My current focus in my life right now has to do with energy, motivation and how to do things in a way which remains compelling for me, rather than a grind I force myself to go through. From this I have noticed two main directions in which your attention and introspection can go: expansiveness, focused on what you want to do, and orthogonal, focused on the obstacles you meet.
Both are incredibly important to do, and the point of the distinction isn't to determine which one is "better", but rather the value of each and how they are complementary.
Expansive direction is typically the realm of classic self-help: identify something you want to do, motivate yourself through different methods such as pep-talks, visualisation, momentum, systems of accountability and increasing the visibility of the task at hand. The key insight here is that we tend to create what we focus on, so it makes a lot of sense to focus on positive things, not just the things we want to add, but also the aspects of our life we are grateful for.
The problem with expansiveness is that, sooner or later, you run into obstacles. Namely, your own resistance to the tasks at hand if you are trying to do something difficult and or comfortable. Perhaps you find that your surge of motivation has started to run out, or that you do not have as much free time as you had in the beginning and are starting to veer off the trajectory you would like, or the emotional difficulty of adapting to the changes is far more than you anticipated.
What I observe then is that the limitation of only directing your attention towards expansiveness is that you start becoming untethered from reality, in denial of the constraints which are bogging you down. Like the ambitious people who are trying to push everyone around them to do more even though they are burnt out, or the mind trying to bully the body into complying even though it is exhausted, this can be rather dangerous if taken to the extreme.
Orthogonal introspection then is about asking and answer the following question: why am I not doing the things I would like to do? I decided to name this "orthogonal" as opposed to something like "resistance" because the latter term is loaded with negativity, since resistance is rarely something we enjoy. If you want a visual metaphor to the two different outlooks, then imagine that change is like a river, that expansiveness is focused on the flow of that river, and that orthogonal introspection wishes to examine the rocks amidst the water which shape and disrupt its flow. The rocks aren't "bad" per se, they simply are where they are, but in some situations we might want to relocate them.
Because it is not just a lack of willingness which prevent things from getting done, there can be a multitude of factors such as: some sense of tension which occurs while you are doing the task. Or having to work within environments which are chaotic and demotivating. Or not being genuinely engaged in the task at hand, and only having a shallow interest in it. Or maybe the timing just isn't right, sometimes our interests come and go, like the cycles in nature, and it's preferable to admit that.
There are a variety of reasons why we might not be doing what we know we "should" be doing. Expansiveness is about doing the thing anyway, and there is genuine value in meeting resistance head-on. But if this is all that we do, then we risk fighting ourselves over and over, which is basically impossible in the long term from what I can tell. Orthogonal introspection is about identifying and dissolving the resistance, or in another term, facing our shadow.
The two form a really important dialogue: if all you did was focus on why you cannot do X, Y or Z, also known as being pessimistic then you wouldn't really feel compelled to do anything, prefering to look for excuses so as to not take responsibility for your life. And because our external life tends to be a reflection of our internal world, someone only focused on problems would find very few solutions, if any, and few things to be grateful for.
But as said above, blind optimism can create a significant shadow. Positive talk, motivation and effort might make you run into the same wall over and over again because you aren't willing to look at your limitations. If this happens, then there must be a reason, because life isn't some set of circumstances that simply manifest randomly. But if that reason hasn't been identified, then that reason must be something below our awareness, a principle we could call the Law of subtle causation.
Orthogonal introspection then is about seeing and feeling differently, so that we may act differently and not keep falling into the same traps. It can definitely turn into navel-gazing, which is why I think that the two directions of introspection need to dialogue with one another, to keep each other in check and to produce genuine change.
In summary, expansiveness is about focusing on what you want and what you enjoy. This is incredibly key for those of us who have gone through a disempowering childhood, where they felt like they were the victims of their circumstances, and that pleasure and satisfaction were always out of reach, unreasonable or perhaps even undesirable to have, the morality of pain and struggled as mentioned in a previous post about glorifying struggle.
Orthogonal introspection on the other hand is about focusing on what we are struggling with, and what the current circumstances are. If ignored, we might keep fighting against ourselves forever, or perpetuating the same patterns over and over again because we are not willing to face the pain of some past failures we could learn from.
The experience of parallax in our visual field can only exist because we have two eyes, each seeing slightly differently from one another. I suggest that this is the same here, but at a much larger scale, since it concerns our entire life and how we experience it. If positivity by itself was enough to shape our lives in better ways, then we would probably be surrounded by swarms of joyous people. Evidently, this isn't the case, so something more broad and dynamic needs to exist: a dialogue, not a unilateral obsession with a single principle.
Edit (23rd September 2025): Perhaps the terms "will" and "fate" are better reflections of the two ways of thinking. Will focuses on what you can accomplish through your own plans and determination. Fate focuses on what you must work with: your strengths and weaknesses, your circumstances, your shadow, which can become fate, as per Carl Jung's quote: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
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Conflict Productivity Block Observation Motivation Aliveness Will Fate Shadow
2025-09-21