Apathy: Sometimes, motivation is a foolish thing.

You will find words and phrases like indifference, lack of energy, impassiveness, lack of concern, the attitude of not caring and lack of enthusiasm when you search for the meaning of apathy.

Apathy is not inadequacy but an unwillingness to use our power when opportunity abounds

As we have established in this series, people are not mad — there is a thought process to every decision and action. This tells us there is a process to feeling apathetic.

You are wired to choose life and pleasure over pain and death. This means you are constantly negotiating these four options:

You: Can I have life and pleasure?

Life: No!

You: Can I at least stay alive then?

Life: Well…If you can fight.

You: Can I fight without dying?

Life: Yes, if you fight hard enough.

You: Okay. Can I fight hard without getting an injury?

Life: Are you kidding?

You: Fine! I will fight if I do not die.

While this is not how it always plays out, it is a good representation of how you negotiate with yourself and life.

Fighter Mentality

The more challenges you go through, the more likely beatdown you will feel if you do not heal the injuries that come with those challenges.

Think of yourself as a striker going onto the pitch for a match even though you have one hurt ankle. Your intentions look good — you still want to play, but you will sabotage your team if you do not take care.

Many times, we attempt jumping from one battle to another. Because of this, we do not have injuries; we become mangled flesh.

Battles will keep coming, but we do not have to be on every field.

When we focus too much on the fight, we do not realize when we have succeeded.

This happens with goal-setting— people want to be successful and they put in the work so often that they do not realize they have surpassed their goals.

The fighter mentality is amazing if you know how to stop and recharge yourself. As they say, “It is easier to die for something than to live for it”.

When you keep fighting and you begin to feel like the war (life) will never end, you are very likely to slip into a place of apathy.

Journal Questions

1. What are the things I am presently fighting for and against?
2. What drains my resources the most?
3. How long have they drained my resources?
4. Where do I feel fatigued?
5. How long have I felt fatigued?
6. What do I need to see, hear, touch or hold to stop feeling this way?

Essence of Q1

The things you fight for are the things that give you the power to wake up daily, while the things you fight against are the things that make your good day awful.

Example: If an abuse victim gets out of abuse into therapy and gets a good life because you worked them through it, that is something you fought for. Fighting against will be setting laws, advocating and highlighting abuse in society.

Different sides of the same coin but fighting against can significantly drain your energy if you do not find a way to refocus and see the goodness in your actions.

Advocacy is fantastic. However, realize you are speaking to a million people and have to constantly search for evidence to show them how terrible things are. The downside is that you feed on negative news to prove your points.

So you do not get frustrated by people’s responses, find a way to connect with victims whom your advocacy work has rescued and focus on their journey instead so you can draw energy.

Essence of Q2 and Q3

Whatever drains your resources is supposedly your area of passion. However, if you do not gain the results you are looking for, it becomes frustrating to keep throwing resources down the drain.

I love how the Oxford Languages Dictionary defines drain:

1. To cause the water or other liquid in (something) to run out, leaving it empty or dry.
2. To deprive of strength or vitality.

Synonyms: empty (out), remove the contents of, void, clear (out), unload, evacuate.

If you can track how long something has been draining you, it becomes easier to trace when frustration set in, what triggered it and how the apathy started. This information helps you and your therapist know what to specifically focus on.

Essence of Q4 and Q5

Where Q2 and Q3 focus on what you lost, these focus on how you felt. At what point in your passionate pursuit of life, purpose and passion did you start feeling the burnout, how long have you managed that, and what have you been using to power yourself?

You will never get this information if you do not shut up and listen to yourself.

Sometimes, motivation is a foolish thing to be practising when what you should be doing is listening and tracking.

Listening to your internal dialogue, spending time with yourself, recording your train of thought, and ensuring you are self-aware enough to shut down or expedite what is happening inside you.

If you are too proud to admit fatigue, rest assured you will convince yourself to pursue something else that will drain you more.

Essence of Q6

We are afraid to specify what success means to us because it becomes harder to overlook the failure.

I recently discovered that specificity means I have to dream in detail like what I want is in front of me — that is scary because the picture, the experience and the reality become an undeniable want or craving.

However, if we cannot dare to dream, how do we want to handle it? What level of success will annihilate your fatigue? Know it!

