Motion-addiction

The story of impatience

I have not been writing through the past month. This is a cause of greater anxiety than I can let on. Perhaps, it is called writers’ block, a word that I cast a side-eye on usually. Perhaps, it is overstimulation - too much travel, too many things going on at the same time, too much conversation so much so that I can’t hear myself think.

Crowds are a good thing. They lead to fodder for writing. But there is perhaps such a thing as too much fodder. A goldmine. A database - that one can’t quite sift through. Everywhere people are talking about AI, in which I have little interest. It charts out a chatter-trail through which man makes his own destruction. If I were to lend my mind’s work to AI, I would land on a 404 page without access to my interiority. That is AI’s job maybe. To empty out our interiorities. That is the story of technology, I think. The story of impatience.

Soil, forests, minds, mines need for periods of time to be fallow. Unproductive.

When I don’t write, I wonder what a fallow soilscape feels like. Perhaps, this is what rest feels like, that which the Burnout Society (as Byung chul Han would call it) comes to occupy uncomfortably. I am burnt out; Byung chul han’s analysis of self-motivation and the destruction caused by it, appear a bit too true.

I read this wonderful essay on fire and the ecology of Burning. If there is not enough energy to be released, burning and its associated productive metaphors do not help. There has to be a substantial reserve of metal, wood, or thought, whatever it is that your favourite form of burning entails. Burning, in my favourite form that is mining the mind constantly for production, is no longer sustainable. It’s my productive anxiety that keeps the flame flickering however feebly. Acquiring rest from this machinic attitude to the mind is not easy. Too much exercise of whatever form leads to a kind of motion-addiction. Perhaps, I have some version of it. Motion-addiction. The ecologies of stillness lead me into anxiety.

These are my last days in Vrindavan. I am not sure when I will come back to this strange city again. I watch people watching the river on sultry evenings. The river has no anxiety about speed, no motion-addiction. It is completely full, coming up to the ghats in the time of the monsoon. It seems still, but is in motion.

[Vrindavan riverside. 19 July, 2025. Copyright: Atreyee Majumder.]