One of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is unhealthy mental states and their link to productivity. On a personal level, mind you. See, sometimes I think that patience is kind of counterproductive, in a way, because I can just sit and wait for a long time, when the right sort of directed impatience would do me a lot better service by making me busy my hands with something useful, or something at all, anyway. Other times I think that part of the problem I have is that I fail to enjoy the individual moment, get caught up in the yesterdays and tomorrows. They seem to be opposed, but I wonder if maybe that's not a false perception on my part. Another possibly related thought I had was that most of the people I know that have real struggles in their mental landscapes tend to need more structure in their lives, but at the same time all too easily fall into ruts and struggle with routine becoming stifling. It would seem that a great many of them are frustrated by a lack of a sense of progress to their routines. I don't see an incremental growth easily to begin with, it's even more difficult without clear goals set to find anything other than frustration from my daily/weekly/monthly routine. Personally, I actually get a lot of enjoyment out of some of my daily routines, but it seems to be a common problem, and I don't have a ready solution to it.

As Thom pointed out, we on the Left spend so much time and effort defining who we are not that we eventually start to lose reference points by which to define who we are. Hmmm...a societal-wide identity crisis? More than that, but an interesting point, that's for sure.