Proving Points

Do you want to win or prove a point? They look identical but are significantly different — one is yours (internal), and the other is for others (external).

This quote stood out to me the first time I read it, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his” ― Gen George S. Patton.

We are so focused on the fight that we convince ourselves that our death is the measure of passion. While a willingness to sacrifice certain pleasures and even our lives is required to focus, we want to ensure we focus on what happens after victory is achieved.

Our world would be better if many of our heroes past stayed alive to secure their victories and not leave it to novices and people who just wanted titles.

As a parent, are you fighting for your kids (overall health), or are you just fighting for their stomachs and clothes on their backs? As a boss, are you fighting for the organization (overall values), or are you just fighting to cut down overhead costs?

With life’s battles, victory is not always about proving your points to others that you have resources (time, energy, people, and money) but winning without losing yourself (empathy, joy, energy, focus, the cause…etc).

Way too many times, people try to recover from trauma like a revenge mission — I will prove to them that I can live without them. Well, one of three things could happen that you do not have control over

1. They might not look at you long enough to realize you are healing
2. They might not care about the point you are proving
3. They could physically die while you are healing

You are likely to get discouraged faster and fall into apathy when your healing focuses on them rather than you.

Journal Questions

1. Why am I fighting so hard?
2. What are the benefits of my fight?
3. Will I be successful if no one ever notices?
4. How am I ensuring I stay victorious?

Essence of Q1

Think of this like a truth or dare game, except this time, every lie in your response dares you to live a life of tiredness, resentment and frustration. The only way out is truth — stop lying to yourself.

Confront why you fight, however terrible, petty or powerful it makes you feel and sound. Interestingly, you can fight for power, pettiness and pity simultaneously.

The only downside to this strategy of having opposing reasons is that your energy is divided, and you do not get the full result for any singular reason.

You could be fighting hard to get the victim card — investigate your intention.

Essence of Q2 and Q3

We all show up every day because there is a benefit to what we do — it makes us feel good, people respect us, we get to say, “I did for…what no one did for me”, and we get to point at our life’s work.

Other times, we show up because the benefits of what we do prove a point to the naysayers — you get to laugh last on the subject.

If your successes do not feel successful because they did not notice it, then you have fought to prove points. That is why answering honestly is required.

If you realize you are fighting to prove points, it does not mean your fight is wrong — it means you are not healed in an area, and your success is a bandage for your hurt.

Essence of Q4

The answer here will give you the tenacity to stay in the fight on days you want to throw in the towel. This will ensure that your fatigue gets treated as fatigue, and your hurts get treated as hurts.

It will ensure you know which battles are worth jumping at and which are worth sitting out. It will give you focus on how to negotiate with people and situations.

You go hard always because you have not thought about sustaining your victory.

Until you realize what victory is and how to sustain it, you will keep having high enthusiasm and apathy — a rollercoaster ride.

Get out of Apathy!

Know your limits: I know you want to change the government and end world trauma, hunger and climate change issues. However, realize there are thousands of contributing factors to those situations — you are not the only stakeholder.

As you put in more than your best, give yourself room to live so you do not go insane and lose faith in change.

Acknowledge what was lost: contrary to popular opinions, loss of faith and hope is apathy. The physical or emotional experience that minified your faith is merely the trigger.

Get help: you do not need generic social media motivation here but personalized therapy where you confront what was lost, make room for grief and create an intervention for moving forward.

Sometimes, we lose things and people we had. Other times, we grieve the possibilities of what could have been.

Apathy sets in when we feel deprived of the power to dream and other times when we lose the power to hold onto those dreams. Either way, there is something to grieve over.

Take a break: if you do not take breaks between your passionate work, your emotions will take a break on your behalf to keep you sane. Unfortunately, your body keeps working without that internal energy — this forces you to use more force on yourself.

Rest! Take breaks from the intensity of the things you do.

Set a gauge: determine how long your breaks are, what kind of energy tells you to work, take a break…etc. There are specific months of my year when I am no one’s therapist or coach — I have found I am more drained during those months when I try.

Those months are not draining because they exist in a calendar but because of the preceding schedules in the months before them. So, be realistic about the stamina you have when you are living at a certain intensity.