If times are tough, perhaps a negative enough feeling about them will encourage me to pursue drastic change or effort.
As soon as you’ve felt bad long enough to notice there’s a problem, the emotion ceases to provide you with any new information.
And the more complex or stressful the course of action required to change the circumstances, the more counterproductive a continuing negative emotion will likely be.
Essentially, our negative emotion systems were evolved to handle short-term emergencies (e.g. being stalked or chased by a predator) and seasonal-or-longer resource pressures like food shortages. These kinds of situations either require immediate but short term action, or else a passive strategy of energy conservation, resource hoarding, and risk-avoidance.
So, if the thing you’re feeling bad about isn’t an immediate emergency, or won’t be helped by passive inaction, a negative emotion will hurt more than it helps. (And most people’s goals, most of the time, aren’t helped by passive inaction!)
The “but maybe negative feelings will motivate me” idea is just plain wrong, in precisely the same way that “but death is a natural part of life” is wrong. It’s socially-cached sour grapes.
People think negative emotion makes sense because a person who holds power over you can get you to do things with it. But there’s still a high cost to your effectiveness in that case (narrowed focus, lower creativity, greater stress, etc.), and if you try to apply it to yourself, it has some rather nasty failure modes.
(Worse, sometimes, these negative motivations can be stealthy; i.e., you don’t really realize that the “carrot” you’re dangling for yourself is just a stick in disguise. Hence my saying that “what pushes you forward, holds you back”—i.e. anything you use to try to get yourself to do something, is a disguised “stick”. Positive motivation doesn’t feel like you’re trying to motivate yourself at all—you just are motivated.)
As soon as you’ve felt bad long enough to notice there’s a problem, the emotion ceases to provide you with any new information.
I absolutely agree, provided that you also roughly apprehend the problem’s relative importance to your happiness. Not all problems can be solved at once.
our negative emotion systems were evolved to handle short-term emergencies (e.g. being stalked or chased by a predator) [or famine reaction]
Plausible, but be careful—Caveman stories are ripe for mockery (see “Paleo” diet/fitness). But to put it in Caveman Bob terms—as I mentioned before, mounting unhappiness with a situation may be the only thing enabling a risky decision, like looking for food in a new area, or attacking a rival.
“but maybe negative feelings will motivate me” idea is just plain wrong … It’s socially-cached sour grapes.
Negative feelings about my long-term situation do motivate me—not directly (like they would if they were in response to some immediately addressable threat), but in giving me a reason to plan/think about changing things. I readily admit that I wish to experience fewer negative feelings. So for me there are no sour grapes. I’m 100% behind reducing pointless discomfort. Maybe what you say is so for most people; I agree that such sentiments as “maybe we need death so we can appreciate life” are just as you say, suspiciously convenient and without sound basis.
Negative feelings about my long-term situation do motivate me—not directly (like they would if they were in response to some immediately addressable threat), but in giving me a reason to plan/think about changing things.
Sure—but “plan/think about” changing things is not the same thing as actually taking positive action on a consistent basis. Otherwise, we’d all be skinny rich supermodels, just by worrying about our weight, money, or looks. ;-)
That’s my main point here. Negative emotions don’t provide much utility for the action part, even if they do promote thinking. Seth Roberts suggests that one function of negative emotions is a relative increase in thinking and observation, and it does indeed make sense. You just have to remember to switch to positive anticipation as soon as possible, by deciding what you want to change the situation to.
Plausible, but be careful—Caveman stories are ripe for mockery (see “Paleo” diet/fitness).
Notice that my hypothesis is actually a negative one—I’m saying that there’s no evolutionary basis for a long-term action motivation system based on negative emotions. Can you point to an evolutionary pressure that would create such a thing?
But to put it in Caveman Bob terms—as I mentioned before, mounting unhappiness with a situation may be the only thing enabling a risky decision, like looking for food in a new area, or attacking a rival.
Neither of which is a course of action that requires sustained motivation in the face of opposition. Either your attack succeeds or fails, and the only reason you’re looking for food elsewhere is that there’s none here. IOW, nothing needing willpower to continue at.
