I really thought I was on the up-swing, but clearly I'm not. Recent news that one of my children will need a major surgery, continued pressure at work, and the return of my recurring pain has put me right about where I was before I crashed.
The oddest part for me is the crawling feeling on my skin. When I get like this my body becomes hyper-attuned. Every sound, smell, taste, and especially touch is heightened. I don't want anything touching me except maybe the flowing water of a warm shower. Walking down the hall the sound of my pant legs popping was grating.
Yesterday I did everything I could to avoid human contact. People asked me at church how I was doing and I avoided the question. How can I explain to them what I'm feeling if I can't figure out myself? My wife has started to key-into the fact that I'm not doing well, but I don't know what to tell her either. She asks me if I want to talk, and I do, but I don't know what to say or how to express myself.
I feel like I am caught in a strong current being pulled around, bounced off of things, and unable to rest. It's just a constant swirl.
I just want to hide. Burry myself in the side of a mountain, deep within its heart where there is no sound and the world cannot touch me. I want to be able to just let my mind unwrap everything on its own. To rest.
Showing posts with label burnout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label burnout. Show all posts
Monday, July 15, 2013
Monday, July 8, 2013
The INTP and Work
Following my recent crash and burn I've been trying to sort through what happened, why it happened, and how I can improve. One of the key topics that I have hit on is how I have been viewing work. I'm still processing through this, but this discussion on The Refuge helped me start to clarify some of my thoughts. Last night I was responding to the thread and got on a roll about what works best for an INTP in the workplace. A lot of this seems to be me explaining to myself where I went off track...
I see work in two ways. One is a way for me to pay my bills. For that, one job is just as good as the next if the dollars add up. Any extra dollars above what I need to pay my bills is frankly a waste of time. I don't love money or having fancy things so pay is just about keeping the bill collectors off my phone.
The other way I see work (if I am being clear-headed) is as a way for me to challenge myself, to create, to solve problems, and generally do what I want to do. Sure, my employer has a job description for me and expectations and all that, however what I really work for is my secret agenda and I use their money to do it. Now I'm not talking about stealing from them. What I mean is that I see it as an old fashioned bargain. They want something (labor to make them money by doing certain tasks) and I want something (to do what I like to do). We strike a bargain - they pay me and I do the work they need done. However, the reason I work is for me, not for them and not for money. I want to be intellectually challenged. I want to solve hard problems. I want to create order out of disorder. I want to learn new things. I want to be creative. I want to make discoveries. I want to be an INTP. So I work for me, not for them. I sell them some of the fruit of my labor, but the rest of it is for my pleasure. They know this and they're happy to get what they get.
I think of it like a young man in a small farming town. What if he's forced to become a farmer but what he truly loves is being a mechanical engineer? He might be forced to be a sod buster due to economics and education, but guess what he's going to end up doing? If he's on the ball and does what he wants then he ends up making a better tractor or designing a better thresher. He knows he has to sell vegetables to pay the bills, but what he really works at is what he wants and loves to do. Soon he designs a way of sorting vegetables, so he doesn't have to do that tedious job anymore, which will let him spend more time designing machinery and improving things. Then he goes to his next challenge. Sure his customers still think of him as a farmer and still expect him to produce vegetables. He does that and they pay him for it (and he pays those stinking bill collectors), but what they think and expect doesn't define what he is, what he wants, and ultimately what he does. He is a mechanical engineer.
