“What's all this stuff about motivation? I say, if you need motivation, you probably need more than motivation. You probably need chemical intervention or brain surgery. Actually, if you ask me, this country could do with a little less motivation. The people who are causing all the trouble seem highly motivated to me. Serial killers, stock swindlers, drug dealers.... I'm not sure motivation is always a good thing. You show me a lazy prick who's lying in bed all day, watching TV, only occasionally getting up to piss, and I'll show you a guy who's not causing any trouble.”
This was George Carlin in the most profoundly funny (actually you could reverse the terms and say "funnily profound") ways exposing the modern non-problem of motivation. I say non-problem because if you abstracted “motivation” as something that needs to addressed by the other, one might as well ask “Who motivates the motivator?” “Who motivates the motivator of motivators?”, and the question runs ad infinituum, into a regression, much in the same way one can ask,”Who guards the guards?”
My favorite journalist of them all Christopher Hitchens said that as soon as he woke up every morning, he would check the New York Times and see if the catchphrase ,”All the news that is fit to be printed” was something sloganized at the top of the paper. Then he would see if the “astrology” coulmn was still there. Once he’d verified that those things were at their places, he’d be irked enough and full of rage to carry on each morning. After all, any serious journalist knows that not all news that’s worthy of people’s attention gets printed in papers, most of them are quietly smothered out.
This reminds of something that is known as an anti-social “ikigai”. Japanese have this ratther peculiar term called “ikigai”, which is embedded in their lives as a “purpose of existence”. And what this purpose is, is sometimes more or less like the happiness of smallest things such as being needed by someone, finding joys in the things you do, or hoping that the things you are doing will transform into “ikigai” themselves. But in a detailed study conducted in Japanese students, it was found that the more people strived for an “ikigai”, the less likely they were to find it- the ghost of not having an “ikigai” haunted them.
I have had this strange feeling that the more I searched for meaning through words and concepts, the more I entered into what Alan Watts dubbed to be the “department of utter confusion”. The Taoists had it that the true wisdom was the loss of misconceptions rather than an accumulation of knowledge. And given time enough, all of our concepts, patterns of taking a look at the world, will have been voided- there is no particular “way” to make sense of the world, and no one true method that someone can motivate anybody.
To be truly motivated is to not be motivated at all. It might be expressed in the Chinese philosophy of "wei wu wei" - the action of non-doing or no forcefulness. Everyone falls short of motivation time to time, and we wanted to convey the message that it is alright- to be not motivated at times is human. Modern motivational speakers might try to give you a sense that they're motivated all the time or even if they've not tried to do so, people might perceive it so. To be motivated all the time would be akin to a person who laughs all the time or is happy all the time- that is an impossibility, something against the nature.
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The two men who are at the forefront of WiseDumb podcasts are Karan Bhatta and Rupesh Sah who are researchers, educators and media personalities. You can reach out to them for a collaboration:
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