Some time ago, I was discussing with a friend how overflowing anger, frustration and suffering can lead to the motivation to actually change your life to the better. The basic idea was that until a certain threshold of negative feelings for a specific aspect of your life is not reached, you will not put in the effort to change this aspect. While I agreed with the basic concept, I could not get rid of a slight unease I felt when I tried to wrap my head around it. It somehow felt so wrong, yet it sounded so right.
First of all, even back then I could come up with some negative aspects of this overflowing barrel idea. The thought of waiting for something to happen to you, here, the overflow of negative feelings, instead of taking your life into your own hands seemed wrong to me. However, this could easily be fixed by declaring the size of the barrel as the skill you have at controlling your life. Now, you can just train to lower the threshold for taking action, in other words shrinken the size of your own inner barrel, to decrease the time before between you having an idea and you actually implementing this idea. This training would then be progress towards not procrastinating your life.
It seemed like the correct view on the problem and so I rolled with it, even though it still felt wrong. Some time later, I thought about this discussion again and realized that I got the initial idea completely wrong. To repeat: Until a certain threshold of negative feelings for a specific aspect of your life is not reached, you will not put in the effort to change this aspect. I, unconsciously, turned this around and assumed it meant: you will change an aspect of your life, whenver a certain threshold is reached. The turned around phrase has one crucial flaw in it, which was also the root for my unease: the assumption that I will. The difference in these two statements is that the first only states the overflowing barrel as one of potentially many prerequisites that have to be met in order to change, whereas the second states that it is the only one.
At first glance, this might not pose such a stark difference in the meaning or at the very least not seem so problematic, but this changes when you think about the consequences of an overflowing barrel that you are wearing on your back. When the negative feelings fill up your barrel and you do not change, because there are still other things that prevent you from changing, then the overflowing barrel will crush you. In other words, the negative feelings go from an occasional mood to being the norm, in other words: you become depressed. And this was the unease I felt when talking about the overflowing inner barrel. It should not be viewed as just a skill one has to hone, but rather a danger everyone has to avoid.
This also aligns with what can be observed in the world: people get so deep into the cave of procrastinating away their life that they cannot see the light of the outside anymore when they turn around. Instead, they run in circles in a dark place and at some point may even give up completely. Taking your life into your own hands is not only about having a fulfilled life, but also about not losing yourself.
And so I think that waiting for the inner barrel to overflow before you take action is the wrong approach. Instead of slowly filling your own barrel, you should try to empty it as often as possible.
Ash