I once read a psychologist who talked about going into a factory. It was a dreary environment - one of those places where workers are little more than machines with slightly more dexterity and a lot less job security. It was a mind numbing environment that epitomized the industrial revolution. Well, there was one guy there who was one of the happiest people the psychologist had ever seen. He got to work a bit early every day, set out his tools just so, and eagerly waited for the whistle and the first bucket of parts to arrive. His job was to put parts together in a certain way to make a product. He would make the same product day after day. When that whistle blew and the parts hit his bench he smiled happily and charged into his work. At the end of the shift he would carefully clean his workbench, put his tools away and walk out of the plant whistling while everyone else was dragging. How in the world could the guy be happy? The psychologist spoke to the foreman and asked about the man. Was he a slacker? Is that why he was happy? Was he a new guy? Was he a moron? Was he wealthy and just did this to feel like one of the people? The foreman responded that no, the guy wasn't a layabout, had been with the company for years, and he wasn't wealthy. In fact he was the top performer and constantly produced more than anyone else. So the psychologist went and spoke to the man to find out what the deal was. He found that the guy had designed his job into a personal agenda. He knew that he was stuck in that factory since it was the only game in town, but he was a guy who was competitive and loved challenging himself. So he started seeing how many pieces he could make in a shift. Eventually he realized that he couldn't improve his count unless he reduced his number of motions, set all the pieces in a particular way, kept all the tools in exactly the right spot, and stayed perfectly focused on what he was doing. Day after day he challenged himself to do better in that mundane job and refined his work, his tools, and his environment. Everyone else around him was miserable (including the foreman) but this guy had found a way to do what he wanted and he was happy. It wasn't a job anymore.
That's why I asked you what it is you want. I don't like going to a job either. It's pointless except for paying the power bill. However, if I can go do what I want to do and strike a bargain with someone else to get them to pay for it then it's not pointless anymore and it's not a job. It becomes an enjoyable activity for me even though once in a while I may have to drag my cart of vegetables to the market. If I set up my job that way then I don't have to be significant to the world, I don't have to be a rising star, I don't have to even like the people around me. It doesn't matter, because I am doing what I want to do. It just takes some thought to realize what that is and a little creativity to figure out a way to do what I want in the framework of my situation. I have to reassess every once in a while since things change, but the overriding question that I have to keep coming back to is simple - what is it I really enjoy and want to do and how can I do it right now?
I see work in two ways. One is a way for me to pay my bills. For that, one job is just as good as the next if the dollars add up. Any extra dollars above what I need to pay my bills is frankly a waste of time. I don't love money or having fancy things so pay is just about keeping the bill collectors off my phone.
The other way I see work (if I am being clear-headed) is as a way for me to challenge myself, to create, to solve problems, and generally do what I want to do. Sure, my employer has a job description for me and expectations and all that, however what I really work for is my secret agenda and I use their money to do it. Now I'm not talking about stealing from them. What I mean is that I see it as an old fashioned bargain. They want something (labor to make them money by doing certain tasks) and I want something (to do what I like to do). We strike a bargain - they pay me and I do the work they need done. However, the reason I work is for me, not for them and not for money. I want to be intellectually challenged. I want to solve hard problems. I want to create order out of disorder. I want to learn new things. I want to be creative. I want to make discoveries. I want to be an INTP. So I work for me, not for them. I sell them some of the fruit of my labor, but the rest of it is for my pleasure. They know this and they're happy to get what they get.
I think of it like a young man in a small farming town. What if he's forced to become a farmer but what he truly loves is being a mechanical engineer? He might be forced to be a sod buster due to economics and education, but guess what he's going to end up doing? If he's on the ball and does what he wants then he ends up making a better tractor or designing a better thresher. He knows he has to sell vegetables to pay the bills, but what he really works at is what he wants and loves to do. Soon he designs a way of sorting vegetables, so he doesn't have to do that tedious job anymore, which will let him spend more time designing machinery and improving things. Then he goes to his next challenge. Sure his customers still think of him as a farmer and still expect him to produce vegetables. He does that and they pay him for it (and he pays those stinking bill collectors), but what they think and expect doesn't define what he is, what he wants, and ultimately what he does. He is a mechanical engineer.
