Everything we do comes from feelings, and the stuff that seems to come from thoughts, is coming from thoughts that we've chosen to listen to because they rationalize hidden feelings. So the secret of motivation is to find those hidden feelings, and tune into them, because they're stronger than thoughts.
I go to the gym because I remember, from other times, that afterwards I felt good and was glad I went. But all the feeling is gone from those memories. I have to use thoughts and willpower to jump the gap. So I'm wondering if highly motivated people just have better feeling-memory, and if it's possible to develop it.
Lately I've been making some progress in motivation by using my superpower: narrowly focusing my attention. For example, if I have to do some cleaning, I forget the entire context of why I'm doing it (to fit in with a culture whose standards of cleanliness are a waste of energy and a trick to avoid boredom), and just focus completely on the task itself. The book of Ecclesiastes said it best: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."
New subject. Over on Hacker News, I just saw this article, The bed that saved me from the Taliban, which contained this description of the emotional vibe of the shooters: "Each time they would laugh afterwards, like they were just playing around, or like it was a big party or something." And I made this comment:
Terrorists in TV and movies are never like this. They're always super-serious evil, like Voldemort, like nobody ever is in real life. I wonder how much violence could be prevented if Hollywood didn't give us such a bullshit view of human nature.
Last week this was posted on the subreddit: The nightmares of the past about today. It's a long and thoughtful blog post about dystopian fiction in the late 1800's. My favorite bit: "Art is not the seed of wealth. Art is its fruit."
Posted on the subreddit yesterday, Is religion a universal in human culture or an academic invention? It's a subtle point. The author is not disputing the reality of all the stuff that we call religion, but arguing that the line between religion and not-religion is artificial, and that what we generalize as religion is better viewed as "a patchwork of particular beliefs, practices and experiences."
Also from Aeon.co, a nice article about Cosmopsychism, with some of the same ideas I mentioned in my December 3 post.
Our nature-based ancestors were animist, because almost everything in their world was self-organizing, and could be realistically viewed as a person. Even a tool would be made by the person using the tool, or by someone they knew, so it would already be integrated into the world of people and stories.
Now manufacturing has surrounded us with mass-produced objects, and we don't have a clear sense of how to assign meaning to all these things. From the article:
Rather than see an object as a member of a large group (say, one of 42 black T-shirts), [hoarders] see it as singular, unique, special. Each black T-shirt is perceived apart from the others and carries its own history, significance, and worth.
The genius of Marie Kondo is not fighting animism, but embracing it: Go ahead and think of all your objects as people, and then politely send away the ones that aren't making you happy.
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