Restlessness

Few and far between do I have moments of complete peace of mind. I do have an ability to focus on a task, but those idle moments certainly get the best of me. This feels like an article about a topic that not many people speak about, especially young people, but is a common feeling.

As I sit here in my bed, typing away at 1 in the morning, I have spent the last 3 hours or so either trying to fall asleep, reading my new book of choice, Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or thinking about tomorrow and the future beyond. While this doesn’t happen every single night, it happens more often than not.

I have, on many occasions, built a bit of a grudge with the Philosophy of Stoicism. Today’s topic highlights one of the many criticisms I have of it. There is a certain level of “peace of mind” that stoicism promotes (On the outside at least). In my experience, “peace of mind” simply does not exist. There is, from my view, a more profitable framework of being present and staying out of my head. Losing the introspection, and moving towards, well, movement. Stoicism promotes “controlling what can be controlled,” and while this is good, for me, stoicism, through reading its many great authors (Which I still highly recommend), creates a diminishing of emotions. Without going too far off topic, simply put, I think feeling emotions is what makes humans truly human. Without emotion, and going through them (both literally and figuratively), we become numb. And while I can be wrong, through my experience, in an attempt to truly live by the standards of stoicism, I lost the ability not only to feel negative emotions, but positive emotions as well.

To return to the original plan of this article, over the past three years of beginning my journey down this fascinating path of life, the restlessness has only grown stronger. Planning my live event led to numerous long nights, awaiting my full-time position at Rhetoric caused me to spend hours at night trying to find alternatives, just in case something didn’t work out. There is always so much more to do, so much more to get down, and the possibilities for what can be done are endless.

What is strange about this is that I have always experienced this my whole life. While stronger now, this restlessness, especially among young people, is in my mind the norm. If anything its a GOOD thing. It means you care and that you are thinking and acting on this feeling. When I originally became a Philosophy major and began reading many of the major Philosophers in history, I was always in pursuit of a way to fix my overthinking and restlessness problem.

The truth is that these problems will never go away, whether I like it or not. There are ways I have found the remedy for them, but they always loom in the background. My intention is not for this article to sound doom and gloom; I am quite happy in my current state of affairs. I intend to show that if you are feeling restless, it is merely a common staple of the human condition. I want to achieve more and take my life to new heights. That sounds like a really GOOD thing.

It’s crazy that I thought at a certain point there was something wrong with me. It turns out that I was just like everyone else, and in a way, it makes me feel a lot better. Is this one of those articles that I really just wrote to get myself out of my own head?

Question for God! (or the universe)

P.S You can tell I have been reading Dostoyevsky again…