I once read a psychologist who talked about going into a factory. It was a dreary environment - one of those places where workers are little more than machines with slightly more dexterity and a lot less job security. It was a mind numbing environment that epitomized the industrial revolution. Well, there was one guy there who was one of the happiest people the psychologist had ever seen. He got to work a bit early every day, set out his tools just so, and eagerly waited for the whistle and the first bucket of parts to arrive. His job was to put parts together in a certain way to make a product. He would make the same product day after day. When that whistle blew and the parts hit his bench he smiled happily and charged into his work. At the end of the shift he would carefully clean his workbench, put his tools away and walk out of the plant whistling while everyone else was dragging. How in the world could the guy be happy? The psychologist spoke to the foreman and asked about the man. Was he a slacker? Is that why he was happy? Was he a new guy? Was he a moron? Was he wealthy and just did this to feel like one of the people? The foreman responded that no, the guy wasn't a layabout, had been with the company for years, and he wasn't wealthy. In fact he was the top performer and constantly produced more than anyone else. So the psychologist went and spoke to the man to find out what the deal was. He found that the guy had designed his job into a personal agenda. He knew that he was stuck in that factory since it was the only game in town, but he was a guy who was competitive and loved challenging himself. So he started seeing how many pieces he could make in a shift. Eventually he realized that he couldn't improve his count unless he reduced his number of motions, set all the pieces in a particular way, kept all the tools in exactly the right spot, and stayed perfectly focused on what he was doing. Day after day he challenged himself to do better in that mundane job and refined his work, his tools, and his environment. Everyone else around him was miserable (including the foreman) but this guy had found a way to do what he wanted and he was happy. It wasn't a job anymore.
That's why I asked you what it is you want. I don't like going to a job either. It's pointless except for paying the power bill. However, if I can go do what I want to do and strike a bargain with someone else to get them to pay for it then it's not pointless anymore and it's not a job. It becomes an enjoyable activity for me even though once in a while I may have to drag my cart of vegetables to the market. If I set up my job that way then I don't have to be significant to the world, I don't have to be a rising star, I don't have to even like the people around me. It doesn't matter, because I am doing what I want to do. It just takes some thought to realize what that is and a little creativity to figure out a way to do what I want in the framework of my situation. I have to reassess every once in a while since things change, but the overriding question that I have to keep coming back to is simple - what is it I really enjoy and want to do and how can I do it right now?
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
By tomorrow...
Yesterday I crashed and burned. Bad. It all just came apart at once. I left work and went for a drive. Eventually I ended up down by the Snake River. It was a place that I had visited numerous times throughout the years and I occasionally find myself drawn there when things get tough.
I stood there for a while gazing into the water and watching the massive trout rising below to sip insects from the surface. The sound of falling water was in the background and the pungent scent of old river water filled my head.
Nearby is an old power station. There used to be two of them that competed to provide power to the nearby town. They sat on opposite sides of the river and occasionally the operators would take pot shots at each other with .22 rimfire rifles leaving bullet scars on their stone walls. Now the area is overshadowed by a huge dam with massive turbines the likes of which those old boys never could have imagined.
Today I took the day off and then took another drive. I went in a different direction and ended up on back roads I had never seen before. A sign warned "rough road" which seemed to be a signal to the roads department to just let the potholes be. I dodged around them swinging wide from one side of the road to another.
Occasionally out here you take a turn and find an old homestead. I can't help but think about the people who built them, their desire to make a good life for themselves, and then they left it all behind. Sometimes it's obvious that the old house was the original homesteader and there's another place built right next door in the 1920's or so and then another next to that built even later. This one though sat all alone in a valley.
Clearly they had put some time into it. That was a nice place back in the day and it's held up pretty well. Someone put a lot of extra work into making those gables and extra windows. But they left, so I did too.
Eventually I found myself on a long lonely road that crosses the northern edge of the Snake River plain. I had intended to go another way, but this was good enough. Eventually I saw a sign for Atomic City and hit the brakes.
It's an odd place. It quite literally sits out in the middle of nowhere. Nearby is the Idaho National Laboratory where nuclear power was first investigated by the U.S. government. It was there that the nation's first nuclear reactors were designed and built. It was there too that the first nuclear submarine was designed and tested in a huge tank some 600 miles from the ocean by Admiral Rickover. It's also the area where the first ever fatal nuclear accident occurred. That was on the Army's watch, Rickover never would have let it happen.
Atomic "City" was the first town in the world lit by nuclear power as a test by the finest engineering minds in the nation. There's almost nothing there now despite its brush with history. A race track was built for some strange reason. There's a fire station to deal with range fires and it seems that there are a couple decent houses for the folks that man it. The rest is dilapidated, empty, eternally for sale.
Things are looking a little up though. The 2010 census showed that population had increased over the last decade. The number of families in town had increased 30% to 9 and overall population had risen 16% to 29 souls. Still, it's clear they have a way to go to get back to the heydays of 1950 when 250 people lived their lives here.
