“I begin to feel like I’ve accomplished my goals. It’s like I think that adulthood is something that can be earned like a trophy in one monumental burst of effort and then admired and coveted for the rest of one’s life. ”
We could have an explicit norm that you can’t consider yourself at a given level unless you can pass the relevant test(s) at the time. That seems thoroughly reasonable to me—it allows for saying things like “I used to be at level 6 strength, but I’ve been so busy at work this year that I haven’t gotten to work out hardly at all, and I’ve slid to level 4”.
Another way to look at it is to say that the levels always come with a timestamp. Once you attain them, you can mentally award yourself a nice badge, like so:
But the badge is only valid for that year; like car tax discs and food truck permits you must keep it up to date.
I think a norm that makes you lose your level is less useful than a norm that actively encourages you to keep it. For example, each month I briefly attempt to better at the “Self Control” skill. I’ve successfully done it once a few months ago. Since then I don’t think I’ve done the full 8 days.
I don’t want to be able to say “I am capable of working solidly in 2 hour chunks 8 times a month,” I want to actually have done that, on a continuous basis (and frankly I want to do better than eight 2 hour chunks, but from my own experience I think it’s a pretty decent level 1 achievement, embarassing as that may be.)
Well, if you haven’t tested yourself at least semi-recently, you can’t properly say that you can do a given thing, so there’s not all that much difference between these two, I think. Either way works for me.
We could have an explicit norm that you can’t consider yourself at a given level unless you can pass the relevant test(s) at the time. That seems thoroughly reasonable to me—it allows for saying things like “I used to be at level 6 strength, but I’ve been so busy at work this year that I haven’t gotten to work out hardly at all, and I’ve slid to level 4”.
This sounds good.
Another way to look at it is to say that the levels always come with a timestamp. Once you attain them, you can mentally award yourself a nice badge, like so:
But the badge is only valid for that year; like car tax discs and food truck permits you must keep it up to date.
I think a norm that makes you lose your level is less useful than a norm that actively encourages you to keep it. For example, each month I briefly attempt to better at the “Self Control” skill. I’ve successfully done it once a few months ago. Since then I don’t think I’ve done the full 8 days.
I don’t want to be able to say “I am capable of working solidly in 2 hour chunks 8 times a month,” I want to actually have done that, on a continuous basis (and frankly I want to do better than eight 2 hour chunks, but from my own experience I think it’s a pretty decent level 1 achievement, embarassing as that may be.)
Well, if you haven’t tested yourself at least semi-recently, you can’t properly say that you can do a given thing, so there’s not all that much difference between these two, I think. Either way works for me.