Recently my company hired another person to work with me. we are supervisors in a warehouse, it isn't exciting but I guess it is a job that needs to be done. This new hire has been with us about 6 months but he recently changed start times and I am working with him more frequently. This is pretty good because we have a lot in common, mostly in our personalities.
My coworker friend has been down lately, the kind of depression that hits everybody from time to time, the kind that comes about when one takes stock in their life. About a week ago he was online looking something up and I asked him what he was doing. He stated he was trying to learn about something but he just can't get wrapped up in it. He turned to me and told me that he was sad by this because at one point he had a great hunger to learn new things, and now he just doesn't.
Almost jokingly I started to speak in an almost poetic rebuttal to his statement to which he responded, we went back and forth becoming more frank and less poetic to the sad reality that we had to face. Life has become too complicated to take anything else in. Our hypothesis is that our wanting to learn new things was destroyed by three things, lack of time, necessity to learn things we HAVE to learn, and distractions.
Lack of time is pretty self explanatory. We both recalled college and the abundant time we had to immerse ourselves into anything we desired. Sure we were learning school work but we were in the major of our choice, we wanted to learn these things and we wanted to learn more. College lacked responsibility and if we weren't doing things we shouldn't, we still had plenty of time to take in anything our hearts desired. Time now is of short supply. Work, commuting, daily tasks and chores make time to learn impossible. Recently I started going to the gym daily. This change, plus work, plus commuting, plus rollerderby, plus some sleep means I have no time for anything else.
Necessity to learn things we HAVE to is our second problem. Quite often we are required to learn things just to do our jobs. It might be company policies, new initiatives or strategies that we have to read about, do tutorials and take tests for. Unlike college these topics are not of much interest to us but we have to learn them. But not only this, we HAVE to learn in our daily lives as well. Just to keep up you constantly need to learn new technology, read up on new health trends and learn about new things that come up in the news. There are so many things that we have to learn that it makes us frown at the prospect of learning anything new.
Finally distractions. Recently I subscribed to the Adobe Creative cloud. I want to learn as many programs as I can, but 2 months later I haven't done anything. I procrastinate all the time and any free time I possibly have I spend trying to distract myself from my life. We both admit our lives are far from what we wished them to be, but we are stuck where we are because we have to adult. It is this great trap we have entered and we fear we will never escape. Adult life is not fun, it isn't adventurous or grand, it is tedious and boring at best and we constantly want to distract ourselves from that fact.
Logically all this makes sense, however in the end they are just excuses. What bothered us both about all of this is that we want to learn a variety of things but we find ourselves tied down. It may be a mental block cause by the reasons I listed above, but it is a barrier neither of us know how to pass. We are cognizant of this fact and still can't do anything about it.
My friend and I have had many conversations about many topics, however it boils down to the fact we don't really love what we do. In many ways we have resigned ourselves to the life we live and lost heart for whimsy. In other words, maybe we don't want to learn new things because we don't feel they will help us in any way, or that life will always be this incarnation it is now. This is some dark shit and in the end very depressing. Ultimately all of this got refined to the question this blog is titled after... when did I stop wanting? When did I stop wanting to learn, to grow, to move, to experience? When?