To get to Atomic City you take the turn at the old Quonset hut that's been turned into a bar. It's easy to find, someone made an attempt to make it look Irish by painting a couple shamrocks on plywood. There's a paved road into town, but all the others are still dirt just as they were back in 1950 when its name was changed from Midway to the more ambitious label it still bears today.
The only thing ambitious in town today was a large turkey vulture eating dinner on the road. Some rabbit had hopped it's last.
There was at one time the Twin Buttes Bar named after the two buttes that rise to the North. I suppose that in a place like Atomic City all you could do was get well lubricated and try to avoid the burning summer heat or hide from the biting winter winds. I can't imagine how depressing it would have been to walk into that place for a cold one and then step back outside and realize that things hadn't improved.
Mysteriously a couple cars and an ancient RV are now parked in the gravel that serves as a parking lot. Where the two Fireside Pizza signs came from I couldn't guess. As with all old towns some things just kind of show up, stay, rust, and soon nobody thinks about them anymore. A few decades later they're still there.
Apparently your car could get well lubricated too...
By the time I snapped this picture someone in a fire district truck was keeping an eye on me. I guess I looked kind of suspicious. After all, who comes to visit Atomic City today?
I turned back onto the road and frightened off the giant bird again on my way back to the old highway. In my mirror I could see the vulture return happily to its meal. By tomorrow there will be nothing left.
I stood there for a while gazing into the water and watching the massive trout rising below to sip insects from the surface. The sound of falling water was in the background and the pungent scent of old river water filled my head.
Nearby is an old power station. There used to be two of them that competed to provide power to the nearby town. They sat on opposite sides of the river and occasionally the operators would take pot shots at each other with .22 rimfire rifles leaving bullet scars on their stone walls. Now the area is overshadowed by a huge dam with massive turbines the likes of which those old boys never could have imagined.
Today I took the day off and then took another drive. I went in a different direction and ended up on back roads I had never seen before. A sign warned "rough road" which seemed to be a signal to the roads department to just let the potholes be. I dodged around them swinging wide from one side of the road to another.
Occasionally out here you take a turn and find an old homestead. I can't help but think about the people who built them, their desire to make a good life for themselves, and then they left it all behind. Sometimes it's obvious that the old house was the original homesteader and there's another place built right next door in the 1920's or so and then another next to that built even later. This one though sat all alone in a valley.
Clearly they had put some time into it. That was a nice place back in the day and it's held up pretty well. Someone put a lot of extra work into making those gables and extra windows. But they left, so I did too.
Eventually I found myself on a long lonely road that crosses the northern edge of the Snake River plain. I had intended to go another way, but this was good enough. Eventually I saw a sign for Atomic City and hit the brakes.
It's an odd place. It quite literally sits out in the middle of nowhere. Nearby is the Idaho National Laboratory where nuclear power was first investigated by the U.S. government. It was there that the nation's first nuclear reactors were designed and built. It was there too that the first nuclear submarine was designed and tested in a huge tank some 600 miles from the ocean by Admiral Rickover. It's also the area where the first ever fatal nuclear accident occurred. That was on the Army's watch, Rickover never would have let it happen.
Atomic "City" was the first town in the world lit by nuclear power as a test by the finest engineering minds in the nation. There's almost nothing there now despite its brush with history. A race track was built for some strange reason. There's a fire station to deal with range fires and it seems that there are a couple decent houses for the folks that man it. The rest is dilapidated, empty, eternally for sale.
Things are looking a little up though. The 2010 census showed that population had increased over the last decade. The number of families in town had increased 30% to 9 and overall population had risen 16% to 29 souls. Still, it's clear they have a way to go to get back to the heydays of 1950 when 250 people lived their lives here.
To get to Atomic City you take the turn at the old Quonset hut that's been turned into a bar. It's easy to find, someone made an attempt to make it look Irish by painting a couple shamrocks on plywood. There's a paved road into town, but all the others are still dirt just as they were back in 1950 when its name was changed from Midway to the more ambitious label it still bears today.
The only thing ambitious in town today was a large turkey vulture eating dinner on the road. Some rabbit had hopped it's last.
