I’ll come out of the shadows (well not really, I’m too ashamed to post this under my normal LW username) and announce that I am, or anyway have been, in more or less the same situation as MixedNuts. Maybe not as severe (there are some important things I can do, at the moment, and I have in the past been much worse than I am now—I would actually appear externally to be keeping up with my life at this exact moment, though that may come crashing down before too long), but generally speaking almost everything MixedNuts says rings true to me. I don’t live with anyone or have any nearby family, so that adds some extra difficulty.
Right now, as I said, this is actually a relatively good moment, I’ve got some interesting projects to work on that are currently helping me get out of bed. But I know myself too well to assume that this will last. Plus, I’m way behind on all kinds of other things I’m supposed to be doing (or already have done).
I’m not offering any money, but I’d be interested to see if anyone is interested in conversing with me about this (whether here or by PM). Otherwise, my reason for posting this comment was to add some evidence that this may be a common problem (even afflicting people you wouldn’t necessarily guess suffered from it).
I’ve got a weaker form of this, but I manage. The number one thing that seems to work is a tight feedback loop (as in daily) between action and reward, preferably reward by other people. That’s how I was able to do OBLW. Right now I’m trying to get up to a reasonable speed on the book, and seem to be slowly ramping up.
I have limited mental resources myself, and am sometimes busy, but I’m generally willing to (and find it enjoyable to) talk to people about this kind of thing via IM. I’m fairly easily findable on Skype (put a dot between my first and last names; text only, please), AIM (same name as here), GChat (same name at gmail dot com), and MSN (same name at hotmail dot com). The google email is the one I pay attention to, but I’m not so great at responding to email unless it has obvious questions in it for me to answer. It’s also noteworthy that my sleep schedule is quite random—it is worth checking to see if I’m awake at 5am if you want to, but also don’t assume that just because it’s daytime I’ll be awake.
Hope this doesn’t turn into a free-therapy bandwagon, but I have a lot of the same issues as MixedNuts and anonymous259, so if anyone has any tips or other insights they’d like to share with me, that would be delightful.
My main problem seems to be that, if I don’t find something thrilling or fascinating, and it requires much mental or physical effort, I don’t do it, even if I know I need to do it, even if I really want to do it. Immediate rewards and punishments help very little (sometimes they actually make things worse, if the task requires a lot of thought or creativity). There are sometimes exceptions when the boring+mentally/physically-demanding task is to help someone, but that’s only when the person is actually relying on me for something, not just imposing an artificial expectation, and it usually only works if it’s someone I know and care about (except myself).
A related problem is that I rarely find anything thrilling or fascinating (enough to make me actually do it, at least) for very long. In my room I have stacks of books that I’ve only read a few chapters into; on my computer I have probably hundreds of unfinished (or barely started) programs and essays and designs, and countless others that only exist in my mind; on my academic transcripts are many ‘W’s and ’F’s, not because the classes were difficult (a more self-controlled me would have breezed through them), but because I stopped being interested halfway through. So even when something starts out intrinsically motivating for me, the momentum usually doesn’t last.
Like anon259, I can’t offer any money — this sort of problem really gets in the way of wanting/finding/keeping a job — but drop me a PM if gratitude motivates you. :)
To some extent, the purpose of LessWrong is to fix problems with ourselves, and the distinction between errors in reasoning and errors in action is subtle enough that I would hesitate to declare this on- or off-topic.
It should be mentioned, however, that the population of LessWrongers-asking-for-advice is unlikely to be representative of the population of LessWrongers, and even less so of the population of agents-LessWrongers-care-about. This is likely to make generalizations drawn from observations here narrower in scope than we might like.
I’ll come out of the shadows (well not really, I’m too ashamed to post this under my normal LW username) and announce that I am, or anyway have been, in more or less the same situation as MixedNuts. Maybe not as severe (there are some important things I can do, at the moment, and I have in the past been much worse than I am now—I would actually appear externally to be keeping up with my life at this exact moment, though that may come crashing down before too long), but generally speaking almost everything MixedNuts says rings true to me. I don’t live with anyone or have any nearby family, so that adds some extra difficulty.
Right now, as I said, this is actually a relatively good moment, I’ve got some interesting projects to work on that are currently helping me get out of bed. But I know myself too well to assume that this will last. Plus, I’m way behind on all kinds of other things I’m supposed to be doing (or already have done).
I’m not offering any money, but I’d be interested to see if anyone is interested in conversing with me about this (whether here or by PM). Otherwise, my reason for posting this comment was to add some evidence that this may be a common problem (even afflicting people you wouldn’t necessarily guess suffered from it).
I’ve got a weaker form of this, but I manage. The number one thing that seems to work is a tight feedback loop (as in daily) between action and reward, preferably reward by other people. That’s how I was able to do OBLW. Right now I’m trying to get up to a reasonable speed on the book, and seem to be slowly ramping up.
I have limited mental resources myself, and am sometimes busy, but I’m generally willing to (and find it enjoyable to) talk to people about this kind of thing via IM. I’m fairly easily findable on Skype (put a dot between my first and last names; text only, please), AIM (same name as here), GChat (same name at gmail dot com), and MSN (same name at hotmail dot com). The google email is the one I pay attention to, but I’m not so great at responding to email unless it has obvious questions in it for me to answer. It’s also noteworthy that my sleep schedule is quite random—it is worth checking to see if I’m awake at 5am if you want to, but also don’t assume that just because it’s daytime I’ll be awake.
Hope this doesn’t turn into a free-therapy bandwagon, but I have a lot of the same issues as MixedNuts and anonymous259, so if anyone has any tips or other insights they’d like to share with me, that would be delightful.
My main problem seems to be that, if I don’t find something thrilling or fascinating, and it requires much mental or physical effort, I don’t do it, even if I know I need to do it, even if I really want to do it. Immediate rewards and punishments help very little (sometimes they actually make things worse, if the task requires a lot of thought or creativity). There are sometimes exceptions when the boring+mentally/physically-demanding task is to help someone, but that’s only when the person is actually relying on me for something, not just imposing an artificial expectation, and it usually only works if it’s someone I know and care about (except myself).
A related problem is that I rarely find anything thrilling or fascinating (enough to make me actually do it, at least) for very long. In my room I have stacks of books that I’ve only read a few chapters into; on my computer I have probably hundreds of unfinished (or barely started) programs and essays and designs, and countless others that only exist in my mind; on my academic transcripts are many ‘W’s and ’F’s, not because the classes were difficult (a more self-controlled me would have breezed through them), but because I stopped being interested halfway through. So even when something starts out intrinsically motivating for me, the momentum usually doesn’t last.
Like anon259, I can’t offer any money — this sort of problem really gets in the way of wanting/finding/keeping a job — but drop me a PM if gratitude motivates you. :)
To some extent, the purpose of LessWrong is to fix problems with ourselves, and the distinction between errors in reasoning and errors in action is subtle enough that I would hesitate to declare this on- or off-topic.
It should be mentioned, however, that the population of LessWrongers-asking-for-advice is unlikely to be representative of the population of LessWrongers, and even less so of the population of agents-LessWrongers-care-about. This is likely to make generalizations drawn from observations here narrower in scope than we might like.
Same deal as the other two—PM me IM contact info, we can chat :)
PM me with your IM contact info and I’ll try to help you too.
Look, I’ll do it for free too!