In college, I once started to feel physically ill whenever I looked at my “Engineering Mechanics—Statics” textbook. There was something deep inside me, screaming, “This is awful! Avoid this!” whenever I was confronted with my homework. I only ever got work done when I became more afraid of not doing it than I was of doing it, if that makes any sense.
Not to play psychiatrist, but this sounds like a more likely explanation for your predicament than the hypothesis of contentment. If you could take a pill that would remove your anxiety when you faced the prospect of doing something that appears difficult or that you might be judged on, would you take that pill?
You know, I just might. The “don’t get frustrated” pill seems more in line with my preferences than a “be willing to play hurt” pill. The last time I tried—well, “was pushed into” is more accurate than “tried”—filling out a job application, I got frustrated halfway through and stopped.
Incidentally, I’m a lot better at getting things done when I have someone to do those things with, but there is one big exception. I have a great deal of trouble at working alongside one of my parents. Nothing kills my intrinsic motivation to do something as effectively as one of my parents telling me I need to do it.
Another note: I’ve generally found that, when I “work hard” at something, I’m usually reasonably successful at it. By simply applying enough effort for a long enough period of time, I can brute force my way through many tasks that are really, really difficult, such as learning to play an extremely difficult song on the piano, beating the notoriously difficult Battletoads on the NES, or even just cramming for an exam by doing several months’ worth of suggested problems in the space of a week or two. The difference between what I think of myself capable of doing with enough effort and what I actually achieve contributes to thinking of myself as “lazy.” I have a strong preference for avoiding anything that feels like it takes some kind of an effort to do; in other words, something that feels frustrating. (Interestingly, difficult video games often don’t trigger this reaction. I like games that show me no mercy, that let me push myself to my limits and make even the little successes feel like an accomplishment.)
The only emotion that I’ve found that really motivates me to do things I don’t normally do is, oddly enough, anger. If I get sufficiently annoyed with a problem, I’ll go to absurd, ridiculous lengths to solve or fix the problem. A trivial example of this is the time I got annoyed at the dirt on the floor in my room sticking to my feet, so I went and got the broom to sweep it. A less trivial example concerns one of my courses at college. In that course, I had to “design” digital circuits using Verilog and an automatic hardware generator. I hated doing the work, would only get started reluctantly, and could never focus on it. This one time, however, the Verilog code worked just fine, but the hardware generator gave me a design that kept giving me errors. Instead of getting frustrated, I got angry. How dare this program not work! I ended up spending several hours in the computer lab making a furious, focused effort to understand what was going on and fix it. Which I did.
In the book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Ralph Koster (of possible special interest to a game nerd) he basically defines “fun” as “learning without pressure”. Learning, in this context, means improving skills and responding to a challenge where there is no extrinsic consequence for failure.
Your desire for a job you can “take or leave” on a day-to-day basis, and your anxiety about homework, fits well with (but is more extreme than, I think) my own experience. If I were to diagnose myself with something (which I am loathe to do) it would be some type of anxiety disorder ( I have a friend with similar issues who was so diagnosed, medicated, and actually seems to be doing better, although it’s difficult to separate cause from effect here).
See if you relate to the following anecdote:
in grade 9 I entered a special school program which was kind of like correspondence (work through assignments at your own pace) except that it was held at a regular high school so that students could socialize, have progress monitored by and access to teachers, and take supervised written tests whenever we were ready. Sounds pretty great compared to normal classes? It was. But, my first year (grade 9) I got rather behind in my work, in more than one subject, and started getting concerned reports home. Even though the work I had to do was obviously within my capabilities, I found it very difficult to face. Eventually I had to bite the bullet and finish everything in one big cram at the end of the year, and I pulled OK grades, but I stressed out endlessly over what was really a trivial amount of work (which I recognized even at the time).
The following year (grade 10) I hit the ground running in September. By mid-october I had finished Math 10. I got similarly ahead in other subjects, and the further ahead I got the easier it was for me to work more and more. (To a point, I also had a defiant self-image of rational laziness so that I didn’t want to do more than the minimum amount of work, even if I could do it faster/better. So I never skipped a grade, I would just get ahead by a few weeks/months and then… yup, play Magic (the original (Beta/Unlimited)!) and basically fuck around with my friends, computer, porn, etc.
