Fear, Fever, Thrill

While I was an undergraduate I came to know the most peculiar individual. He existed on the periphery of my social circle; but as a figure of popular discussion, he was legendary. He was known simply as "Bri" (as in "Brian"), and the reason for his fame was actually nothing exceptional. He was an alcoholic, pure and simple. But what made Bri so peculiar was the way he was mythologized. Not only did we tell tales of Bri's spirits-soaked exploits, but we did so within a certain theoretical framework. The peculiarity of all this was that Bri himself provided the framework for his own myth. In Bri's terms, his life was defined by a cycle, and the cycle could be captured in a tripartite conceptual form: the fear, the fever, and the thrill.

The fear is best captured by the period of self-loathing and depression that usually comes on Sunday mornings. The fear is a state of being in which one is wrought with anxiety. One is unable to live in the present, as concerns about the future dominate consciousness.

The fear can last for hours, days, or even weeks. But when it does subside, it transitions into the fever. An illustrative example of the fever is happy hour. All day long one agonizes at one's desk, staring at a computer, completing mundane tasks that no one will ultimately care about. One is painfully aware of one's cosmic impotence, constantly staring out the window thinking, "Shouldn't I be hunting a pig with a spear right now?" But the hours tick away and a light appears at the end of the tunnel. Text messages begin to role in: "Pub @ 5?" One's fear begins to slip away, and a general excitement for the evening hours is awakened in the soul. The seemingly unlimited potential of the night becomes more and more real. The fever has set in.

As the fever reaches its highest pitch, one begins to transition to the thrill. The thrill tends to correlate with intoxication, but it need not. The thrill sets in as the fever subsides, along with the last traces of futural oriented life. All of the agitation caused by thoughts of what might be has slipped away at this point, as a momentary Dionysian form of being takes root. Whereas a cosmic impotence characterized the soul during the fear, and arousal characterized the fever, the thrill is felt as a sort of virility. Each moment seems drenched in significance. Momentary glimpses of infinity abound.

Of course, the thrill gradually dies down. From a burning blaze to glowing embers, the thrill exhausts its fuel as quickly as it is fed. Pure activity gives way more and more to stagnation, paralysis--i.e., the fear.

More and more, I find the fear-fever-thrill cycle applicable to my own life. While it began as a way to characterize the pattern of substance abuse, I have realized that it is suitable for describing other activities. Partaking in sport, for instance, follows a similar pattern for me. Even my reading/writing habits can be made to fit the fear-fever-thrill cycle. But generally speaking, it best describes the waxing and waning of social life: the fear of being alone, the fever of anticipated interaction, the thrill of communion. Furthermore, each stage of the cycle always already contains the seed of the next stage. The fear, characterized by existential dread, conditions the futural thought that becomes exciting during the fever. The fever is exciting precisely because of the thrill which defines its horizon. And while the thrill is the closest one comes to living in the moment, one might argue that it already contains the seeds of its own destruction. In the midst of the thrill, one knows, in the back of one's mind, that this too shall pass. The thrill will end, and the uncertainty of the morrow will return.

Phenomenological Lottery

The last post was quite technical, I realize. So in this post I will do some similar phenomenological work, but on a more basic kind of experience, and in a more plain manner, as I am basically winging this right now.
During a recent conversation with an associate, in which I brought up a favorite topic of mine: winning the lottery, I did some quick phenomenological reflection and was able to come up with a very precise way to account for both the similarities and differences between our experiences. Some meta-reflection on what had just happened made me appreciate and understand phenomenology more, which I'll say more about later. The conversation went something like this:
I brought up how much I love fantasizing about winning the lottery. (Its true! I don't know exactly why, but I simply love thinking about what I would do with millions of dollars. Whether I would actually do any of these things is of course impossible to determine. But the fact remains that I derive great joy from simply thinking about such things, which I think is at least modest evidence for the fact that I would actually do them...anyway...). My associate told an amazing story about how a friend of his had bought him a modest amount of stock in a bio-tech company. After awhile he received a message from his friend telling him that the stock had gone up five-hundred percent. Mistakenly thinking that five-hundred percent meant 500X the initial investment instead of what it actually means--5X (still not bad at all!)--my associate spent an entire day unaware of his error. This is a fascinating set-up because it means that my associate spent about a day of his life as a millionaire. It is sufficient, but not necessary, to actually be a millionaire in order to spend a day as a millionaire. All that is is needed to spend a day as a millionaire, technically, is the assured belief that one is a millionaire. Thus, my associate spent that day literally mapping his empire, planning his various degrees of charity and largess, contemplating how to live with the inevitable joy that awaited him in his newly acquired wealth. Of course, all of this came to an abrupt end upon realizing the magnitude of his mathematical error. But nevertheless, all of this is enough to ground the truth of the statement that my associate knows what its like to be a millionaire in a way that I never have. While we have both entertained the same propositional content, namely "I am a millionaire" , we have entertained it in completely different ways. My associate believed that he was a millionaire, for however brief a time. I will never have such a belief, unless I actually win the lottery or fall prey to some similar drunken math. I have only hoped to be a millionaire, and imagined being a millionaire.
The phenomenological point is that the overall content of the experience is best articulated by taking into account both properties of the object of consciousness "I am a millionaire" and properties of the experience of the object of consciousness "believing", "wishing", "imagining" etc.

As for my metareflections on phenomenology, the whole experience of sharing these stories and then thinking about them in this way made me realize that my phenomenological training may amount to something like: the ability to make very fine and precise distinctions between both the types and tokens of objects, properties, and other sorts of categories in a very consistent way that allows for a standardized form in which to compare experiences. A bit of a mouthful, but I'm working on it. I'm beginning to realize that doing phenomenology means constantly formulating an ever clearer and more concise definition of phenomenology.