Explanation for Apathy

It happens to me sometimes that I become pretty much apathetic about things.  I just can't see the value of very much.  Why clean the house when you will just have to do it again soon?  Why learn Spanish when there is no prospect of needing to speak Spanish?  Why practice music when there is no prospect of performing in front of people?  Why write blog posts when there is no sign that anyone cares?  Why learn about things that you will never use?

The answer to these questions would be that there is an intrinsic value to these activities, the doing of them is reward enough.  Well, what happens when you don't feel that much has intrinsic value?  Today the thing that had the most intrinsic value for me was sitting in a park looking at leaves in the sunshine.  When I am being apathetic being productive has less value for me than not being productive.  My main motivation at this point for doing things is to avoid the displeasure of other people.

This apathy has been bothering me.  For a start there is little more that is despised more in my culture than apathy.  If you don't wish to be productive you are a bad person.  I don't want to be thought of as a bad person, even if I and everyone I care about, says to not care about what other people think of me.  The second reason I have been bothered by all of this is that I didn't understand the reason for this apathy, but I had an epiphany today.  The reason for this was the video below, which is mostly about how people feel at work, and how much challenge and meaning matter.  It's about twenty minutes long and should be shown to any supervisor if they care about productivity and the environment of their employees.

Dan Ariely: What Makes Us Feel Good About Work

Basically we really care about the meaning of our work, that we accomplish something.  If you work on something that is simply tossed aside then it really upsets you, even if you enjoyed working on it.  If you work hard on something you think the end product is a better product than if you didn't work hard.  This is one reason why parents post a billion pictures each of their babies, parenting is hard work, the result of that hard work are constant little achievements (the first steps etc.), and therefore parents think their child is so much more interesting and wonderful than the child of anyone else.

How does this explain my apathy?  Well, nothing I am going to do seems to have a worthwhile end, see above.  Why am I more apathetic now than in the recent past?  It's because pretty much whatever happens in the next year or so, we will be moving to a different environment.  Nothing really matters in this environment because it will end soon, and so the prospects of achieving anything meaningful here approach zero.

Now that I understand more fully this completely normal facet of humanity, that people don't work hard for things that have little purpose at the end, my apathy makes sense to me.  It also allows me to worry less about what I am doing.

One of the things that produces a sense of meaning with this blog is the feedback in comments (whether in person or on the blog) as otherwise I have no idea if anyone is really reading other than by accident.  While I take a certain pride in what I write that isn't significantly more than the pride I would have in thinking about the subject.  Any evidence at all that anyone has been convinced by anything I have ever said here would be the acme of purpose.  Well, maybe that will happen some day.