Long-Term Self-Delusion

2010.05.26   prev     next

Maybe about 25 years ago, if not more, I decided that I was going to become fit enough to have defined abs. Not body-builder fit. Not chiseled (a state which I now understand can’t be maintained for much longer than a photo shoot anyway). Just fit enough that you can see my abdominal muscles.

So here I am 25 years later, and I don’t seem any closer to that goal than at the beginning of the 25 years. According to the official definitions, I’m “overweight,” and hovering near the edge of “obese.”

Is there something wrong with me, mentally?

Over the course of my life, I’ve met several forty-something guys who were extremely heavy — morbidly obese or beyond — and seemed to remain so for the entire time I knew them. It seems pretty likely to me that many or most of them had been obese since their teens or early 20s; in other words, about 25 years. In my attempts to cast their mental state in the most charitable light possible, I would imagine that sometime around the beginning of that 25-year period, they just decided that they wanted to be morbidly obese, and so that’s what they did. Not that they like being that heavy, other things being equal. But they know that other things are not equal, and they decided that the things you have to do, and not do, to avoid morbid obesity, just aren’t worth it.

But thinking about it now, I have to suspect that probably none of these guys made a decision like that. Like me, they’ve probably been spending the past 25 years thinking that they were going to turn it around any week now. If you could read these guys’ minds, you would probably find that they really think they’re going to start a fitness program sometime within the next few days, certainly by next Monday. If you could ask them where they’ll be in a few months (and get an honest answer), they’d say they’ll be substantially fitter, such that their friends and family members are commenting on how much better they look. And where will they be six months from now? Quite fit. A year from now? Very fit. Just like me. If you asked me any time over the past quarter-century if I would have noticeable abs a year from today, I would have said that it was highly probable, something like 80-90% likely.

What do I think about the fact that I’ve been thinking that for 25 years and nothing’s come of it? What do those morbidly obese guys think about that same statistic in their own lives? There must be some reason that we can think this way, year after year. Isn’t the classic definition of insanity to keep doing the same thing again and again, getting the same results each time, but each time thinking you’re going to get different results? Are the morbidly obese insane? Am I?

Insanity can come in many forms, but they all have one thing in common: disconnection from reality. Insane people are those who would prefer to believe that something is true even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it isn’t true, simply because they can’t bring themselves to accept a reality that doesn’t include that target of their desire. Morbidly obese people don’t just want to get fit, they want to get fit their way. They don’t just want their friends and family to think, “Wow, he got in shape,” they want them to think, “Wow he got in shape his way. He was right all along.” They want to be right.

Bill Phillips, my longtime fitness inspiration, says, “Half of getting what you want is knowing what you have to give up to get it.” If you really want to be fit, you have to give up your deluded ideas of how you were going to get there your way. You have to say, “This guy Bill really knows what he’s talking about — I need to do exactly what he’s telling me to do.”

Artistic Success

For the past 25 years, I’ve had another delusion: I’m going to make some successful works of art. Most recently, I have a great idea for a book. And a great idea for an iPhone app. But these ideas have been languishing for many months now (a year?), because I somehow just don’t have the time to work on them. I have a full-time Dilbert job. And when I’m not there, I’m spending time with my wife and son. And I’m picking up around the house, or mowing the lawn. And I’m watching TV. And I’m blogging (like right now). And I’m grocery shopping, or getting something at Walmart or Lowe’s. And I’m going out to eat. And yes, I’m exercising a bit too. And I’m sleeping. And I’m snacking. And I’m petting the cats. And paying the bills. But I’m not working on my book. And I’m not working on my app.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, I’m making zero progress on my book and my app. And that whole time, I keep thinking that I’m going to start working seriously on one or both of them any day now. And when I do, of course, I’m going to keep up that effort until it comes to fruition.

Am I crazy?

I told my wife about this recently, and she suggested that I might have to abandon her and my son to make these dreams of success come true. Of course, she wasn’t seriously suggesting that I do so — she was just saying that that might be the reality of the situation. A reality I don’t want to face.

Then, something like the very next day, we were watching TV (again), and a character from one of our favorite shows, Friday Night Lights, asked the successful artist for whom he was interning to tell him the secret of success as an artist. At first the artist tried to deflect the question, but then became exasperated and revealed the truth:

It was like a punch in the gut. Can that really be true? Is that the reality I face if I don’t want to be deluded for another decade or two?

I can’t keep doing the same things I’ve been doing. I wouldn’t be writing this if I still believed I could. But I can’t bear the thought that I would have to ruin all other aspects of my life to achieve artistic success. There are successful artists who have a family, right? And who paid the bills with a day job while achieving their first successes, right? I sure hope I’m not deluded to believe that.

But if I have no plans to sacrifice anything that I’ve been doing for the past many months, then I know I’m not going to get what I really want. I have to do something different, and hope that it’s enough to turn the trend around.

Because if it isn’t — if there isn’t any way, or none that I’m going to be able to find — then I’m just screwed. And I can’t wait until I’m dead to realize that. If my dreams are really impossible, there has to be point where I say, “This is it. This is what I got in this life. There isn’t any more, and there isn’t going to be.”

But I’m not ready to say that yet. Another year, then we’ll see.