I’m skeptical of whether this is a particularly common outcome in practice. I suspect that if you’re not an expert Buddhist meditator and basically living in a monastery, you’ll just fail at this, and you’d have a much easier time achieving happiness by actually having a strong identity.
I agree it is not a common outcome in practice, although that is largely because people identify as “someone who does things,” or at least as “someone who ought to do things,” without identifying as something else that would actually drive them to do things. That is a recipe for making yourself miserable. It may be, too, that “someone who ought to do things” is enough of a natural identity, so to speak, that it is very hard for someone not to identify in that way, even if they think they are not doing so.
I suspect that if you’re not an expert Buddhist meditator and basically living in a monastery, you’ll just fail at this
This is probably right. Fortunately for me, that is not too far off from describing my life.
I’m skeptical of whether this is a particularly common outcome in practice. I suspect that if you’re not an expert Buddhist meditator and basically living in a monastery, you’ll just fail at this, and you’d have a much easier time achieving happiness by actually having a strong identity.
I agree it is not a common outcome in practice, although that is largely because people identify as “someone who does things,” or at least as “someone who ought to do things,” without identifying as something else that would actually drive them to do things. That is a recipe for making yourself miserable. It may be, too, that “someone who ought to do things” is enough of a natural identity, so to speak, that it is very hard for someone not to identify in that way, even if they think they are not doing so.
This is probably right. Fortunately for me, that is not too far off from describing my life.
(either that, or people identify as “someone who doesn’t do things”, and find that to be a concept with negative value)
Right, I don’t think this is all too different. Saying that it is bad to be someone who doesn’t do things means that one ought to be doing things.