Lately, I feel like I’ve been consumed with a single question, one that works its way into the different cracks and fissures in my life. That is, am I having a good day? This question seems to confront me constantly, and while it’s almost certainly a thorny externality of my prolonged unemployment, I still can’t dismiss it, nor do I think I should.
This question isn’t posed to me directly, but rather, as most pertinent issues of our lives, it manifests itself in different outfits and settings, often appearing as a nagging anxiety that I’m not doing enough with my day. Or maybe it’s the sudden ebbs and flows in my mood, cascading doubt and malaise that flows over the languor of my usual schedule. Whatever the case, I know that I’m regularly concerned with having a good day, with being able to look back on a day at it’s end and say, that was a good day, or maybe just know internally that it was good. This is, more than most others, the question of my life at the moment. With that, there comes more questions, about that question itself, its meaning, its criteria, and its consequences. I currently have the maybe over-optimistic feeling that I can talk out some of these questions, and arrive at some answers, or at least understand some of the forces moving me here.
How to go about structuring this discussion? Maybe lets start with the quotidian, what am I doing every day that creates this question? I start most days by writing a few words in a digital journal, not far from where this document is being written. The main purpose of that “daily note” is the creation of a to do list, which I can then dutifully check off, and where the ritual of a good day is consecrated. I have tasks that I like to accomplish regularly, be it running, reading or applying for jobs. If running and reading are somewhat Sisyphean in that they are never-ending projects, but their difficulty and import is of my own choosing, then applying for jobs is Promethean in that it feels like an eagle eating my liver every day. Whatever the case, this is where I litigate the “goodness” of my day, I set out goals and then accomplish those goals, and have a written record where I can say I did what I needed to, therefore it must have been a good day. If that were the whole of it, then this article would be much shorter, and profoundly boring, though in fairness it might still be boring anyways.
I suppose the thorn in the side of this otherwise idyllic bohemian life of mine is that I still feel unsatisfied. Maybe more specifically, I have this sense that these goals aren’t totally mine. I have this sense that I am doing all of these things for these abstract externalities, because they contribute to some other, future Brennan that will be glad of them. I do them because they are good for my mind, they are good for my body, but in a way that somehow feels segmented off from me, whatever or whoever that is. This isn’t to say that I think those are bad things, that it’s bad to be fit or well read or something, but that I some times feel like I’m doing those things for the list, rather than myself. I perform tasks because the list is there, and necessitates them, it exerts this odd power over me. Going further, I create these tasks because I will fulfill them, maybe not because they are what I want or need. But this then introduces another question, what is it I want or need? Are my “wants” a trustworthy source? If the answer to that is, as I suspect, no, then how do I choose what to do with my day? This anxiety is like a root growing in concrete, slowly splitting it apart and questioning it’s integrity. Eventually that question has to become, what is good for me? What is good?
Interestingly, the things I find most energizing, mentally and physically, the things that I live life for, are rarely captured by these lists. If I’m going to a party with friends, I won’t write “go to party” on the to do list, I’ll just do it and have a good time. I might reflect on it later, but I wouldn’t write “take the bus on your own and listen to music and feel awesome”. Maybe that suggests something important about both joy and the lists, maybe that genuine thrilling happiness can’t be prerecorded, can’t be written. Maybe the point of the list isn’t to prefigure those sorts of experiences, but to structure the life surrounding them. If that is, as I’m thinking, true, then what am I really doing when I write a list and look at it to see if I had a good day?
I think in my brain, there is a strong divider set up between “normal life” and “joy”, if we take joy to mean those really energizing moments you spend with your friends and family in leisure or activity. That’s not to say I’m not a happy person or can’t feel happiness when I’m in Normal Mode, but I do notice myself greatly anticipating those times that are designated as spaces of fun or joy. I know that a more authentic and sustainable way to be happy is to understand it as like a process, something that is continually happening in your life and manifested in every moment, if you’re willing to see it. Despite that, I still have this instinctive fragmentation, and hierarchy of life moments, that I think must figure in this instinct to reflect on a good day. If normal life and this pleasure are separate, and one is rigid while the other freeflowing, then I should try to make that “normal life” as productive as possible.
This word, productive, productivity, has been lurking in my mind as I write this and it finally takes its form here. Productivity is something that figures largely in this discussion, and it’s hard for me to figure out what I feel about it. I have a sense that productivity is sort of like the pleasure of my normal life. I will take a moment here to recognize the deficiency in my terminology, clearly “normal life” isn’t a perfect way to describe what I’m getting at, and shouldn’t be taken to mean that normal life is some soul destroying drudgery, but more a different mental state. If I’m not in fun mode, then productivity should be at work, which is a potentially problematic situation. I fear falling into the soul-disintegrating trap of “productivity”, of a life, a lived experience, oriented around accumulation of traits and skills that might better acquire me wealth and labour that suits my vanity. I equally fear a sort of self satisfied lassitude, telling myself that laziness is actually counter-cultural or somehow meaningful. I fear that my indolence already runs deeper than I am aware of, or comfortable confronting. I fear the platonic state I am aspiring towards when I write such lists is a perfectly organized, computer like existence, where everything occurs just so and finds it’s right place and timing. I fear letting myself slide into comfortable fantasy.
