How unpleasant work is, I believe, depends a lot on what part of your work it is.
My work is math. Making progress on math—learning a new concept, figuring out a proof—is not only fun, but so addictive that I can’t stand to stop it once I’m doing it. Being stuck on math—incomprehension or being stumped—is absolutely miserable. You can’t do anything but sit and think about how pathetic you are. It is probably not as unpleasant as cleaning toilets (math doesn’t literally make your back hurt) but it’s up there.
So in my case I think when I procrastinate I’m running away from the more unpleasant part of work (being stumped and confused). Even intellectually stimulating work can suck now and then because it’s not always stimulating. A writer has fun writing from time to time—but writer’s block is no fun at all, and I suspect that writers procrastinate when they’re blocked, not when they’re inspired.
You can’t do anything but sit and think about how pathetic you are.
If you mean this statement literally, then it’s a problem with your beliefs, not with math. Do you believe that you should be able to solve something that you’re stuck on? If so, consider switching your thought to, “I don’t like it that I haven’t solved this yet”. This is not the same as judging yourself pathetic based on a “should” thought.
I have been observing lately that many forms of chronic stress are a special case of “not noticing that I am confused”, in that they can be traced to an “is/ought” confusion.
What we believe “should” be seems to push emotional buttons calling for social signaling and protest against reality, rather than actions to change reality.
Thus, when the facts come into conflict with shoulds about ourselves, we respond by defaming/punishing the transgressor (i.e., ourselves), rather than paying attention to what behavior change(s) we need to make.
This seems like a plausible explanation for why so many self-help materials talk about the need to accept one’s self as-is, and claim it to be essential for making real behavior change. That is, it might be literally true!
Yeah, it’s the “should” part. Work is enjoyable—spending time thinking “I should have been able to do this long ago” is not enjoyable.
Right—so drop the moral outrage of the idea.
Behind that “should” is a generalized moral principle, most likely in the form of a generalization over a class of people and an assigned moral status… which could be something like, “People who can’t solve easy problems are stupid”, carrying a further implication like, “stupid people are pathetic”, or something of that sort.
If you realize that these “morals” are not the same thing as your “values”—i.e., that you may value being smart or capable, but this is NOT the same thing as saying you’re bad/pathetic/whatever if you don’t achieve some particular thing, then you can drop the “ought” part of the belief, and turn off the self-punishment reflex.
While this takes conscious effort to do, you only need to do it once for each generalized “moral precept” that you carry in relation to the subject matter. The difficult part lies in that we also have a “punish the non-punishers” reflex, and so that reflex may have already told you that I’m a bad person for implying that stupid people shouldn’t be considered pathetic, because then they’d get the wrong idea about their stupidity. ;-)
Once you realize, though, that any given moral judgment is inherently circular, and exists only to motivate our protest and punishment instincts, and that you will still value whatever you value, independent of the protest/punishment instinct, then that particular judgment will cease to drive self-punishment and other-punishment.
(Yeah: one interesting side-effect of doing this is that one becomes less self-righteous in one’s interactions with others—a terrific bonus, since our instinctual moral outrage only works well on others when they already share the relevant morals or recognize your authority to establish group norms. Not being distracted by subconscious outrage does wonders for your ability to actually communicate with or motivate other people, if you indeed decide that you actually care to do so, vs. just letting them be.)
It reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend last year—not about self-help but about moral judgments of other people. I thought it was very important that I be morally outraged about other people’s wrongs, that I protest, get upset, and try to stop them. My friend disagreed; he had some complicated philosophy (which I can’t do justice to) about moral relativism and tolerance. The crux was that I shouldn’t try to exhort everyone to be good, and I shouldn’t get angry when people are not good, according to my understanding of “good”. It seemed very weird to me at the time, since I have the standard (religious?) intuitions that the good should be rewarded and the bad should be punished, and that the bad damn well deserve to suffer.
There are definitely similarities, but my point has nothing to do with relativism or tolerance. I have no problem with judging others to be doing the wrong thing by my values, or even by their values. ;-)
What I’m saying is, if I want someone else to actually follow my values, as opposed to merely scratching my protest-and-punishment itch, then I am better off eliminating the outrage part and focusing on what will actually convince them to follow my values… even if it might involve some sort of (consciously planned) display of outrage, protest, or punishment.
