Need Demotivated? I Can Help You

Yes, you read that right.  I think it's time for Grandma to share some of her own tips for constantly demotivating herself.  Not sure how funny this is going to be, though I started with an idea of parodying yet another of those about 8,790,000 online articles about how to get yourself to do something you ought to do when everything in you cries out No! Or at least, most of you does, and hey, it's July.

But what about demotivating yourself?  A mere 59,000 entries about something all of us do most every day.  You can see this is a field crying for more content.  Meanwhile, exploring this got to be fun right away.  I took the quiz on demotivate.com, whose motto is, "If you're happy and you know it, find another site."  Their other motto is,

 Life sucks, give up.  

The quiz told me I am ~

On your way to true demotivation You are headed on the right path, just pick up a few bottles of vodka, wait til your dog dies and you will begin to finally feel how worthless your existence really is!

It's interesting to a demotivator to look up images for "Life sucks."  On one hand, you quickly get sidetracked into things like Cheezburger, which collects "epic fails," the best of which involve trucks whose drivers were probably both stoned and working above their pay grade.

At least half of what comes up on Google about demotivation is trying to motivate you in a sickening sweet way.  Now, I don't blame the people who make those posters, and sometimes put them on Facebook.  I know lovely people who do that now and then.  They are just trying to feel better.  I blame the society for making us all want to BE SOMEONE, and telling us that you can do anything if you try.  Especially when it tells you you can feel better if you try.

(Parenthetically, you really can't make yourself feel better, take it from an expert.  What you feel, you feel, including long bad moods that are profoundly karmic in nature.  But you're not allowed to be depressed and listless, are you?  It makes your friends nervous.  Actually, moods - energies - are catching, that's been studied, too. It feels good to be around a hypomanic, for a while.  Same is true of a depressive, except backwards.

[Even more parenthetically, I had the perhaps unique experience of being yelled at in a psych ward by another depressive for being depressing.  Specifically, I was playing Barb'ry Allen on the piano, which is not nearly so bad as cracking gum loudly and glaring at someone who is playing a sad song.  Psych wards are full of passive-aggressives, of course, the resident doctors being the worst.])  

Okay, where was I?
 
I wanted to be a little Zennish for a moment. I wanted to say that, while demotivation from outside can work, unfortunately, motivation from outside does. not. You can find learned articles about experiments that demonstrate that, if you are a scholarly type.  If not, allow me to summarize:  a sign on your wall, a post-it on your computer, people telling you to cheer up (don't you hate that?), these things do. not. work.  I know I am annoying you with my feeble cliched attempts to emphasize the point, so I'll make the point and run:  to be sustained in an effort, your motivation has to be internal.

Nor is internal motivation always good.  For example, you may have internalized at a very young age that if you were only good enough, your father would love you.  At least respect you.  And actually, painful life things like the delusion that you can make rejecting parents notice you often lead people to work hard and do good things.  Though mental constructions like that (if you only work hard enough . . . ) are often proven to be incorrect (are delusions, in Buddhist terms) with disastrous results.

And this post is long enough, so click here for a coffee mug that will help you stay pessimistic.  It's hard, with all these puppies and kitties on Facebook. Remember, they only enjoy life because they have little tiny brains not capable of hanging onto elaborate mental constructions.  Bless them.  Well, bless us all.