Context: In the super-awesome detective series called ‘True Detective’ (Season 1), Rusty Cohle and Marty are working on this Dora Lange Case where a women is found raped and mutilated in the middle of a field. The dead body is set up in quite a show – she’s got antlers tied on top of her head, tattoos of potentially ritualistic symbols drawn on her, weird wooden objects placed besides her and so on and so forth. So Rusty and Marty go about chasing the leads in trying to solve this case.

That’s when this phrase comes up. Days of Nothing.

It’s a part of one of Rusty’s many profound rhetorics throughout the series. This one occurs when he talks about how it is like to ‘work a case’. Here’s the transcript from the series:

Rusty Cohle : “Days of nothing. That’s what it’s like you work cases. Days like dogs.

Marty: “It goes on like that, you know the job. you’re looking for narrative… uh… interrogate witnesses… parcel evidence… establish a timeline… build story… day after day.”

Point: That’s the point of how the days have been. Days of Nothing. I’ve been looking for narrative. Trying to establish a timeline of events, to build a story (of my life), day after day. But all i’m ending up with is days of nothing. Many of us try to do that – take control of the narrative, pull out the first person from the story of our lives into third person and start dictating how things go and will go. Sometimes, we are able to get into third person and actually drive the story in the direction we want it to go. Many times, however, it’s only a fictitious exercise. All in our heads. 

That’s how many times the days go by, thinking and day dreaming about the narrative we would want, only to realise that the night is closer and so is Monday. And it sucks. That’s not how life is supposed to be like. Even if one might argue that due to circumstances and responsibilities and so on and so forth, life is supposed to be like that, I’d just argue that it still isn’t meant to be like that.

I’d just close this part with a quote I saw from Ayn Rand on my timeline.

Context Level 2: Level 2 context is the complete post above. Additional information is an article that I found on my timeline shared by a friend – It’s titled: “How the internet, dopamine and your brain are working together to screw your potential”. It hypothesises that there are two types of creators: Replication creators (RC) and Skilled Creators (SC). It goes on to state that our brain produces dopamine in both cases (Dopamine is that hormone-drug that makes us feel happy… one of the ways it gets triggered is when we think we create something). The problem is, that with the access to internet, we are always finding material, collating it and thinking we have created something. The Level 1 context above is a prime example.

Effectively, if you’re getting inspired by something to the extent that you are merely replicating it in your environment, you’re not really creating something but your brain is fooling you into elation, hence preventing you from truly creating something.

Point level 2: I realise that my last few posts have been RC posts – I have accumulated a few ideas, connected them to songs or articles or books, and presented a hypothesis. There is no real research. There is no real creation. And there’s only one way of escaping that. By just using that muscle between the ears and going ahead and actually churning out something original, be it a business idea or a book.