But first, today’s silly little vid for a silly little song I wrote.
That picture in the thumbnail sets blood sugar to twitching.
I recently realized that I no longer crave sweet things. That craving died a long time ago, right about when I first truly realized that eating that kind of crap will make me feel ill almost instantly.
And nothing kills a craving like memories of nausea.
What happens instead is that I long for all those sugary foods I used to eat. It’s a subtle but important distinction.
I don’t crave those foods because I don’t want to eat them at all. They’re gross.
But I do long for the days when I could.
All right, motivation.
What is motivation?
Motivation is the desire to do something. So when we say, “I don’t have enough motivation to do it”, all we are really saying is, “I don’t want to do it” but with an extra step in there to keep us from realizing we’re just choosing not to do it because we do not feel like doing it.
Instead we blame a lack of this mysterious substance “motivation”.
“Oh trust me, I would do that right away if I had the motivation if I wanted to do it bad enough. But alas, through no fault of my own, I do not. ”
Boy, this motivation stuff sure is important.
The conflict is between the grownup part of us that wants to have done the thing, usually for grownup reasons like “to stay in shape” or “to make a good impression at work” or “to not get evicted”, and the child inside of us that doesn’t want to experience whatever it will take to get it done.
And being a child, it does not feel the need to be logical or reasonable. It absolutely will keep you from doing vitally important things that your grownup mind very much wants to do and no amount of cajoling or exhorting will change that.
No matter what you do, you will never feel like doing it.
So why are you waiting around to feel like doing it? That is not, despite what our lazy inner child tells us, a prerequisite for doing it.
This is where discipline enters the picture. Discipline, in this context, can be seen as the ability to do things regardless of whether you feel like it or not.
This is the lesson at least one parent, usually the father, was probably trying to teach you but was too inarticulate to explain.
Life doing only what you feel like doing is catastrophically stunted. Even if you were a billionaire, it would result in a very tiny, pathetic life.
Even billionaires have to wait for the car sometimes.
So whichever parent tried to teach you this was right when they said (or implied) that self-discipline is a skill you’d need for the rest of your life. No matter what kind of life you are leading, it’s going to involve shit you don’t want to do, and you will need whatever internal resource that takes.
And I think the lack of understanding of this hurts a lot of people, especially all us victims of “failure to launch”[1] who absorb the toxic lesson that our lack of desire to do all the adult things means we are deeply and terrible broken.
But no, that’s normal. Being a grownup involves doing a fuckton of things you don’t want to do. Not wanting to do them is everyone’s default setting.
The problem lies in a lack of understanding of this leading us to wait around forever as if the desire to do these things might magically appear some day.
It won’t. So you have to ask yourself, then how do most people do these things?
The answer is self-discipline.
And they got it from practicing it, more or less. Presumably because, not being born gifted, they had no choice but to develop it just to get through school.
But “lucky” guys like me never needed it for school. Not one bit. Even doing the homework in high school required only a trivial flexing of my mental muscle.
So then I reach the precipice of adulthood only to have that all snatched away when my parents took me and my brother out of school.
No launching for me.
More after the break.
He who hesitates
I’ve always been rather timid and hesitant.
It’s part of my natural caution, I suppose. Or maybe a result of severe early childhood trauma. Same thing, really.
But it’s like I go into everything expecting pain at any second. Like I am constantly a Vietnam era soldier cautiously making my way through a booby trapped world.
And I know that is a way too harsh way to view the world. I’m perfectly fine in most ways most of the time. I could be a lot more bold and daring without suffering much damage.
And if something does blow up in my face, so what? I will live, and learn, and make brand new and even better mistakes in the future.
There are worse things than failing or getting hurt.
This probably connects to the post-pain analysis issue I have mentioned before. How part of the neurosis cycle of the intellectually extra is when we excoriate ourselves after an error or mishap, calling ourselves stupid over and over for not having done the smart thing which was “obvious if we’d just thought about it for two seconds”.
But you didn’t have two seconds. You are judging yourself in hindsight based on what you can see clearly now, in hindsight, at leisure, but those are not the conditions under which you made your “mistake”.
So next time you “fuck up”, grab a hold of yourself and try to interrupt that whole process and ask yourself if you really should have known better.
Or if you should just shrug, say, “oh well, shit happens!” and move on.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.