At the same time, I should acknowledge that my productivity can be, and has been, good for me. Running more has been great, my body feels much healthier and it certainly improves my mood. Making myself read again, and finding a passion for learning and exploration again through more books has been one of the greatest things I’ve probably ever done for myself. I feel like I have a brain, and can build opinions on things, it has been enormously uplifting, so clearly productivity isn’t completely bad. I suppose the question that matters is, am I doing these things for the right reasons? I worry that for me, “productivity” can sort of replace intentionality, which is the other word I’ve been waiting to use. I find that I can absolutely sleepwalk through life, not in that I don’t appreciate things or don’t try to achieve outcomes that are good to me, but I forget to think about why I’m doing things. In this respect, social media is clearly one of the worst things to happen to me, with its architecture of addiction and compulsion, though I will restrain myself from re-writing my Masters thesis here.
Lets briefly reflect here, because I am beginning to lose the plot myself. I’m concerned with what a “good day” is, because I am constantly asking myself whether or not I am having one. Thinking about that more reveals that good days are automatically ones that I have with my friends and family, and outside of that I try to make myself have “productive” days, though that is problematic. I need to ask myself, is productivity simply a bitter fruit, one that I have to careful with, or is there something more essential to it that I can focus on instead?
Circling back to my questions of scope, hierarchy and continuity, I think I also have to ask, to what end? Lets say I am able to answer that I have a good day, is a good life really about racking up the number of “good days”? I suppose if you could say that about every day, that would be a good life, but I have a sense that its lacking. I would like to think that life shouldn’t be about “maximizing” things, that it is something that should be more “felt” than “planned”. I think that can also lead to some bad outcomes though, I don’t want to be a pure hedonist who just wants to go with the flow and write it all off as “life”. How then can we conjoin some sort of planning with feeling? Circling back again, I think the answer is something like mindfulness or intentionality. These are words that have been devoured by the capitalist media singularity, and now means overnight oats or monthly subscriptions, but I hope to rescue some of this idea for my use here.
When I’ve thought about intentionality, I’ve taken it to mean that you can do things for a reason, you can do things because you choose to do them. You can think about why you are doing things, instead of accepting that you already tend to do them that way, and change them quite easily. This is something I struggle with, I don’t realize the mental barriers I’ve set up for myself that prevent me from doing things that would probably be good for me. The most obvious example is something like not going for a run because its the wrong time of day. I don’t have to believe that! I could just realize that it doesn’t matter if its morning or afternoon, I can just go for a run. These are mental barriers that limit my behaviour, but are surprisingly easy to knock down, and that’s what mindfulness and intentionality do. It requires being reflective about the patterns in your life that are there because they are automatic, and therefore invisible. In a roundabout way, this entire article and reflection is me trying to reflect on this automatic process of list-making and good-day-ness. Instead of setting up these mental barriers of productivity, and strict guidelines, maybe I can practice a more intentional way of living, where I think more about why I do things, and think about new ways to do them.
I tend to believe that nothing has an “essence”, nothing has an eternal platonic identity that it will always be defined by. If we are defined, it is by the relationships we are in, of which there are countless. They are biological, historical, social, and cultural, down to the atoms that comprise my brain, this keyboard and your eyes. To borrow some terms from Deleuze and Guattari, they are all machines, which each have different states of becoming. There is no reason to think that one way of being must hold forever, I can change, and those things I am in relationships with will change as a result. Maybe this isn’t a particularly interesting answer, if it all results in “well be mindful!”. What is more interesting is, how can I actually practice that mindfulness? I think its useful to say that, yes there are goals I want, and I need to actually think and reflect on how my actions impact those goals. More accurately, there are relationships that I currently prefer, and I can work towards those. If we accept that all things are defined by the relationships they find themselves in at a specific moment, then all that matters is what sorts of relationships we are implicated in. The sorts of relationships we are in are governed by what we can control, and our attitudes towards things are the first and primary way in which we control, and determine relationships. So the fundamental question is, how should I react to these circumstances? How should I feel towards the world?
In truth, I don’t think I have to, nor should I, feel a certain way towards the world. The world, and me, simply are. I think I should accept the world, and accept that I will be changed, and so will it. I think that ultimately, I am as part of the world as the iced vietnamese I just had is part of me, and in that there is the mosaic of emotion and affect and experience that could make a life “meaningful”, which is perhaps the answer to this entire article. In one of my favourite quotations ever, Deleuze says that “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” (1992, p.6), and that is what I’m trying to do here, rummage around my mental toolshed like Ash in Evil Dead 2, trying to find new mental conceptions that can help me live a more authentic and actualized life, like a chainsaw-hand-mental-framework. That begins with maybe casting off limiting and controlling perspective of “am I having a good day?” and more asking “what sorts of relationships am I creating?”.
Thank you for reading this, admittedly this was more for my own reflection and edification, so thanks for bearing with me this far. A special thanks to Alex for sending me all those mysterious packages in the mail and motivating me to write this.
Works Cited
Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. MIT Press, 59, 3–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828