Have you met non-serious people who long to be serious?
I am one of those people—modulo some possible definitional skew, of course, especially around to what degree someone who wishes to be different from how they are can be considered to wish for it coherently.
I know that right now I am not acting seriously almost at all, and I feel a strong dislike of this condition. Most of my consciously held desires are oriented in the direction of seriousness. A great deal of me longs to be serious in wholeness, but that desire is also being opposed by a combination of deep (but ego-dystonic) conditioning, some other murkier limitations that seem ambiguously biological and in any case have been very difficult to get at or pin down, and some major internal conflicts around which path to be serious about—whose resolution in turn is being obstructed by the rest of it.
Edited to add: to be clear, this isn’t a statement about whether the article winds up actually being useful for helping people become more serious, and indeed I have a vague intuition that most reading-actions applied to articles of this general nature may decay into traps of a “not getting out of the car” variety. (If I had a better way that I thought would be useful to talk about, I’d be talking about it.)
I am one of those people—modulo some possible definitional skew, of course, especially around to what degree someone who wishes to be different from how they are can be considered to wish for it coherently.
I know that right now I am not acting seriously almost at all, and I feel a strong dislike of this condition. Most of my consciously held desires are oriented in the direction of seriousness. A great deal of me longs to be serious in wholeness, but that desire is also being opposed by a combination of deep (but ego-dystonic) conditioning, some other murkier limitations that seem ambiguously biological and in any case have been very difficult to get at or pin down, and some major internal conflicts around which path to be serious about—whose resolution in turn is being obstructed by the rest of it.
Edited to add: to be clear, this isn’t a statement about whether the article winds up actually being useful for helping people become more serious, and indeed I have a vague intuition that most reading-actions applied to articles of this general nature may decay into traps of a “not getting out of the car” variety. (If I had a better way that I thought would be useful to talk about, I’d be talking about it.)