There was at one time the Twin Buttes Bar named after the two buttes that rise to the North. I suppose that in a place like Atomic City all you could do was get well lubricated and try to avoid the burning summer heat or hide from the biting winter winds. I can't imagine how depressing it would have been to walk into that place for a cold one and then step back outside and realize that things hadn't improved.
Mysteriously a couple cars and an ancient RV are now parked in the gravel that serves as a parking lot. Where the two Fireside Pizza signs came from I couldn't guess. As with all old towns some things just kind of show up, stay, rust, and soon nobody thinks about them anymore. A few decades later they're still there.
Apparently your car could get well lubricated too...
By the time I snapped this picture someone in a fire district truck was keeping an eye on me. I guess I looked kind of suspicious. After all, who comes to visit Atomic City today?
I turned back onto the road and frightened off the giant bird again on my way back to the old highway. In my mirror I could see the vulture return happily to its meal. By tomorrow there will be nothing left.
Gone
Well, I did it. I got burned out. Last night after that post on The Refuge I drove off for a while and just went somewhere safe. Took today off from work to do the same thing.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Is it so bad to go mad?
One of the things I have found interesting about INTP's is the number of people who have said something along the lines of, "I seriously thought I had mental illness..." I've been there too and often, and often too often. But I have begun to wonder what it is that I am afraid of and why I don't just quit wasting time and step off the edge and into the abyss that I am so sure is there. After all, if it's not there then I can quit worrying about being insane and start worrying again about world peace, hunger, and whether or not the Rolling Stones disprove everything I have ever heard about substance abuse. If, on the other hand, the abyss really is an abyss and I really do go mad then at least I can be happy in knowing that my fears were justified and I can go about my business believing that a rock I found in the road is an alien from the Galactic Empire come to tell me that I have been selected to rule the universe from a hostel in Southeast Los Angeles.
Of course, the things that pull me back constantly are all the responsibilities and important stuff that the world tells me I should be concerned about. Not unparadoxically these are the exact same items that keep pushing me to the edge. And so back and forth I go just exactly like a madman trying to decide if the automatic door at the supermarket is out to eat him. Ergo, I am already quite mad and probably (based not completely on, but fully confirmed by the above) a raving lunatic. Strangely enough, I think the rest of the world pretty much knows this and is waiting to find out if I am the kind of lunatic who turns out to be brilliant, the weird uncle, or the guy you see on continuous live news coverage.
The last one is clearly short-term thinking and just doesn't work out for an INTP. After all, if we're going to be that kind of crazy then we're going to do it right and go into politics. Otherwise at some point a person ends up being swarmed by people in tactical gear and the social pressures of so many people screaming and yelling at us and even touching us while telling us what to do would be pretty uncomfortable. Worse, should I survive, I would have to sleep in a concrete building with a few thousand people who inherently cannot leave other people alone. So it's either that or go to inauguration balls with people of exactly the same character, but slightly better taste in clothes and fewer scruples about who they sleep with. Either way, that whole type of crazy just isn't for me.
That leaves the other two options. Now, I already have various assorted nephews and nieces who all think of me as that strange guy who's supposed to be related to them, but that they know nothing about. I suppose I could just be happy with some such small achievement and start sending them copies of my combined analysis of Tolstoy, Dr. Seuss and Nitsche for Christmas, but it doesn't seem right to leave it at that (particularly since that list of authors doesn't include anyone from the southern hemisphere). No, I have decided that if I am going to go mad then I might as well go the whole way and become brilliantly mad.
And so that's where I am at a bit past 1:00 in the morning. It's not a pretty place to be, but apparently it's where I am so who are you to judge? If you haven't gone stark bonkers yet then you're just being all theoretical which might get you published in a journal or two, but never gain you any real respect amongst we the leaders of the Galactic Empire.
So what brought all this on? Earlier tonight I was catching a documentary on Henry Ford. Actually, I caught the last third of it last night, then the first third this afternoon and the second third tonight (ah the wonders of modern television). I was struck by the fact that Ford just bit the bullet and became completely what he was. Admittedly a lot of what he was turned out to be a vindictive jerk, but that's not the part I'm talking about. I'm talking about the single-minded obsession with making one type of thing and just making it better and better. The guy was badly embarrassed in court when he seemed to think the Revolutionary War was in 1812 rather than 1776. Newspaper editors called him a joke and then went home in their Model T's to houses that would just fit into Henry's bathroom. It would seem that Henry had the better way. He picked one thing that he did well, focused it on one thing he wanted to do, and then promptly ignored all the other stuff. I suppose that if he had failed to make an inexpensive automobile and thus change the world we would have called him mad.
