What keeps me on target is seeing the positive changes in my life. I think it would be nearly impossible if I were trying to do something where I could not see or feel improvement in some way.
Now I'm thinking you can hack your motivational system by learning to notice smaller and smaller improvements. But also, there has to be a context in which the improvements are valuable. Two winters ago I worked out for a few months, but it wasn't worth the trouble. Doing squats enabled me to climb hills better on my bike, but I was already climbing hills well enough, I was already thin and healthy, and the main practical difference was my bigger thighs ripped out a pair of expensive jeans. Being able to do more pull-ups would be great if I was climbing trees every day to pick fruit.
If we are all guaranteed basic survival (which I support) then there's less room for improvements to have practical value, and what counts as an improvement is mostly a function of personality and culture. If you like listening to music, and your friends are musicians, getting better at playing music will have high value. What if you like killing and your friends are killers? Destruction is easier than creation, and I think most of the tragedies of history happened because whole cultures discovered that they could feel good by telling themselves that something easy was an improvement. If ancient civilizations had video games there would be more forests left. And even in modern society, how much meaningful activity is really just people motivating themselves at the expense of others?
Finally, a comment from Aaron:
]]>It's been a while since I read the Continuum Concept but I remember Jean Liedloff describing the elders of the community and how their focus on life was achieving bliss. From what I understood they were aiming to have a perfectly still mind and to just let bliss wash over them. I know that western eyes see a stone age people as living in a state of extreme deprivation but as far as the Yequana people were concerned they had everything they needed - which is why the elders could indulge themselves by aiming to live in a perpetual state of bliss.
More and more products are advertised for what they don't have instead of what they have. Everything is this-free and that-free. It troubles me that the word "free", which is supposed to mean something like wildness, is now used for puritanism. "Woo-hoo, the wind is blowing through my hair because of my dietary restrictions!" And what's with all these food allergies anyway? Whether or not they're psychosomatic, something new is causing them.
Also on the subject of food, I knew it! Why salad is so overrated.
This probably won't amount to anything, but it's cool: Physicists Show Molecules Made of Light May Be Possible.
More science: a great long article about the discovery of Homo naledi, a new human-like species remarkable for its small head, long legs, and abundant skeletons. The best part of the story is they had to recruit very skinny people with scientific credentials to get into the cave where the bones were discovered.
Finally, this is one of the best articles ever posted to the subreddit: Why boring cities make for stressed citizens. There's stuff about how we're biologically adapted for complex environments, how rats in stimulating environments are much smarter, and a bit at the end about how boredom might be good for us. I just got the idea that boredom is like drugs: it's good in moderation, and with the right set and setting.