Motivation

 

I haven't been paying much attention to writing in this blog for the past few months. Life events have diverted my attention - I moved into a new home and I'm spending more time in the company of loved ones now that the Covid mess has transitioned from a life-threatening pandemic to another disease in the mix of things that impair and annoy. But it is a new year and that always causes me to ponder stuff. 

I have been thinking about motivation.

It seems to me that there is a segment of the human population that is highly motivated to act. People can be motivated by greed, or their sense of outrage over social injustice, or their desire to make art, or their thirst for political power - there are countless reasons behind high motivation. These highly motivated people drive human society. They tend to dominate the news cycle.

At the other end of the spectrum is the segment that has little or no motivation. These folks may be victims of trauma, may have a mental health condition, might be addicts, may have other impairments - physical/health issues or cognitive challenges. Also in this segment are the folks that have been beaten down over time by bad luck - multi-generational poverty, adverse childhood circumstances and random bad events. The people in the low-motivation segment often struggle to stay alive. They can't contribute much to the economy and may need assistance to stay housed and fed.

In the middle is the majority - ranging from fast-food workers to corporate lawyers. The people in this group have some motivation but not as much focus as the people in the high-motivation segment. Examples include the AT&T technician laying down hip-hop tracks in his home studio on weekends, the family doctor that loves to go deep sea fishing, the schoolteacher that is an expert on all the Star Wars characters and stories. People in this group might shift upwards or downwards depending on the random events of life - an unexpectedly successful investment leads to a fortune and a life of high-impact philanthropy, or an injury from an auto accident leads to an addiction to painkillers, job loss and broken family connections.

All of this human activity, the struggle and striving - it's meaningless to the universe.  It is a fact that humans are small creatures on a small planet in a vast cosmos.  Our species is also very young. Sharks have been around for 40 million years; homo sapiens showed up about 400,000 years ago. But, of course, our insignificant status is all we have. We can only be human beings interacting to our environment with whatever tools we can create.

There is a thing that gives me great hope. It is the ability of individual humans to deeply connect with each other, to get that feeling of shared consciousness and synchronized emotional states. It happens in so many ways - through rituals surrounding life events (weddings, funerals, birthdays), through festivals, through group spiritual practices, from creating and sharing music, from group efforts to protect and improve a community.  

The various motivational segments unite when human connection grows.