Wheat from Chaff

My night last night: roughly 6 hours of Rise of Nations. Single Player. Tucked into my closet cum office space, the entire night I lead the English against the Romans then the Inca in an atemporal battle royale. I stopped to eat a little bean dip.
 
I realized something profound about myself somewhere betwixt bean dip and bedtime--the kind of thing only really profound to the realizor I think--I'm not gonna go anywhere, especially with video games around.
 
I do nothing all day at work except blog and bitch to my friends on Trillian about what a vacuous wormhole my life is. There I get really motivated to do something about my goddamned existence but, you know, my hands are kinda tied because I'm at work.
 
Then  work is over and I more or less break for my car, eager to become an active participant in  my life. By the time I've navigated the 520 parking lot (50 minutes for 15 miles yesterday) all I want to do is sit down and stare at something. TV would suit, but the fact that the syndicated powers-that-be have been showing nothing but old crappy episodes of the Simpsons the last two weeks quickens my retreat to the closet.
 
As for the commute itself, I used to use that time constructively. I dreamt up a story collection that took place entirely on the freeway. People daydreaming their way into car accidents and whatnot, questioning how the human paradigm could've gotten so off track as to be a species of commuters. This was before I had a decent computer. Now I just glare at the HOV lane, wondering how far I can get before a motorcycle cop comes roaring out of the swamplands and busts me--how close I can get to that first game of--whatever.
 
To be fair to this state's shit traffic system, upon arriving home, I'd still do nothing even if I had a chauffer and/or a rocket-propelled grenade to make my commute faster/easier.
 
I think the problem is that I'm a very Pavlovian creature by nature. Like most people who have brushes with priesthood, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov thought creatures were mere bundles of drooling reflex and carnal desire. I'm not sure if he extended this distinction to include humanity, but, in my case, he should have.
  
The only time I have ever taken my life in hand is after some cosmic nudging. I so lack drive that I have to be forced to action if action is to be taken at all. Conscious attempts at action without this force end ignominiously. I have a history of not doing a goddamned thing, yet being adored by every employer I've worked for. Stimulus, response. Every time I've made a preemptive attack on the wheels of fate, I get nowhere. Stimulus, response. The jobs I do get just fall into my lap. Stimulus, response. Primitive, instinctual Luke learns from this and continues down this path of evolutionarily stable behavior. So it's a chicken/egg type of dilemma, but regardless of whether it's a cause or an effect, I am completely unable to self-motivate.
 
Despite this knowledge, Luke the conscious agent remains naive, hopefull. "Holy cow there are lots'uh things I'd like to do. There's a big beautiful world to be explored!" Thankfully, Pavlov's Luke, the Luke of the cerebellum begins subconsciously working his magic. "Yeah, big and beautiful. Well you can't have it, move along, nothing to see."
 
Cerebellar Luke's got the right idea; Conscious Luke is iceskating uphill. This disappointment, this Carteresque malaise, is my stupid rationality thinking that transcending circumstances is something other than impossible. He thinks there might be a chance I could do something worthwhile if I'd just stop taking the path of least resistance. Like I said, naive. He looks at the results, has the wherewithall to trace them back to their causes, has the intelligence--for lack of a better word--to turn this into a more or less representative algorithm for Luke's life. He sees the narrative arc and still swings blindly against it. Unfortunately, Conscious Luke has control of emotions, and being constantly broken at the wheel of fortune makes feelings of sadness and failure happen.
 
So this bloated, self-deceptive humunculus sits astride the instinctual cortices and gets mad. He tells them what horrible fuck-ups they are, cursing his luck to have been bound to such vile creatures, such automatons. "You plod along; your dyadic reasoning lacks foresight," he screams. He continually explains their shortcomings on the off chance they will someday understand. His complaints are legion: They are guileless, lazy, they lack ambition, they fail to see the myriad choices that lay before them. 
 