More recently, as a PhD student, I still encounter the same thing. When I’ve fallen behind on a project, often due to unrelated and mild doubts/laziness/underestimation, I become more and more unwilling to face work the farther behind I get. OTOH if a colleague comes to me with a problem which I am not “supposed to be” working on, I become immediately energized. Of course, I allow myself to work on side projects less and less the farther “behind” I am on the projects I am assigned to. I have finally seen the pattern, maybe too late not to suffer serious damage in my “career”. It is largely this: I hate exposing myself to the possibility of public failure. For me, the “consequence” which makes learning/trying/failing/mastering “not fun” is simply having to admit that a) I want to get/achieve/do/win at X and b) I failed (in this instance) to get/achieve/do/win at X. When I am doing something optional, and where I am not expected to succeed (e.g. because it’s someone else’s problem and any contribution I make will be accepted with grateful surprise), I can be extremely goal-directed and work with intense focus. In the very short term, fear of missing a hard deadline (mainly in undergrad) can also make me work til the break of dawn with amazing concentration, much as you described anger doing for you.
I’m not suggesting that you have exactly the same anxieties that i do. But recognizing what it is that separates the activities you can focus and work on from those you can’t may lead to surprising revelations about yourself, and may even suggest ways to find a job that’s a good fit for your temperament.
Sorry if this was a bit rambling and self-indulgent.
That’s really interesting… I think I understand you better now. I think that, because of this recurring anxiety and frustration, you’ve felt for a long time that your options were:
achieve in the way others want you to, but hate every minute of it, or
restrict yourself to playing games and doing things that don’t cause anxiety or frustration for you.
As per the second pill example, I think this is a false dichotomy, but a universal one; people take their emotional reactions for granted, and don’t often imagine that it could be possible to feel differently about something that persistently troubles them. (Of course, it doesn’t seem possible to just feel differently by a direct act of will, which is all that most people ever think of to try.)
Given that you’d take the second pill, though, you can now imagine a third alternative:
become able to do some difficult and long-term (but rewarding) activities without automatically feeling this anxiety and frustration, thus giving you many more interesting options for how to spend your time.
If that sounds appealing to you (and of course it doesn’t mean you’ll have to end up doing what others want you to do; it just means you’ll be able to genuinely explore some new options), then it might be time to start carefully analyzing why you get these feelings, and whether there’s something you can do to change that...
Not to play psychiatrist, but this sounds like a more likely explanation for your predicament than the hypothesis of contentment. If you could take a pill that would remove your anxiety when you faced the prospect of doing something that appears difficult or that you might be judged on, would you take that pill?
ETA: This is starting to remind me of Robin Hanson’s recent post.
You know, I just might. The “don’t get frustrated” pill seems more in line with my preferences than a “be willing to play hurt” pill. The last time I tried—well, “was pushed into” is more accurate than “tried”—filling out a job application, I got frustrated halfway through and stopped.
Incidentally, I’m a lot better at getting things done when I have someone to do those things with, but there is one big exception. I have a great deal of trouble at working alongside one of my parents. Nothing kills my intrinsic motivation to do something as effectively as one of my parents telling me I need to do it.
Another note: I’ve generally found that, when I “work hard” at something, I’m usually reasonably successful at it. By simply applying enough effort for a long enough period of time, I can brute force my way through many tasks that are really, really difficult, such as learning to play an extremely difficult song on the piano, beating the notoriously difficult Battletoads on the NES, or even just cramming for an exam by doing several months’ worth of suggested problems in the space of a week or two. The difference between what I think of myself capable of doing with enough effort and what I actually achieve contributes to thinking of myself as “lazy.” I have a strong preference for avoiding anything that feels like it takes some kind of an effort to do; in other words, something that feels frustrating. (Interestingly, difficult video games often don’t trigger this reaction. I like games that show me no mercy, that let me push myself to my limits and make even the little successes feel like an accomplishment.)
The only emotion that I’ve found that really motivates me to do things I don’t normally do is, oddly enough, anger. If I get sufficiently annoyed with a problem, I’ll go to absurd, ridiculous lengths to solve or fix the problem. A trivial example of this is the time I got annoyed at the dirt on the floor in my room sticking to my feet, so I went and got the broom to sweep it. A less trivial example concerns one of my courses at college. In that course, I had to “design” digital circuits using Verilog and an automatic hardware generator. I hated doing the work, would only get started reluctantly, and could never focus on it. This one time, however, the Verilog code worked just fine, but the hardware generator gave me a design that kept giving me errors. Instead of getting frustrated, I got angry. How dare this program not work! I ended up spending several hours in the computer lab making a furious, focused effort to understand what was going on and fix it. Which I did.