Then there was another snippet of a travel show where some attractive girl is wandering around Vietnam and is talking about the last emperor of that country (who's burial place is unknown because the 300 people who buried him had their heads lifted so nobody could get to the dead guy's stuff that was buried with him). This guy knew what he liked and what he liked was having 50 different meals prepared for him every day from which to choose - and by different meals every day I mean he didn't want to see the same meal twice in a year. Seems eccentric, but on the other hand I am a glutton and I'm not so sure I wouldn't have set up a similar system if given the chance.
Also tonight I saw a portion of a really bad movie with an actress who got some awards (one for apparently being simultaneously fascinated and upset by a reference to fava beans in a show that was also mentioned in one of those non-reality tv shows I happened to watch last night). In this movie she's investigating some alien phenomenon or another which causes her to be simultaneously fascinated and upset (but not enough apparently to get an award). On the screen were shown some esoteric notes filled with scribbling that looked significant, but probably was just a set designer's high school algebra notes.
Suddenly it happened, all those disjointed concepts blended together and I thought, "Well, why not just go ahead and become mad?" What I mean is, why not just do what I do even if it seems insane to everyone else and even to myself? If that means going catatonic for a few hours then so be it. If it means that I finally outfit my pickup with a camper so I can take a nap at lunchtime while blasting Tchaikovsky then why not? If it means turning my backyard into a collection of small outbuildings each resembling a shed, but each with a different purpose then I might as well start buying wood and paint. If I want to fill a couple thousand notebooks with arcane scribbling that only I understand then dammit I have every right to do so!
As INTPs we are inherently different than the majority. People simply aren't going to get us. Unfortunately, we spend huge amounts of time trying to fix that by essentially trying to fix ourselves. Well, who's to say we are the ones that need to be fixed? How do we know that we aren't the right way up?
I think in the morning I might as well go mad. I've nothing better to do...
Of course, the things that pull me back constantly are all the responsibilities and important stuff that the world tells me I should be concerned about. Not unparadoxically these are the exact same items that keep pushing me to the edge. And so back and forth I go just exactly like a madman trying to decide if the automatic door at the supermarket is out to eat him. Ergo, I am already quite mad and probably (based not completely on, but fully confirmed by the above) a raving lunatic. Strangely enough, I think the rest of the world pretty much knows this and is waiting to find out if I am the kind of lunatic who turns out to be brilliant, the weird uncle, or the guy you see on continuous live news coverage.
The last one is clearly short-term thinking and just doesn't work out for an INTP. After all, if we're going to be that kind of crazy then we're going to do it right and go into politics. Otherwise at some point a person ends up being swarmed by people in tactical gear and the social pressures of so many people screaming and yelling at us and even touching us while telling us what to do would be pretty uncomfortable. Worse, should I survive, I would have to sleep in a concrete building with a few thousand people who inherently cannot leave other people alone. So it's either that or go to inauguration balls with people of exactly the same character, but slightly better taste in clothes and fewer scruples about who they sleep with. Either way, that whole type of crazy just isn't for me.
That leaves the other two options. Now, I already have various assorted nephews and nieces who all think of me as that strange guy who's supposed to be related to them, but that they know nothing about. I suppose I could just be happy with some such small achievement and start sending them copies of my combined analysis of Tolstoy, Dr. Seuss and Nitsche for Christmas, but it doesn't seem right to leave it at that (particularly since that list of authors doesn't include anyone from the southern hemisphere). No, I have decided that if I am going to go mad then I might as well go the whole way and become brilliantly mad.
And so that's where I am at a bit past 1:00 in the morning. It's not a pretty place to be, but apparently it's where I am so who are you to judge? If you haven't gone stark bonkers yet then you're just being all theoretical which might get you published in a journal or two, but never gain you any real respect amongst we the leaders of the Galactic Empire.
