Not Interested, Thanks

[I don’t often write what might be called ‘diary entries’, but for some reason I felt compelled to write this one. I don’t keep a diary, so I had to post it here. Caveat Lector] I seem to be losing the motivation to do things — to do most anything, really. I’m not depressed or unhappy about this, or anything, just uninterested in doing things that would seem to require considerable focus, attention, and energy. Sign of age, perhaps. For example: I have almost entirely ceased reading fiction, and ceased watching films and televised fiction. This is partly because I don’t like contrived drama (surely there’s enough ghastly drama in the real world), and partly because I get no joy from reading or hearing sad stories of suffering, real or invented, especially when these stories usually strike me as lame, contrived, and unimaginative. Why does anyone like consuming the imagined misery of imagined characters? What we have come to call ‘tragedy’ (not its original meaning — it actually comes…