Why are you doing what you’re doing?
Much of our actions are driven by unconscious forces, and this is fine as it pertains to the beating of our hearts or the expansion of our lungs. But for anything voluntary this is absolutely consequential.
Knowing the reasons behind your actions matters because every act has both potential positive and negative consequences. To not know why you’re doing what you’re doing is to necessarily invite negative consequences that only end in contradiction. This is not a problem in itself—it matters less whether contradiction is happening, and more whether the stance towards it is one of responsibility or one of avoidance, and how deep that avoidance goes.
While not all actions are equal—some are clearly recognised as addictive or dysfunctional—for example drug-taking, smoking, abuse, and increasingly so phone use—all behaviours are dysfunctional when taken to extremes. And not only behaviours but any aspect of personality or character pushed to its limits becomes dark. Many of the things we would consider normal or even healthy can actually be devastatingly unhealthy.
Thankfully we have an inbuilt warning system around this which is the conscience. Our conscience has been there since the start and can always tell us whether what we are doing is misaligned or not, irrespective of what our conscious will and external pressures might also be telling us. Similarly there is also the felt experience of tension and suffering—a metaphysical necessity that must eventually lead to the break down of any misalignment.
The theme again is not whether tension is occurring, but how attuned or open you are to tension when it occurs, and how you choose to respond to it when it does.
There are three levels of awareness you can bear in mind to conceive of and understand the drivers behind any action and how ‘conscious’ it is—three movements in the development of insight. These are: impulsive, dissonant and synthesis (or integrated).
At the impulsive level of awareness one simply does what they want because it feels good and that’s about as far as it goes. It could be sensory indulgence of some kind, ostentatiousness, bragging, promiscuity or any number of other immediate means of meeting a need. I eat chocolate because it feels good. I seek out sex because it feels good. I force my neighbours to hear my music because it feels good. I seek attention because it feels good and that’s about the extent of my reasoning. And I will do so using the lowest common denominator method available to me that most expediently patches this need. There is no awareness of why exactly the behaviour feels good, let alone of any downsides to it or how oneself might be causing them.
This is not to say there’s anything wrong with food, sex, having attention, or any of this; only that when the processes behind seeking anything are unchecked then they must necessarily lead to problems and distortions. Which, when they do occur, escape any conscious link being made between causes and consequences.
A fairly relatable example of ‘making the link’ is when drinking alcohol leads to a hangover. Most western folks reading this can relate to this objectionable phenomenon. Have several drinks in the evening and you will wake up with a headache. Maybe even have several drinks in the morning and a headache in the evening, and perhaps even have another drink to make the headache go away.
Sometimes the hangover can be so excruciating that you vow never to drink again, but fast forward six days and you’re repeating the process. It’s not hard to make the link here between the action and the outcome, and yet the reason it continues is because the two parts making each decision independently are simply not talking to each other nor able to reach any mutually acceptable agreement. There is a need to have a talk with oneself and it might be a difficult one.
But where responsibility is not being taken, or where the tension to be traversed seems too great, or where the link between cause and effect remains obscured for too long, level two awareness of the action starts to emerge.
Level two awareness shows up as dissonance. At this point both sides of a decision—the yes and the no—are encroaching to some extent on consciousness, but they are not both being given full consideration or the opportunity to somehow have it out. One understands at some level that there is something unwholesome about their behaviour, or that it is not socially acceptable, or they might regard these two things as equivalent. But in any case this is incompatible with the desire to do it.
This gives rise to tension—a tension simply between the part of them that wants to do what makes them feel good right now, and the part of them that knows that it is also harmful. And the cleanest apparent solution to this is to find some way to placate that dissonance. This is not really a solution, but it does ease the tension for a while and hence appears like one.
The cliché that somehow isn’t yet regarded as such is prancing about on social media under some other pretence. LinkedIn despite professional appearances is one of the most dissonant platforms. But dissonance pervades all of them. Posting for one reason, but making out it’s another; posting a video of yourself in yoga pants whilst claiming it’s to help people do yoga; posting a shirtless image of yourself doing an overhead press whilst claiming it’s about teaching people how to do the overhead press; smoking cannabis because it “helps your anxiety;” so on and so forth. Look at what’s in my right hand, not in my left.
Again the point is not that any particular behaviour itself is necessarily bad or wrong. Because that would presuppose one particular moral code over another. The point is not any particular outward behaviour in itself but the contradiction that sits behind it. No one can tell you the way forward—your own experience will tell you that if you listen. Non-contradiction must always be the aim.
In shadow work circles there is sometimes talk of ‘shadow benefits’. There is no limit to the number of convincing sounding reasons available for justifying all kind of dissonant behaviours while hiding the full set of reasons even from oneself.
Known suffering is often less scary than unknown freedom. Victimhood is often easier than the unknown of change or asserting yourself. Generalising the opposite sex as bad is often easier than confronting the possibility of nuance and what that brings up in turn. Identifying with your personality preferences is often easier than working with them, like an introvert who now has an excuse to not meet with the world. Sometimes there is the opposite problem and embracing your preferences wholly, which would be an act of true self-love, is the truly difficult thing. As always there is truth to both sides, but finding the deeper truth always requires a meeting of both.
Sometimes even disabilities and medical labels can be held onto precisely because a person secretly benefits from having them. It’s no longer merely a physical state of anxiety or distraction or whatever, but my Aspergers, my ADHD and my anxiety. Medicalisation provides an almost unassailable defence that no one ought dare to challenge. Medicalise a pattern of tendencies or behaviours and you will find some temporary relief, but every label is as much a pointer towards understanding as it is a limitation on it. The fact this is controversial to point out is itself the tell.
Whether or not you believe you are responsible, you’re probably right.
It is only through tussling with the light and dark sides of both the impulse and its antithesis that one experiences the third movement of insight into any given behaviour, and that is synthesis.
Synthesis means to have brought both sides into awareness and reconciled them. One understands the answer to the question ‘why am I doing what I’m doing?’ They see the need for gratification, security, justice, attention, to be loved and admired, to be significant, and they don’t deem any of it as bad or wrong in itself. These can all have wholesome roots, but they must be considered alongside their impacts when unacknowledged, and the need for their opposite.
Getting attention is not merely ‘me getting attention’—it is also another person giving attention. Selling something doesn’t merely get you money—it also transfers it from someone else. Gratification is needed but it isn’t a permanent state. And not only isn’t but cannot be, because otherwise there would be no growth, no journey and nothing here in the first place to be gratified.
At the level of synthesis, the link has been made between causes and consequences. One understands precisely what actions have led to the current experience, as well as what decisions made now will lead to in the future. By being conscious of both causes and consequences, they can truly make the right decisions for them that reconcile inner contradiction.
Only the third level of awareness can truly meet both needs and therefore be used to enact meaningful change. Everything else on the way is merely compromise and displacement into other behaviours.
Why are you doing what you’re doing?