So what brought all this on? Earlier tonight I was catching a documentary on Henry Ford. Actually, I caught the last third of it last night, then the first third this afternoon and the second third tonight (ah the wonders of modern television). I was struck by the fact that Ford just bit the bullet and became completely what he was. Admittedly a lot of what he was turned out to be a vindictive jerk, but that's not the part I'm talking about. I'm talking about the single-minded obsession with making one type of thing and just making it better and better. The guy was badly embarrassed in court when he seemed to think the Revolutionary War was in 1812 rather than 1776. Newspaper editors called him a joke and then went home in their Model T's to houses that would just fit into Henry's bathroom. It would seem that Henry had the better way. He picked one thing that he did well, focused it on one thing he wanted to do, and then promptly ignored all the other stuff. I suppose that if he had failed to make an inexpensive automobile and thus change the world we would have called him mad.
Then there was another snippet of a travel show where some attractive girl is wandering around Vietnam and is talking about the last emperor of that country (who's burial place is unknown because the 300 people who buried him had their heads lifted so nobody could get to the dead guy's stuff that was buried with him). This guy knew what he liked and what he liked was having 50 different meals prepared for him every day from which to choose - and by different meals every day I mean he didn't want to see the same meal twice in a year. Seems eccentric, but on the other hand I am a glutton and I'm not so sure I wouldn't have set up a similar system if given the chance.
Also tonight I saw a portion of a really bad movie with an actress who got some awards (one for apparently being simultaneously fascinated and upset by a reference to fava beans in a show that was also mentioned in one of those non-reality tv shows I happened to watch last night). In this movie she's investigating some alien phenomenon or another which causes her to be simultaneously fascinated and upset (but not enough apparently to get an award). On the screen were shown some esoteric notes filled with scribbling that looked significant, but probably was just a set designer's high school algebra notes.
Suddenly it happened, all those disjointed concepts blended together and I thought, "Well, why not just go ahead and become mad?" What I mean is, why not just do what I do even if it seems insane to everyone else and even to myself? If that means going catatonic for a few hours then so be it. If it means that I finally outfit my pickup with a camper so I can take a nap at lunchtime while blasting Tchaikovsky then why not? If it means turning my backyard into a collection of small outbuildings each resembling a shed, but each with a different purpose then I might as well start buying wood and paint. If I want to fill a couple thousand notebooks with arcane scribbling that only I understand then dammit I have every right to do so!
As INTPs we are inherently different than the majority. People simply aren't going to get us. Unfortunately, we spend huge amounts of time trying to fix that by essentially trying to fix ourselves. Well, who's to say we are the ones that need to be fixed? How do we know that we aren't the right way up?
I think in the morning I might as well go mad. I've nothing better to do...
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Burned out
It's been a horribly stressful few weeks. Work piled-on and then I had a large project at home. It just wouldn't stop. Now I feel that floating feeling. Maybe it's the stress from this morning. I don't know. I just know that what I really want is to lay down and go to sleep for a while.
The burnout problem comes at times that I never expect it. I'm chugging along doing great and then all of a sudden I hit the mud. My wheels don't even spin like when I'm "stuck", they just stop and I sink. My engine shuts down and I don't want to do anything, see anyone, speak to anyone, or even step outside. I want to be alone far away with no obligations.
I'm burned out again. Damn. I was going to make sure that didn't happen and here I am. :-(
So I just looked at my other posts and what do I find? An unfinished post from a few weeks ago saying:
I guess I had an inkling of what was coming.
The burnout problem comes at times that I never expect it. I'm chugging along doing great and then all of a sudden I hit the mud. My wheels don't even spin like when I'm "stuck", they just stop and I sink. My engine shuts down and I don't want to do anything, see anyone, speak to anyone, or even step outside. I want to be alone far away with no obligations.
I'm burned out again. Damn. I was going to make sure that didn't happen and here I am. :-(
So I just looked at my other posts and what do I find? An unfinished post from a few weeks ago saying:
It seems to be an inevitable experience for an INTP - burnout. We drive hard and keep driving. As things get more and more difficult we bury our emotions, ignoring them even though they continue to affect us. Soon we are completely wrapped-up in whatever it is we are working on. And it works. We achieve more. We understand more. We makes things better. Sure, some important things may have to wait a while but no big deal.
I guess I had an inkling of what was coming.
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