Inertia

by Jamie Mahowald ’21

I’ve only moved once in the last four hours. I covered up a Russian language course book on the coffee table with a blanket, because I don’t want to look at the fact that I haven’t picked it up in six days, but otherwise I’ve been sitting on the couch, trying to come up with column ideas.

For the first week after March 12 — my birthday, of all days — I let myself lie on this couch and lie to myself that I was burned out. My junior year, O ye most salient and fearful of high school, the year that sucks out my soul and spits it right back in on a weekly basis, is being truncated by an event not seen on such a scale in a century. And here I am now, on my second rewatch of The Office.

For the first two weeks of quarantine I waited for some kind of amorphous motivation to arrive at my doorstep like an Amazon package I could never be bothered to place an order for, a motivation that would get me up and out of the house and on my journey toward the sun, except oh shoot it’s raining today? Darn I guess I can’t go over to White Rock.

Frankly I should know better — being at a place like St. Mark’s forces onto me that motivation is no more than a punishment devised by my current self to cheat my future self.

Last Sunday I had nothing serious to attend to, so I set up a thought experiment, a day-long inquiry into the psychology of my own discipline: After going for a run in the morning, I plopped myself on the couch and turned on the TV. On the coffee table to my right I placed three books I’d convinced myself I needed to read. At the keyboard a few feet in front of me was the music of two songs I’d committed to learn, and loaded on the computer screen was another unfinished song I’d been working on.

I told myself I would resist nothing — I would instead wait for the opportunity, for the motivation to get up and do the things I’d placed directly in front of me.

It never came. I went to bed that night without touching any of it.

My innate inertia revealed by this experiment cast a bright and unflattering light on the myth of all the things I’d do if only I had the time — here I am with all the time I will ever want, and I’ve seen every Saturday Night Live episode aired in the last four years.

In hindsight I had no more or less motivation back in B.C.E., Before the Corona Epidemic. I did have discipline, which is no more than the ability to root out thoughts of future motivation and plant in its place present productivity, and I’ve set my goal throughout the next couple weeks to regain that discipline again in a way I can use at home, so if you’re experiencing the same problem I am (and I know you are, don’t lie to me —you can lie to yourself, but don’t lie to me), I urge you to do the same.

It’s okay to feel sad right now. You and I have every right to the anger and indignance and the fear we feel that this chunk of our lives is vanishing before our eyes.

Change ripped through my junior year like a wildfire. I see an infant in the Jamie I was last August, and I can only hope I’m no more than an infant to the Jamie I will be next January, and every week promised something more dramatic than the last — one time it was a performance and another time it was a tornado and another time it was a letter. But then the change very suddenly stopped, and I saw that as an excuse to burn myself out, to lose all discipline I thought I had.

Inertia is the enemy to productivity, to dynamism, to life, and just because inertia is being forced onto us by circumstance, we don’t have to listen to it. As the great philosopher John Mulaney said, “It is statistically one hundred percent easier not to do things than it is to do them, and so much fun not to do them.”

We can’t motivate ourselves — I’ve found that motivation lives short and burns out, much like we do — but we can discipline ourselves. Or, at the very least, we can change ourselves. Change our mind. Change our habits.

St. Mark’s School of Texas

10600 Preston Road
Dallas, Texas 75230
214-346-8000

About Us

St. Mark’s School of Texas is a private, nonsectarian college-preparatory boys’ day school for students in grades 1 through 12, located in Dallas, Texas. St. Mark’s aims to prepare young men to assume leadership and responsibility in a competitive and changing world.

St. Mark’s does not discriminate in the administration of its admission and education policies on the basis of race, color, religion, sexual orientation, or national or ethnic origin.