Wow, this post describes 100% of my life.
I may add, from experience, that this condition is quite complex to cure. I understand that there are tasks that either can’t be cheated through or maybe you just need to be very-very lucky to do them without much effort, because all the tasks with that property have been automated and the world is not heaven yet. Therefore all the things that tell me “you shouldn’t experience pain to make an effort towards a task” make me not believe in them, because pain IS effort, and such allegations propose to cheat the way through every task possible. It’s much like a lot of syllogisms that cut greek philosophers the mental effort to actually understand reality and thus allow them to instantly “understand” all of existence — I just don’t consider that as anything serious and often don’t even try.
When I occasionally try to address the issue of too much pain during my effort, it is instantly, immensely painful, because if successful, it would cut a lot of pain-effort from all other tasks and therefore must be the hardest-painful task I will ever accomplish. This sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but “this just CAN NOT be easy, this must be painful” is what I feel every time I am presented with a trick to make my work less painful.
The general issue I am “working” with in therapy (rather, complaining about it, because it does not require effort, and I like my therapy sessions) is my anxiety. It is the primary source of the pain from my efforts for the last couple of years. Recently I have experienced a sort of epistemological shock that triggered a lot of reflection on myself. I have confronted the question of “why do I not keep main questions related to my job always in my head, and why do I not consider my actions from the point of these questions but instead do it just when the actions feel cool, or worse, if the action will seem to others like I’m doing the work”. The stance my brain has taken is that the point I just can not push myself through is the point of setting the goal. Like, I just cannot let the profit or some other objective stat to guide my decisions, I actively resent it and continue to “keep with the flow of my mind”. To set a goal, to let the numbers guide my decisions even for a few hours, seems very wrong and excruciating. I don’t know how to come out of this pit yet.
Also I am very surprised with why do I even make as much money as I make now, with such a severe case of this effort-pain bias, given that my colleagues do not have it as bad.
I have suddenly become mildly interested in investigating an edge case of this argument. I am not coming at this from the perspective of defending the statement of infinite certainty, it is only useful in certain nonsense-arguments. I just found it kinda fun, and maybe an answer would improve my understanding of the rhythm behind this post.
So, let’s suppose you have a statement so utterly trivial and containing so little practical sense you wouldn’t even think of it as a worthwhile statement, for example “A is A”. Now, this is a bad example, because you can already see the nonsense incoming, but I’m not sure if there are any good ones. Let’s then go by the practical definition of certainty of 1-1/1000 -- you need to collect about 1000 statements on the same level of certainty but with different actual drivers behind them, say them out loud and be wrong once. The only problem is there are, like, 10 of these, ever. The other ones are too complex and can’t be put on the same team I-am-sure-of-this. So you can’t properly measure if you are sure of this even on the scale of 90%. Technically, this may pass as a candidate to be 1.0 certainty, by the “say and be wrong rarely” definition, because there ever are only this much of such trivial statements, and the probability of you being correct on all of them, no matter how many times you repeat, is substantial.
I also don’t think it would bother me much if I was stripped of possibility of changing my mind about “A is A”.