A Minor Crisis of Self

This past week, after stumbling upon a friend's blog, I realized something about myself.

I am no longer an intellectual person.

For the first four years of college, I loved to learn.  I mean yeah, it was homework and tests and that sucked, but I adored just gobbling up knowledge in both of my majors and anywhere else I could find it.  I wanted to know more and more and didn't want to stop learning more.  I wanted to talk about everything I learned, discuss it and argue about it until I turned blue in the face.  In my fifth year, my motivation to learn started getting edged out by my hatred of tests and homework, and by the end I just wanted to be done.  However, I promised myself that I would start reading for recreation again, something I stopped doing somewhere between my sophomore and junior years due to just being too goddamn busy, because I knew it was one way I could force myself to do something that stimulated my brain.  There were so many classic novels that I want to read (Ender's Game, 1984, Brave New World, to name a few) and I knew I would have time once I graduated.

It never happened.  Once I graduated, I was so burned out from reading for classes (my last two semesters were brutal in the mindless reading category) that I never picked up another book.  I feared that this would last forever.  Luckily for me, a new opportunity presented itself.  I found myself in a new job that required a lot of travel, including flying all over the damn country.  Finally, I decided, I would have time with which I couldn't do anything but read.  I bought a stack of books, made a list of more to buy, and got really excited about the prospect of doing something intelligent again.

Guess what happened.  Go on, guess.  I made it through a grand total of TWO books before I started bringing my DS with on my flights.  Fucking TWO.  And one of them barely even counts (The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons.  While entertaining and very educational, I can't exactly say that learning about the history of the NBA expanded my intellectual base).  If anyone's curious, the other was Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, which was definitely stimulating.  And sitting in my stack, untouched, a veritable treasure trove of modern classics (Blood Meridian, Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, several books by Haruki Murakami, etc).  When I realized this, I become disgusted with myself, only to realize further that my entire self has become rather shallow.

My personal life (not counting spending time with my lovely girlfriend) basically consists of watching television shows (hence why a future post is going to be an in-depth analysis of How I Met Your Mother.  Brace yourselves), surfing the internet, and playing video games.  When did I revert to a 14 year old version of myself?  What the hell happened?

This is especially jarring to me because, generally, the rest of my life is rather great.  I love my girlfriend, I have a great job that is going to offer me a lot of opportunity in the future, I have finally gotten myself healthy physically (losing more than 80 lbs in the last year) and I am about to move out of the shithole that is Columbia Heights.  My life is generally good, but it's missing something.  It is missing the intellectual challenge I received nearly every day while in college.  It is missing the passionate arguments about politics, business, ethics, hell, even life.  I always hoped that I could rely on my friends for this stimulation once I graduated, only to realize that the vast majority of my friendships have become shallow voids or have faded into nothing.  I can count the number of truly close friends that I have on one hand, and I'm lucky if I get to see them twice a month.  I just plain don't have any motivation to improve myself intellectually, simply because I don't have to.

I'm not even really sure what I want to do about any of this, or what I even can do about any of it.  I need to do something different, whether that be meeting some new people I can spar with, or trying to reconnect with some old friends, just something.  I can't keep going on the way I am, because it is inevitably going to drive me insane.  We'll see what happens.