Again, the thrust of my argument here is that negative emotions are not a viable anti-akrasia tool; they’re vastly more likely to be a source of akrasia than a cure for it, except in cases where you can distort the problem into the form of an urgent/emergency situation, or an ongoing resource shortage.
(Some people do one or both of these things all the time, but it’s not good for their physical or mental health, and there are many problems that can’t be abused into one of those shapes.)
As soon as you’ve felt bad long enough to notice there’s a problem, the emotion ceases to provide you with any new information.
And the more complex or stressful the course of action required to change the circumstances, the more counterproductive a continuing negative emotion will likely be.
Essentially, our negative emotion systems were evolved to handle short-term emergencies (e.g. being stalked or chased by a predator) and seasonal-or-longer resource pressures like food shortages. These kinds of situations either require immediate but short term action, or else a passive strategy of energy conservation, resource hoarding, and risk-avoidance.
So, if the thing you’re feeling bad about isn’t an immediate emergency, or won’t be helped by passive inaction, a negative emotion will hurt more than it helps. (And most people’s goals, most of the time, aren’t helped by passive inaction!)
The “but maybe negative feelings will motivate me” idea is just plain wrong, in precisely the same way that “but death is a natural part of life” is wrong. It’s socially-cached sour grapes.
People think negative emotion makes sense because a person who holds power over you can get you to do things with it. But there’s still a high cost to your effectiveness in that case (narrowed focus, lower creativity, greater stress, etc.), and if you try to apply it to yourself, it has some rather nasty failure modes.
(Worse, sometimes, these negative motivations can be stealthy; i.e., you don’t really realize that the “carrot” you’re dangling for yourself is just a stick in disguise. Hence my saying that “what pushes you forward, holds you back”—i.e. anything you use to try to get yourself to do something, is a disguised “stick”. Positive motivation doesn’t feel like you’re trying to motivate yourself at all—you just are motivated.)
I absolutely agree, provided that you also roughly apprehend the problem’s relative importance to your happiness. Not all problems can be solved at once.
Plausible, but be careful—Caveman stories are ripe for mockery (see “Paleo” diet/fitness). But to put it in Caveman Bob terms—as I mentioned before, mounting unhappiness with a situation may be the only thing enabling a risky decision, like looking for food in a new area, or attacking a rival.
Negative feelings about my long-term situation do motivate me—not directly (like they would if they were in response to some immediately addressable threat), but in giving me a reason to plan/think about changing things. I readily admit that I wish to experience fewer negative feelings. So for me there are no sour grapes. I’m 100% behind reducing pointless discomfort. Maybe what you say is so for most people; I agree that such sentiments as “maybe we need death so we can appreciate life” are just as you say, suspiciously convenient and without sound basis.
Sure—but “plan/think about” changing things is not the same thing as actually taking positive action on a consistent basis. Otherwise, we’d all be skinny rich supermodels, just by worrying about our weight, money, or looks. ;-)
That’s my main point here. Negative emotions don’t provide much utility for the action part, even if they do promote thinking. Seth Roberts suggests that one function of negative emotions is a relative increase in thinking and observation, and it does indeed make sense. You just have to remember to switch to positive anticipation as soon as possible, by deciding what you want to change the situation to.
Notice that my hypothesis is actually a negative one—I’m saying that there’s no evolutionary basis for a long-term action motivation system based on negative emotions. Can you point to an evolutionary pressure that would create such a thing?
Neither of which is a course of action that requires sustained motivation in the face of opposition. Either your attack succeeds or fails, and the only reason you’re looking for food elsewhere is that there’s none here. IOW, nothing needing willpower to continue at.
Again, the thrust of my argument here is that negative emotions are not a viable anti-akrasia tool; they’re vastly more likely to be a source of akrasia than a cure for it, except in cases where you can distort the problem into the form of an urgent/emergency situation, or an ongoing resource shortage.
(Some people do one or both of these things all the time, but it’s not good for their physical or mental health, and there are many problems that can’t be abused into one of those shapes.)