Considering my recent personal experience (which I mentioned here) with removing a huge hidden negative motivation from my life I’d say that the absolutely most critical thing is to find out why you want to save the world.
If you find out that it’s actually because you feel some kind of SASS threat if you don’t try to save the world, I’d strongly suggest trying to directly remove that feeling anyway. The risk here is of course that after you’ve done it, you might find out that you never actually wanted to save the world to begin with. However, considering how I’ve personally experienced the shift in identity from feeling like I should be a good person to feeling like I am a good person, and the much increased motivation in actually doing good it has brought with it, I suspect that the few people who’ll realize that they don’t actually want to save the world will be more then compensated by the much increased effectiveness of the people who’ll go from feeling like they should be world-savers into feeling like they are world-savers.
SASS is PJs terminology, it stands for Significance, Affiliation, Stability, and Stimulation. The exact categories aren’t that critical, the important idea is that they represent the terminal values all humans seem to have hard wired into them so to speak.
So what I meant is that it’s important to know why you’re motivated into doing action X. If it is because you’ve learned that you’ll gain SASS by doing X then everything is fine. That’s operating under what PJ calls “positive motivation” and you’ll feel as if you really want to do it and you can pursue X without feeling stressed out, by naturally selecting the best course of action, among other things.
If you’re operating under a SASS threat on the other hand, which you do if you’ve learned that you’ll lose SASS if you don’t do X, then your mental state will be completely different. This is what he calls “negative motivation” and there you’ll feel like you should and ought to do X without really feeling like you genuinely want to. It’s usually accompanied by only doing as much of X as necessary to remove the immediate feeling of threat and then mostly feeling bad about not doing more even though you feel like you “could”, “should”, “ought” and similar feelings.
Considering my recent personal experience (which I mentioned here) with removing a huge hidden negative motivation from my life I’d say that the absolutely most critical thing is to find out why you want to save the world.
If you find out that it’s actually because you feel some kind of SASS threat if you don’t try to save the world, I’d strongly suggest trying to directly remove that feeling anyway. The risk here is of course that after you’ve done it, you might find out that you never actually wanted to save the world to begin with. However, considering how I’ve personally experienced the shift in identity from feeling like I should be a good person to feeling like I am a good person, and the much increased motivation in actually doing good it has brought with it, I suspect that the few people who’ll realize that they don’t actually want to save the world will be more then compensated by the much increased effectiveness of the people who’ll go from feeling like they should be world-savers into feeling like they are world-savers.
Excellent point (I think). What’s a SASS threat?
Sorry for being late with my answer.
SASS is PJs terminology, it stands for Significance, Affiliation, Stability, and Stimulation. The exact categories aren’t that critical, the important idea is that they represent the terminal values all humans seem to have hard wired into them so to speak.
So what I meant is that it’s important to know why you’re motivated into doing action X. If it is because you’ve learned that you’ll gain SASS by doing X then everything is fine. That’s operating under what PJ calls “positive motivation” and you’ll feel as if you really want to do it and you can pursue X without feeling stressed out, by naturally selecting the best course of action, among other things.
If you’re operating under a SASS threat on the other hand, which you do if you’ve learned that you’ll lose SASS if you don’t do X, then your mental state will be completely different. This is what he calls “negative motivation” and there you’ll feel like you should and ought to do X without really feeling like you genuinely want to. It’s usually accompanied by only doing as much of X as necessary to remove the immediate feeling of threat and then mostly feeling bad about not doing more even though you feel like you “could”, “should”, “ought” and similar feelings.