Comment by andai
6 hours ago
Great article, especially appreciated the graphs. The idea of "keep adding novelty" is probably what separated my successful long term projects from the unsuccessful ones.
I previously attributed that to having lots of variety and freedom, but the consequence of those factors was indeed novelty.
I want to mention Neil Fiore's excellent book The Now Habit, which is a practical manual on overcoming procrastination. The core thesis is training yourself out of the Victim Mindset, with language like "I have to", and into the Producer Mindset, with language like "I choose to."
What's interesting to me is that this isn't an arbitrary choice. "I have to" is actually a delusion.
Think of the most extreme scenario. Someone has a gun and is "forcing" you to blow up a school. Do you "have to" do it? Or would it be better to say no?
If that freedom holds even in the most extreme scenario... doesn't it always hold?
Sometimes your options are truly terrible, but you always have a choice.
That might sound too philosophical, but I think that's an important distinction to learn to recognize in everyday life.
Because the failure to recognize it is what supports this delusion of "I have to", which seems to be the main cause of procrastination: the resentment and pushing against perceived loss of autonomy.
So my meaning here is that it isn't just more useful to think this way, as some psychological trick, but that it is actually more true as well.
Also the dead bot comment is right about the Unschedule! Another technique from the same book :)
I use that one and have found it provides a massive benefit to mental health, at least for my personality type which tends to be consumed with work.
In the "Unschedule", a.k.a. Guilt-Free Play Time, you deliberately set away time for enjoyable activities. You put them in your calendar. (And then you actually do them!)
This removes a major cause of resentment, "life's all work and no play" which drives that psychological resistance to work.
While I'm at it, I'll mention one more :) The Work of Worrying... for a situation you're avoiding, intentionally go through the worst case scenario, and then realize, actually, I'll still be okay. Even if that terrible situation happens... I'll survive, I'll move on, I'll be okay.
Interesting to effectively see Jean Paul Sartre being brought up here. As verbose as he was, though, I do agree with the framing. Putting aside the fundamental physical paradoxes and incoherence of free will, at the level of subjective experience, every action ever taken is a choice, possibly between extremely shitty options, but a choice nonetheless, and owning that is the only way I've ever found to stay sane about life.
That said, I'm not sure about the novelty thing. I'd rate the greatest long term project in my life as being staying fit, athletic, and healthy as I near 50, in spite of some horrible injuries and setbacks, and remaining thus far in a reasonably happy marriage. In both of those pursuits, novelty is almost the anthesis to success. People program hop and never improve, and substitute one-night stands and serial cheating for any form of lifelong relationship. To me, it is just habit-formation and basic discipline, trying to always remind myself what truly matters. Heck, it's probably even fear as much as anything else. I know I'm going to be hurting terribly in my 60s and 70s if I'm alone and unhealthy, regardless of what else I may have achieved, and if I wait until then to try and cram lifetime pursuits into a single decade, it'll be a lot harder than simply starting in my 20s, doing a little bit every week, and sticking with it in spite of how much of a grind it might be at times, because I know how much it will mean to future me and I have to make the choice that future me matters just as much as present me.
In contrast, I'm not convinced that consistently uploading a lot of videos to YouTube is all that important, but of course this guy is free to have his own priorities.
> the fundamental physical paradoxes and incoherence of free will
Are those even true? They sure are in classical, Newtonian physics, but are they in modern, e.g. quantum physics? Not saying that one proves free will, but is there an actual hard impossibility?