Finding The Middle Ground On Motivation

The world can be a truly grim place if you let it get to you. We’re not going to have a new government for months and we might have to go to the polls again. Storms Ciara and Dennis have arrived to compound the misery. Coronavirus is supposedly coming to kill us all. And Donald Trump is still President.

It’s difficult to find some semblance of happiness on a planet that might be dying before our eyes. The news is a constant stream of negativity and these days it follows us in our pockets everywhere we go.

The title of the Dave Chappelle’s 2017 Netflix special, The Age of Spin, was in reference to this generation experiencing tragedy so often that it has become desensitized to it. It’s almost as if we’ve become passive to the goings-on around us.

It’s normal for politics to be an unsettling field of instability. The leader of the free world is a racist? Disappointed, but not surprised. It’s not really anything new under the sun, but is it any wonder Gen-Z is so defined by difficulty with mental health when we’re surrounded by a world that seems to be collapsing around us?

Perhaps the most striking evidence that our generation is so down in the dumps is the media we consume. We don’t just watch particularly dark films and shows, many relate to them. Rick and Morty’s popularity has been fuelled largely by its unique use of nihilism and darkness that young people seem to gravitate towards. I suppose it’s easier to rationalise the waves of negativity when nothing really matters anyway.

Not excusing the behaviour of the Clown Prince of Crime in Joker, but the audience response to the Oscar-winning flick was fascinating. This story had so long been one of a deranged psychopath in make-up terrorising Gotham City. We always rooted for Batman to thwart the Joker’s scheme.

Joaquin Phoenix’s tilt in the role humanised one of the most heinous villains in comic book history. It took the origins of the character out of the context of the world of superhumans and placed them in a frighteningly real setting. Save for the names of the characters on screen, the story of Arthur Fleck can and has happened in real life. Viewers didn’t just sympathise with the character; there was a certain degree of empathy attached as well.

All of that to say this; where do we turn to escape the rigours of real life? Even our most popular methods of escapism have been injected with the misfortune and monotony that we have to deal with ourselves.

Do we simply push through it? Motivation is something that’s hard to find unless it’s from something so overtly all about motivation. From Instagram influencers to the #MondayMotivation crowd on Twitter, it seems like one can’t find anything inspiring out there unless it’s aggressively inspirational. That’s just not everybody’s cup of tea.

Society is drifting further towards extremes. We’re more extreme politically, we’re more adversarial towards one another and people are increasingly isolating themselves from one another as a result. Just like politics, behaviour and opinion, we need to find a middle ground on motivation. There has to be a grey area between waiting for the end of the world and acting like everything is perfect.

The problem is society has grown to avoid grey areas like that same virus that some reckon spells impending doom.