But the futility of using the punish-and-protest instinct in anything involving self-improvement becomes painfully obvious when you notice for the nine-jlllionth time that yelling at yourself doesn’t actually produce any improvements, nor motivate you to do anything positive. (Somehow, we feel as if merely feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to our self-punishment!)
Somehow, we feel as if merely feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to our self-punishment!
I think that’s a special case of feeling as if feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment (displays of disapproval or outrage, etc.) from anyone, and that comes about because feeling guilty often is taken as the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment.
Compare to, say, a politician who’s been caught selling influence or having an affair, or a religious leader who’s been caught using crystal meth and gay prostitutes, etc. They always seem so sincere in their public apologies and statements of regret and remorse… yet, suspiciously, all that tearful regret and all those acknowledgements of moral failing weren’t enough to get them to actually stop doing the corrupt or hypocritical things in question until they got caught and publicly shamed, and even in their admissions of guilt they will still try to avoid giving up anything of substance (political office, religious leadership, etc.) if they can. I think that’s pretty much what the emotion of guilt is — it’s not a feeling of regret at actually having done something wrong, it’s a response to the feeling of being judged negatively by someone whose opinion matters to you (whether for instrumental or terminal reasons). That’s probably why self-inflicted guilt isn’t useful for self-improvement: it’s an emotion that’s primarily about convincing people that you regret something and won’t do it again, whether or not you really do regret it and plan to stop. More signaling than substance. In the social realm, this often balances out, because the things that provoke it — public displays of outrage, etc. — are often largely signaling as well, as there are plenty of reasons to appear outraged other than actually being outraged. It’s a dynamic that’s good for exerting power over people who care what you (appear to) think of them, but, for obvious reasons, not so good for self-control. Yet it’s not surprising that we try to guilt-punish ourselves; we all have self-images we’re trying to live up to, so in that sense we care about being judged negatively by ourselves, and if your ‘thinker’ and ‘doer’ have sufficiently out-of-sync preferences, such that they feel like different people to each other, then it is no surprise that they’ll often invoke adaptations and habits that formed around interpersonal dynamics. So if I’m persistently doing something that I don’t want myself to do, then the part of me that wants me to live up to some higher ideals will automatically execute the “display [and maybe feel] outrage” macro, and the part of me that wants to do something else will respond by executing by the “display and feel guilt” macro… the latter macro consisting not of necessarily changing the actual behaviour, but only changing it to the extent necessary to appear remorseful to a punisher assumed to be someone other than oneself.
(— or at least that’s my guess as to what’s going on, and I will now go off and worry about whether it’s a just-so story and whether it’s useful and whether it’s testable.)
Edit: This reminds me of something parents often do. Punishment of children by parents often amounts to extracting apologies and displays of remorse from the child, with no particular expectation that the child should genuinely understand and regret what they did, or at least regret it for any reason other than the punishment itself. (Being asked/forced to apologize was always what confused me the most — usually parents say “Say you’re sorry!” right away without actually convincing the child they did something wrong, so being told to apologize felt to me like being asked to lie.) Anyway, since people get used to being able to get away with things as long as they make a convincing show of looking sorry after getting caught (which, after enough time being a child, probably feels almost indistinguishable from actually feeling sorry), it makes sense that they’d generalize that rule and get into the habit of responding to their own self-punishment the same way, once they’re broken enough that they start inflicting that kind of self-punishment at all.
Yes, to all of the above. I think the mechanisms for learning and execution might be a bit simpler or more fundamental to the hardware than what you’ve just described, but that’s a relatively minor detail.
It takes a lot more than inspiration to get me writing. As with things that I consider work, I find it extremely hard to get any writing done unless someone else is imposing a deadline on me. When it comes to inspiration, I experience it more or less perpetually, but it doesn’t come easily to me to make use of it of my own initiative. One solution I’ve tried is to provide writing for people in collaborative works, but that only works so long as the other people stick with the project.
