Thanks for your post, this technique sounds very useful, as does your description of willpower as dynamic consistency but my personal experience is that I’ve basically always been able to feel “willpower” or something close to it and in fact have a hard time imagining such an existence.
The only reason I can relate to this claim is that sometimes my state of mind is such that willpower use is barely noticable, and perhaps only because in my default state it is very noticable, so I know what to look for: where forward is my default impetus and all I have to do is steer, or fan the fires.
Off the top of my head, labelled via word association, I might call some of these states (there are probably more and there is some overlap) executing, dueling, drunk, writing and fatalism. writing, dueling, drunk and executing are all distinct. There’s some overlap.
But these are specific states of mind that are not my default. My default state is rest. In this state it very clearly and unambiguously takes what I’ll call willpower to do things. And the more willpowerey I’m feeling, the better I’m able to do anything.
The point of which is that I’d be suspicious of your claim to have never experienced “willpower” if I hadn’t put on various thinking hats which also feel a lot like that. I suspect your default thinking hat is one where willpower may be relatively unnoticable, irrelevant, or even non-existant (if your mind is sufficiently different than mine) and that you’re underappreciating how different minds are.
Thanks for your post, this technique sounds very useful, as does your description of willpower as dynamic consistency but my personal experience is that I’ve basically always been able to feel “willpower” or something close to it and in fact have a hard time imagining such an existence.
The only reason I can relate to this claim is that sometimes my state of mind is such that willpower use is barely noticable, and perhaps only because in my default state it is very noticable, so I know what to look for: where forward is my default impetus and all I have to do is steer, or fan the fires.
Off the top of my head, labelled via word association, I might call some of these states (there are probably more and there is some overlap) executing, dueling, drunk, writing and fatalism. writing, dueling, drunk and executing are all distinct. There’s some overlap.
But these are specific states of mind that are not my default. My default state is rest. In this state it very clearly and unambiguously takes what I’ll call willpower to do things. And the more willpowerey I’m feeling, the better I’m able to do anything.
The point of which is that I’d be suspicious of your claim to have never experienced “willpower” if I hadn’t put on various thinking hats which also feel a lot like that. I suspect your default thinking hat is one where willpower may be relatively unnoticable, irrelevant, or even non-existant (if your mind is sufficiently different than mine) and that you’re underappreciating how different minds are.
*NOT IRL DUELING. DUELING IN A COMPUTER GAME.