They, of course, do their jobs well: processing stimuli, responding accordingly with hardwired, algorithmic precision. The problem is the new guy--the lumpy mass encased in bone, bobbing in its own juices atop the much older bundles of synapses. The new management. It doesn't know its place; it thinks it's better than it is, all powerful. It genuinely believes the random mutation that gave rise to it was somehow better than those that gave rise to the other hunks of flesh, each more or less suited to its own mindless task.
 
This has always been the pivotal question for me. If evolution is going to work as a worldview, how do we explain consciousness? This isn't the freewill question mind you, I think that's a tertiary issue to the big problem. Evolution is the study of chance and advantage. It's like dungeons and Dragons. Roll the dice, calculate your survival traits, your short comings, your saving throws, etc. With all the handwringing, the self-doubt, the self-loathing, the crippling indecision, the arrogance, how can consciousness be a survival advantage? The answer, I think, is that it's not--not anymore.
 
I read a book once: A Primate's Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky.  It's the most interesting travel memoir I've ever read, but has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Another book of his, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, is about the nature of stress from a neurological standpoint. I didn't actually read that one. I read a review about it that seemed comprehensive enough that I could put off reading it--probably forever. Basically, stress is caused by adrenaline and certain other chemicals that flood your system when you sense danger. It's good shit; it has the effect of nitrous oxide to a riced-out Honda Civic, making you run faster, jump higher, think more clearly. This is great if you're more used to being hunted than being hunter. With our poor locomotion and soft hides, we need all the adrenaline we can get. One of our novel traits, according to Sapolski, is the ability to create the illusion of danger and thus, to a certain extent, create all the adrenaline we need. We can take previous stimuli--previous brushes with danger--and project that forward, sensing danger where it may be, rather than where it definitely is. That's consciousness, and it was apparently really good at keeping us from the jaws of tigers and whatnot and somehow helped us realize these fantastic cultural constructs. Kudos brain.  It is also, though, responsible for a myriad of stress-related ailments stemming from the constant stream of adrenaline we jumpy humans imagine into existence. Eventually, being too good at anticipating danger breaks us down physically. The point at which this becomes what we would call diagnosable paranoia isn't really important because, essentially, it's all paranoia to varying degrees.
 
All of which leads me to this conclusion. Now that we've effectively orchestrated an end-run around evolution--pulled out the weighted 12-sided die of civilization--all consciousness really does is break us down. It's harmful, disasterously harmful. We have ulcers, heart problems, crippling paranoia, insanity. We don’t have to worry about the jaws of animals anymore, only the brains of other humans. And it’s our own paranoid brains that are precisely the reason we have to fear our own kind. It’s us and the chimps--the only animals on earth who kill in cold blood. Do chimps get paranoid? That would be an interesting follow up, and might go towards an answer to whether unique ability in fact leads us down the equally unique and extreme path of preemptive slaughter.
 
Could it be that murder has something to do with a life lived in a state of constant fear? Michael Moore has made a career out of arguing there is. What would these guys say about it? What about the possible correlations with human expectation? Anticipating a narrative arc seems to be very similar to the act of constructing danger. Much like the adrenaline pumping mechanism, it is controlled by and subject to the interpretation of the big deflated grey Buddha-looking thing in our brainpans. So given the successes and failures that exist in my mind, the whiner makes judgements on where our life should be heading. It's this projection that has been bothering the hell out of me. The homunculus is tenacious in propping up his extrapolation, constantly nagging me to improve my position, to get my life where it "should" be. But at the same time cerebellar Luke continues to take the path of least resistance. The path of least resistance in this case, it seems, is placating conscious Luke. So at work I look for new jobs and contemplate my existence lackadaisically. Then once I'm free of the restraints of work, the easiest way for primordial Luke to get some rest is to shove conscious Luke in front of blinking lights and explosions.
 
The fact that I'm pretty good at videogames helps me feel like less of a failure. There is, though, a high turnover rate when you play games on easy difficulty.