For me, it works for the things that I believe to continue being important. I can motivate myself to start intrinsically liking doing what I believe to be important to be obsessed over. This doesn’t lock me in on specific subgoals, as when a subgoal is done, it’s transformed into new opportunities for the continuation of a bigger project.
But I’m afraid of starting to like things in which I don’t intrinsically believe, which I only need to get out of my way before a deadline.
From reading the above comment, I explicitly recognized that it’s circular: on one hand, I have a power to control the low-level emotional response, to channel it where I deliberatively believe it should go. On the other hand, I’m afraid of the emotional response taking over, leading me away from the things I deliberatively prefer in the long term. Both effects must be real, but I expect one of them is stronger, if used with sufficient cunning.
Polarizing the activities on those which I identify with, and those I apply only instrumentally creates segregated zones, in one of which deliberation channels emotion, and in the other of which deliberation is afraid of channeling emotion, as it’s expected that emotion will win there. So, on a surface level, it looks like what I identify with is the area of activities where the emotion is channeled. But one step deeper, it turns out that it’s actually an area deliberatively marked as being safe to channel emotions into. Emotional acceptance is the effect of the Escher-brained justification to emotionally segregate the activity, not the defining signature of the self.
And thus, I resolve to try allowing motivation where I didn’t before.
For me, it works for the things that I believe to continue being important. I can motivate myself to start intrinsically liking doing what I believe to be important to be obsessed over. This doesn’t lock me in on specific subgoals, as when a subgoal is done, it’s transformed into new opportunities for the continuation of a bigger project.
But I’m afraid of starting to like things in which I don’t intrinsically believe, which I only need to get out of my way before a deadline.
From reading the above comment, I explicitly recognized that it’s circular: on one hand, I have a power to control the low-level emotional response, to channel it where I deliberatively believe it should go. On the other hand, I’m afraid of the emotional response taking over, leading me away from the things I deliberatively prefer in the long term. Both effects must be real, but I expect one of them is stronger, if used with sufficient cunning.
Polarizing the activities on those which I identify with, and those I apply only instrumentally creates segregated zones, in one of which deliberation channels emotion, and in the other of which deliberation is afraid of channeling emotion, as it’s expected that emotion will win there. So, on a surface level, it looks like what I identify with is the area of activities where the emotion is channeled. But one step deeper, it turns out that it’s actually an area deliberatively marked as being safe to channel emotions into. Emotional acceptance is the effect of the Escher-brained justification to emotionally segregate the activity, not the defining signature of the self.
And thus, I resolve to try allowing motivation where I didn’t before.