan on becoming a motivational speaker traveling across the United States.” My eyes fill with tears in the prospect. “I plan to go around preaching the gospel of mediocrity to already mediocre men. I want to tell them that the new heaven and earth will never arrive until we finally give up on them and accept our florid total mediocrity” – I imagined the packed halls of overweight mediocrities, bald and nodding, their eyes shining with tears—“into the least little ventricle of our average American heart. Or hearts. Our hearts of darknesses!”

-- Excerpt from Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision. Dwight Wilmerding, the main character is a kindred spirit. Glad to know I'm not the only one who's messed up. Oh, and Otto Knittel never said "Philosophizing ultimately means nothing other than being a beginner." Heidegger did.