In the book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Ralph Koster (of possible special interest to a game nerd) he basically defines “fun” as “learning without pressure”. Learning, in this context, means improving skills and responding to a challenge where there is no extrinsic consequence for failure.
Your desire for a job you can “take or leave” on a day-to-day basis, and your anxiety about homework, fits well with (but is more extreme than, I think) my own experience. If I were to diagnose myself with something (which I am loathe to do) it would be some type of anxiety disorder ( I have a friend with similar issues who was so diagnosed, medicated, and actually seems to be doing better, although it’s difficult to separate cause from effect here).
See if you relate to the following anecdote: in grade 9 I entered a special school program which was kind of like correspondence (work through assignments at your own pace) except that it was held at a regular high school so that students could socialize, have progress monitored by and access to teachers, and take supervised written tests whenever we were ready. Sounds pretty great compared to normal classes? It was. But, my first year (grade 9) I got rather behind in my work, in more than one subject, and started getting concerned reports home. Even though the work I had to do was obviously within my capabilities, I found it very difficult to face. Eventually I had to bite the bullet and finish everything in one big cram at the end of the year, and I pulled OK grades, but I stressed out endlessly over what was really a trivial amount of work (which I recognized even at the time).
The following year (grade 10) I hit the ground running in September. By mid-october I had finished Math 10. I got similarly ahead in other subjects, and the further ahead I got the easier it was for me to work more and more. (To a point, I also had a defiant self-image of rational laziness so that I didn’t want to do more than the minimum amount of work, even if I could do it faster/better. So I never skipped a grade, I would just get ahead by a few weeks/months and then… yup, play Magic (the original (Beta/Unlimited)!) and basically fuck around with my friends, computer, porn, etc.
More recently, as a PhD student, I still encounter the same thing. When I’ve fallen behind on a project, often due to unrelated and mild doubts/laziness/underestimation, I become more and more unwilling to face work the farther behind I get. OTOH if a colleague comes to me with a problem which I am not “supposed to be” working on, I become immediately energized. Of course, I allow myself to work on side projects less and less the farther “behind” I am on the projects I am assigned to.
I have finally seen the pattern, maybe too late not to suffer serious damage in my “career”. It is largely this: I hate exposing myself to the possibility of public failure. For me, the “consequence” which makes learning/trying/failing/mastering “not fun” is simply having to admit that a) I want to get/achieve/do/win at X and b) I failed (in this instance) to get/achieve/do/win at X. When I am doing something optional, and where I am not expected to succeed (e.g. because it’s someone else’s problem and any contribution I make will be accepted with grateful surprise), I can be extremely goal-directed and work with intense focus. In the very short term, fear of missing a hard deadline (mainly in undergrad) can also make me work til the break of dawn with amazing concentration, much as you described anger doing for you.
I’m not suggesting that you have exactly the same anxieties that i do. But recognizing what it is that separates the activities you can focus and work on from those you can’t may lead to surprising revelations about yourself, and may even suggest ways to find a job that’s a good fit for your temperament.
Sorry if this was a bit rambling and self-indulgent.
This, too, makes a lot of sense.
That’s really interesting… I think I understand you better now. I think that, because of this recurring anxiety and frustration, you’ve felt for a long time that your options were:
achieve in the way others want you to, but hate every minute of it, or
restrict yourself to playing games and doing things that don’t cause anxiety or frustration for you.
As per the second pill example, I think this is a false dichotomy, but a universal one; people take their emotional reactions for granted, and don’t often imagine that it could be possible to feel differently about something that persistently troubles them. (Of course, it doesn’t seem possible to just feel differently by a direct act of will, which is all that most people ever think of to try.)
Given that you’d take the second pill, though, you can now imagine a third alternative:
become able to do some difficult and long-term (but rewarding) activities without automatically feeling this anxiety and frustration, thus giving you many more interesting options for how to spend your time.
If that sounds appealing to you (and of course it doesn’t mean you’ll have to end up doing what others want you to do; it just means you’ll be able to genuinely explore some new options), then it might be time to start carefully analyzing why you get these feelings, and whether there’s something you can do to change that...
Thank you for your help. I’ll have to let this stew in my subconscious for a while, then get back to you.