Broke

I'm broken.

I don't mean in the sense that my spirit is broken. I mean it in the sense of malfunction, like when the car breaks down. I'm broken, I don't work, I'm screwed-up somehow.

For a full week now I have been trying to work on my research. I work for a few minutes. Then I find myself sitting in front of my computer blankly. I stare off into space and my mind wanders. Psychological pressure builds, and builds. I get a headache. I'm tense.

I haven't gotten anything, and I mean anything, done in a week. A WEEK. It's demoralizing. My supervisor wants progress to accelerate, and I feel as though I'm pushing through thickening molasses. There's no good reason for the retarded progress, no tremendous intellectual hurdle. I just have no focus. I get upset; I should be able to push through on pure disciplined attention. This should be nothing. I'm wasting time; why can't I just do what has to be done. When the supervisor returns from his vacation I'll be forced to tell him that I've accomplished nothing. Having to say that will tear my insides to shreds regardless of his reaction. Disappointment, frustration, whatever. He has nothing on the degree of my self-critique, and increasingly self-contempt.

It is not that I'm incapable of concentrating. Quite often I can concentrate intensely for hours, or even days, on a topic. It's the sort of all-consuming concentration that I recognize might well become dangerous in its own right. So, no, it's not that I can't concentrate. It's that I can't always control when and on what I concentrate. I think it's this concentration that has given me the label of being a little "intense" for some people's taste.

I am prone to extremes (case in point).

As I hang on through the drought, the psychological pressure builds: there is a schedule associated with the Ph.D., there are hoops to jump through at particular times. Regardless of whether I think the hoops and the schedule really mean anything (clearly they don't mean too much, since I took 5 years to get a bachelor's degree, and abandoned one Ph.D. already), my ability to jump through those hoops at will is somehow important to me. So, when the malaise gets to this point where I doubt my ability to perform on (my own) command, it sends shivers of doubt and anxiety through me. The aggressive/competitive side of me (which is well developed) wants desperately to show the melancholy side of me just who has the reins in this relationship. I want to wrangle my intellectual angst with brute psychological force.

At times I've been able to make the slog through to the other side by the very simple attack of taking tiny steps of forward progress, stay focused on focusing on work, no matter how slow the progress, just do something and things will slowly re-align.

The strategy just doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

That's why I say that I'm broken. It's an appropriate phrase. Let me spell out why it's appropriate... Everything in this post as been about overcoming all for an almost mechanical efficiency. Somewhere in my experience I seem to have started evaluating myself in analogy with a piece of software, a computer program, or a machine. The analogy says that I'm broken: with the appropriate inputs, I'm not producing the expected output. It depends the day you ask me as to whether I think it's true.

But really, what other model does society hand you? I'm a part of a nation, an economy, a research institution, and a family. In Aristotelian language each of these carries with it certain responsibilities, a certain role. There are virtues associated with fulfilling those roles, and prudence is the virtue of balancing them. But in our society it seems to be less about relationships and responsibilities, and more about production and performance. In the modern mindset we are agents within dynamic systems. "Agents" have interactions rather than relationships. I find it telling that sociologists model societies using mathematical models derived for modeling the molecules in gases. Molecules don't have relationships, commitments, and responsibilities, they have laws to obey. Our systems are constructed, or at least made intelligible, by the hypothetical existence of underlying laws. The economy is subjected to government control by virtue of conceptualizing it as a dynamical system (and manipulating it accordingly), which implicitly reduces persons to agents - agents obeying laws. So when I fail to obey the laws of productivity, of efficiency, of profit maximization, I am disobeying the laws that make our society intelligible. I am molecule violating electromagnetism, which is to say that I am unintelligible, a puzzle, and probably just a data point that is determined to be an error and thrown out of the pool for analysis. If enough of us deviate together, then maybe the sociologists would update the models to include us as a minority contributing statistically to the dynamics of the whole (a different species of agent obeying slightly different laws).

I am not saying that statistical relationships don't exist between social "observables". I am just saying that describing society and economic engagements as a machine has consequences for the cogs in that machine. If we find economic existence intelligible (that is, we can wrap our heads around it somehow) by thinking of it as a machine, then that metaphor shapes how we see our role in that machine. Wouldn't a carburetor find itself in an odd situation if it failed to perform its proper function without any apparent mechanical malfunction? It's clearly nonsense, any malfunction would just be (by definition) a mechanical malfunction! So, what is the implication? The only malfunction in a component of the economic system (say, someone who cannot keep a job) must be a mechanical problem with the component itself. And sense components are themselves just little machines, we can potentially fix that problem. This is the realm of medicine. Any psychological problem is actually a neuro-physiological (read: mechanical) problem.

You see where all of this goes. If I am failing to fit social expectations, it is because I am broken. And the anxiety it sets up is that I need to get fixed so that I don't fail the system any longer. And what if medicine is not advanced enough to fix me? Or if the cost is greater than my potential economic output?

That's the long way around to explaining my playful expression that I am broken. For me it is both an expression of personal dissatisfaction and a satirical jab. It makes me wonder what a list of modern virtues would look like, and whether/how these would derive from the practices of mechanistic explanation, and how this may or may not deviate from the ancient virtues.