Thanks to Kurt Brown for some discussion of the draft, which led to improvements to the conclusion.
I wrote ~90% of this post on September 19th, and then today returned to finish it, with some revisions and additions. The primary reason it happened today as opposed to ‘eventually’ was because I was walking home, thinking about my plans for the week, wondering when I would write the series of posts I wanted to write instead of playing video games or working on a side project or handling other errands, and realized that I should do “do it for All Might,” a fictional character; from the outside, this might sound insane. From the inside, it was extremely compelling (notice that the post is published). I notice Jacobian’s post also discusses how he spent hours writing his post instead of playing video games, because of a deliberate decision to turn towards meaning.
Why mention this? One of the traps that leads to low-motivation states is one in which narratives that motivate action are relentlessly optimized for presentability or justification. External opinions often provide useful information—other people thinking that you shouldn’t murder is actually pretty good reason to not murder—but overreliance on them and underreliance on one’s own tastes leads to an evaporation of the self.
Thanks to Kurt Brown for some discussion of the draft, which led to improvements to the conclusion.
I wrote ~90% of this post on September 19th, and then today returned to finish it, with some revisions and additions. The primary reason it happened today as opposed to ‘eventually’ was because I was walking home, thinking about my plans for the week, wondering when I would write the series of posts I wanted to write instead of playing video games or working on a side project or handling other errands, and realized that I should do “do it for All Might,” a fictional character; from the outside, this might sound insane. From the inside, it was extremely compelling (notice that the post is published). I notice Jacobian’s post also discusses how he spent hours writing his post instead of playing video games, because of a deliberate decision to turn towards meaning.
Why mention this? One of the traps that leads to low-motivation states is one in which narratives that motivate action are relentlessly optimized for presentability or justification. External opinions often provide useful information—other people thinking that you shouldn’t murder is actually pretty good reason to not murder—but overreliance on them and underreliance on one’s own tastes leads to an evaporation of the self.