Stuckness

Pirsig heavily discussed the idea of being stuck. When he first brought the subject up, I immediately thought of writer's block. Obviously, I am not a writer but I can most certainly speak for every student that has ever had to write a paper when I say that there are times that you sit down at the computer and have literally NO clue what to write. Not having a clue only becomes more frustrating the more you think about it. Sometimes you get so frustrated you kind of want to throw your computer out the window. Every bit of this frustration was captured perfectly by Pirsig.
The point of this point is not to discuss how accurate Pirsig was in his writing, however. Pirsig's writing made me think of what it is that must bother us about stuckness so much. I think we hate it so much because stuckness forces us to feel incompetent and worthless. It is degrading to every part of our self esteem that something so small as a screw (using Pirsig's examples) or an essay can quite literally, render us completely inactive. Something not even capable of thought can stop us from doing anything. I think humans in general are so attuned to the idea of perfection, of never being brought down, of being immortal that anything that brings us down kills us inside. This led me to wonder how those people that Dostoyevsky describes as the inactive men of society feel their entire lives. This stuckness only affects us for moments at a time, however the stuckness affects the inactive people their entire life. At first I had thought of Dostoyevsky referring to himself as smaller than a rodent as strange and a little exaggerated. Nevertheless, reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has made his comment seem completely rational. The inactive man feels the frustration of stuckness every moment of his life. He is never able to get out of the frustration.