How unpleasant work is, I believe, depends a lot on what part of your work it is.
My work is math. Making progress on math—learning a new concept, figuring out a proof—is not only fun, but so addictive that I can’t stand to stop it once I’m doing it. Being stuck on math—incomprehension or being stumped—is absolutely miserable. You can’t do anything but sit and think about how pathetic you are. It is probably not as unpleasant as cleaning toilets (math doesn’t literally make your back hurt) but it’s up there.
So in my case I think when I procrastinate I’m running away from the more unpleasant part of work (being stumped and confused). Even intellectually stimulating work can suck now and then because it’s not always stimulating. A writer has fun writing from time to time—but writer’s block is no fun at all, and I suspect that writers procrastinate when they’re blocked, not when they’re inspired.
If you mean this statement literally, then it’s a problem with your beliefs, not with math. Do you believe that you should be able to solve something that you’re stuck on? If so, consider switching your thought to, “I don’t like it that I haven’t solved this yet”. This is not the same as judging yourself pathetic based on a “should” thought.
I have been observing lately that many forms of chronic stress are a special case of “not noticing that I am confused”, in that they can be traced to an “is/ought” confusion.
What we believe “should” be seems to push emotional buttons calling for social signaling and protest against reality, rather than actions to change reality.
Thus, when the facts come into conflict with shoulds about ourselves, we respond by defaming/punishing the transgressor (i.e., ourselves), rather than paying attention to what behavior change(s) we need to make.
This seems like a plausible explanation for why so many self-help materials talk about the need to accept one’s self as-is, and claim it to be essential for making real behavior change. That is, it might be literally true!
Yeah, it’s the “should” part. Work is enjoyable—spending time thinking “I should have been able to do this long ago” is not enjoyable.
Right—so drop the moral outrage of the idea.
Behind that “should” is a generalized moral principle, most likely in the form of a generalization over a class of people and an assigned moral status… which could be something like, “People who can’t solve easy problems are stupid”, carrying a further implication like, “stupid people are pathetic”, or something of that sort.
If you realize that these “morals” are not the same thing as your “values”—i.e., that you may value being smart or capable, but this is NOT the same thing as saying you’re bad/pathetic/whatever if you don’t achieve some particular thing, then you can drop the “ought” part of the belief, and turn off the self-punishment reflex.
While this takes conscious effort to do, you only need to do it once for each generalized “moral precept” that you carry in relation to the subject matter. The difficult part lies in that we also have a “punish the non-punishers” reflex, and so that reflex may have already told you that I’m a bad person for implying that stupid people shouldn’t be considered pathetic, because then they’d get the wrong idea about their stupidity. ;-)
Once you realize, though, that any given moral judgment is inherently circular, and exists only to motivate our protest and punishment instincts, and that you will still value whatever you value, independent of the protest/punishment instinct, then that particular judgment will cease to drive self-punishment and other-punishment.
(Yeah: one interesting side-effect of doing this is that one becomes less self-righteous in one’s interactions with others—a terrific bonus, since our instinctual moral outrage only works well on others when they already share the relevant morals or recognize your authority to establish group norms. Not being distracted by subconscious outrage does wonders for your ability to actually communicate with or motivate other people, if you indeed decide that you actually care to do so, vs. just letting them be.)
I like this. I’ll try to take the advice.
It reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend last year—not about self-help but about moral judgments of other people. I thought it was very important that I be morally outraged about other people’s wrongs, that I protest, get upset, and try to stop them. My friend disagreed; he had some complicated philosophy (which I can’t do justice to) about moral relativism and tolerance. The crux was that I shouldn’t try to exhort everyone to be good, and I shouldn’t get angry when people are not good, according to my understanding of “good”. It seemed very weird to me at the time, since I have the standard (religious?) intuitions that the good should be rewarded and the bad should be punished, and that the bad damn well deserve to suffer.
I take it you would agree with my friend?
There are definitely similarities, but my point has nothing to do with relativism or tolerance. I have no problem with judging others to be doing the wrong thing by my values, or even by their values. ;-)
What I’m saying is, if I want someone else to actually follow my values, as opposed to merely scratching my protest-and-punishment itch, then I am better off eliminating the outrage part and focusing on what will actually convince them to follow my values… even if it might involve some sort of (consciously planned) display of outrage, protest, or punishment.
