I’m concerned about the world, and I want to do what I feel is my responsibility to contribute to the betterment of it in some way. I owe it to the world to add my ideas to the zeitgeist, but more than that to filter through the myriad of ideas that exist and promote the ones I find to be righteous. Basic problem solving tells us that you must clearly define a problem before a solution can be designed. Applying this to the issue at hand, one would first need to define one’s concerns and then the path to a solution or contribution would open up. But I find it hard to express precisely just what it is that I am concerned about.
When I try to pin down my exact concerns, I am reminded of just how little I know, and because I know so little I am ill-suited to help solve anything. It is at this point I become morose and helpless-I must not have used my time well if I am unsuited to help anyone or make any differences in the flow of the world. But then I admonish myself even more for falling into a hole of both self-hatred and self-pity. Two emotions that individually do more harm than good, but when combined form a sort of synergy that sucks all productivity, contentedness, and self-love out of the mind. At the risk of sounding dramatic, it feels right to compare this energy to a swirling void, where thoughts and ideas move around in a violent maelstrom, producing nothing of value and leaving no room for ideas to flow through the mind freely, as normally happens.
This void is composed of many emotions, and acts as a sort of perpetual production machine:
Shame
Self-pity
Anger
Hopelessness
Longing
Panic
Loss of faith
And much more
This void can last for as long as the user keeps it there. When it vanishes, however, the user’s mindstate does not return cleanly to how it was before the void. (In fact I would say that the mind never really returns cleanly to any previous state.) The aftermath of the void can take different forms: the void may leave a vacuum, which in turn can suck in whatever emotions and thoughts it can find in recent memory, which are often the emotions and thoughts that led to the formation of the void in the first place. It also may leave what I like to think of as a “sticky residue” that is less obvious to the user than the void itself, or the resulting vacuum, but can still inhibit the free flow of thought by causing ideas to “stick” in segments of the thought process, both clogging up the pipeline and leaving the staging area empty. Another effect is general mental fatigue - it takes a lot of energy to fuel and maintain that empty, meaningless void in the user’s head. The process of getting rid of the void, while more conscious and meticulous, is a thousand times less energy-intensive than the void itself. This is important to remember, and may be the easiest way to “avoid the void” altogether.
