Ran Prieur

September 9.

2024-09-09T21:50:24Z

September 9. Continuing on motivation, I often wish for life to be easy and fun. But then it occurs to me, if a task is fun, it doesn't matter if it's easy. Sometimes making something harder can make it more fun. That's why games have difficulty levels. And sometimes, paradoxically, making something harder can make it easier.

This summer I watched a lot of Olympics, and it's a good way to approach any task, especially a trivial task, to do it like an Olympic routine, seeking perfection in every little movement. In the short term it's both mentally and physically harder, but it becomes physically easier as your new smoother movements become habitual, and it's mentally less tiring to focus completely on a boring task, than to do it while thinking about something else.

A few years back an old friend asked for advice on self-hate. I said, I'm not qualified because that's not a problem for me. But I was thinking of propositional self-hate, the intellectual idea that I'm worthless or inadequate. I don't get that, but it turns out that I have quite a lot of practical self-hate, in the form of subtle habits, both physical and cognitive, that don't make any sense except as self-sabotage.

The thing that's helped me the most, in noticing these habits, is cannabis. I wonder how much of the anxiety that's seemingly caused by weed, is already there and only revealed by weed. Related: Marijuana Is Too Strong Now. The days of giant Cheech and Chong joints are over, but it's not complicated to just use smaller amounts.

September 5.

2024-09-05T17:10:28Z

September 5. New post! I'm taking another crack at one of my favorite subjects, motivation. I've said before that motivation is only a problem for humans, but now I'm thinking it's a problem for any organism that doesn't fit its environment. No squirrel ever said, "Oh no, not more nuts to gather." But in captive animals you get a mismatch between what they're made to do, and what they're permitted to do.

With a perfect fit between organism and environment, what you feel like doing and what's good for you to do are one and the same. I have some political ideas on how to get closer to that, to build society bottom-up from intrinsic motivation, instead of top down from money sucking up more money. But realistically, humans are so good at constructing novel environments, that we're always going to be somewhat in a limbo of unfit.

Some people say, instead of motivation, all you need is discipline. Either they're bullshitting, or they're playing on some kind of easy mode. I seem to have good discipline, enough to push myself through the school system with good grades, and do a few jobs where I came home with just enough energy to do basic tasks and sleep. At one point in my 20s, I pushed myself so hard that I started to have nightmares about being dragged to death. Another time, between jobs, I had such fatigue that I could barely walk to the store. Modern medicine drew a blank, and I was advised to have more fun.

Since then I've spent decades trying to tease out a compromise, practicing the subtle art of riding little stretches of feel-like-doing, to get some rest from driving myself. I've found that a good thing to do, when I'm unmotivated, is to play video games -- not all day, just for an hour or two. A good game reminds me what it's like to be in a zone of energizing activity, and that mental state often carries over into the outside world.

Lately I've found another trick. I'm working on being fully present, trying to balance my attention on the smallest bits of what I'm doing, in the smallest bits of time. I've reclaimed a habit from my teenage years, of gently touching objects that I pass, to remind myself of where my body is in space. When I do something clumsily, I slow down and do it again with full focus. Coinciding with these practices, I've noticed that chores are no longer painful. It's not like I enjoy washing dishes, but now the task feels barely harder than sitting on the couch. Also, I seem to have more free time.

I suspect that this is the secret talent of elite doers: they are naturally highly present. They have an intutitive knowledge of when to push through and when to ease off, and they work with such micro-scale efficiency that they tend not to burn out, but to slide into some kind of flow state.

September 2.

2024-09-02T14:40:06Z

September 2. For Labor Day, a repost from July 2012:

The Busy Trap is one of the best essays I've seen about busyness and idleness:

"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write "Childhood's End" and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

If we manage to stabilize in a zero-growth society (instead of an endless series of explosions and collapses) then the culture will change, idleness will seem normal, and busyness and striving will seem strange or even unhealthy. I've read three works of fiction that give a sense of how this world might feel: Richard Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar, John Crowley's novel Engine Summer, and Hitoshi Ashinano's manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

It also occurs to me that nobody is ever doing nothing. Even meditation masters are focusing their consciousness. When we talk about "idleness" we're really talking about potential idleness, the absence of external demands on your time. The freedom to do nothing is the foundation of the freedom to do anything.