But the futility of using the punish-and-protest instinct in anything involving self-improvement becomes painfully obvious when you notice for the nine-jlllionth time that yelling at yourself doesn’t actually produce any improvements, nor motivate you to do anything positive. (Somehow, we feel as if merely feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to our self-punishment!)
I think that’s a special case of feeling as if feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment (displays of disapproval or outrage, etc.) from anyone, and that comes about because feeling guilty often is taken as the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment.
Compare to, say, a politician who’s been caught selling influence or having an affair, or a religious leader who’s been caught using crystal meth and gay prostitutes, etc. They always seem so sincere in their public apologies and statements of regret and remorse… yet, suspiciously, all that tearful regret and all those acknowledgements of moral failing weren’t enough to get them to actually stop doing the corrupt or hypocritical things in question until they got caught and publicly shamed, and even in their admissions of guilt they will still try to avoid giving up anything of substance (political office, religious leadership, etc.) if they can. I think that’s pretty much what the emotion of guilt is — it’s not a feeling of regret at actually having done something wrong, it’s a response to the feeling of being judged negatively by someone whose opinion matters to you (whether for instrumental or terminal reasons). That’s probably why self-inflicted guilt isn’t useful for self-improvement: it’s an emotion that’s primarily about convincing people that you regret something and won’t do it again, whether or not you really do regret it and plan to stop. More signaling than substance. In the social realm, this often balances out, because the things that provoke it — public displays of outrage, etc. — are often largely signaling as well, as there are plenty of reasons to appear outraged other than actually being outraged. It’s a dynamic that’s good for exerting power over people who care what you (appear to) think of them, but, for obvious reasons, not so good for self-control. Yet it’s not surprising that we try to guilt-punish ourselves; we all have self-images we’re trying to live up to, so in that sense we care about being judged negatively by ourselves, and if your ‘thinker’ and ‘doer’ have sufficiently out-of-sync preferences, such that they feel like different people to each other, then it is no surprise that they’ll often invoke adaptations and habits that formed around interpersonal dynamics. So if I’m persistently doing something that I don’t want myself to do, then the part of me that wants me to live up to some higher ideals will automatically execute the “display [and maybe feel] outrage” macro, and the part of me that wants to do something else will respond by executing by the “display and feel guilt” macro… the latter macro consisting not of necessarily changing the actual behaviour, but only changing it to the extent necessary to appear remorseful to a punisher assumed to be someone other than oneself.
(— or at least that’s my guess as to what’s going on, and I will now go off and worry about whether it’s a just-so story and whether it’s useful and whether it’s testable.)
Edit: This reminds me of something parents often do. Punishment of children by parents often amounts to extracting apologies and displays of remorse from the child, with no particular expectation that the child should genuinely understand and regret what they did, or at least regret it for any reason other than the punishment itself. (Being asked/forced to apologize was always what confused me the most — usually parents say “Say you’re sorry!” right away without actually convincing the child they did something wrong, so being told to apologize felt to me like being asked to lie.) Anyway, since people get used to being able to get away with things as long as they make a convincing show of looking sorry after getting caught (which, after enough time being a child, probably feels almost indistinguishable from actually feeling sorry), it makes sense that they’d generalize that rule and get into the habit of responding to their own self-punishment the same way, once they’re broken enough that they start inflicting that kind of self-punishment at all.
The amusing part is that then people worry that displays of remorse extracted under punishment might not be sincere.
Yes, to all of the above. I think the mechanisms for learning and execution might be a bit simpler or more fundamental to the hardware than what you’ve just described, but that’s a relatively minor detail.
It takes a lot more than inspiration to get me writing. As with things that I consider work, I find it extremely hard to get any writing done unless someone else is imposing a deadline on me. When it comes to inspiration, I experience it more or less perpetually, but it doesn’t come easily to me to make use of it of my own initiative. One solution I’ve tried is to provide writing for people in collaborative works, but that only works so long as the other people stick with the project.