Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about self-trust. How do I frame the conversations in my mind regarding subjects such as self-discipline, relationships, expanding my comfort zone, and maintaining my health?
As much as I have striven for the contrary, the mental narratives surrounding these topics in my mind have been of a self-coercive nature. In this paradigm, I have to force myself to work out. I have to force myself to prioritize my relationships. Frequently for me, hard work doesn’t come from a place of intrinsic motivation, but rather from a place of believing that if I don’t do it, bad things will happen. I’ll tell myself that if I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, I’ll get fat, or that I’ll end up poor and lonely, without a meaningful vocation.
My fear of ending up as a “failure” in these regards has been a powerful motivator for me. It has gotten me into the gym and out of my comfort zone. It has pushed me to continue through difficult times in my projects and in my relationships. But now, things have gotten to the point where this negative motivation feels like trying to push a rope: rather than moving things forward, it just makes me feel emotionally tangled. Self-coercion is a short-term strategy that is providing diminishing returns while making life a much less enjoyable experience.
“Wait,” you might say. “Isn’t a call against self-coercion a call for laziness and complacency? Isn’t discipline all about sacrificing short-term pleasures for longer-term gratification? Isn’t it about skipping the donut in the morning so that I in fact do not get fat?”
To this I would answer, yes, externally discipline looks like the negation of short-term pleasures in favor of long-term fulfillment. But for me, the hangup isn’t over discipline itself—I already have a strong desire to live a rigorous and moderate lifestyle. The issue has to deal with the way in which I choose to go about achieving this goal. As I currently see it, there are two worldviews through which I have conceived the path to a disciplined lifestyle:
Discipline arises from conditioning. By punishing myself when I do bad things and rewarding myself when I do good things, I will be more likely to do the good things than the bad things in the future.
Discipline arises from being in touch with my needs. By exercising when I need to release energy, resting when I’m tired, and working when my mind needs stimulation, I can naturally converge to a moderated and fulfilling lifestyle.
I have come to believe that worldview (1), when pursued in the long term, is a path to misery. It’s based on an assumption that I don’t have free will; in other words, that my actions in my day-to-day state of mind aren’t subject to conscious decisionmaking. It comes from a belief that my base state is laziness and that a threat of violence must be used to incite me to action. Worldview (1) says “I’d better be careful, because if I don’t punish myself for misbehavior then I’m going to completely lose control.” Implicit in this worldview is that I have more in common with Pavlov’s dogs than I do with an actualized human being.
On a meta-level, worldview (1) rewards me for punishing myself. It contains the belief that self-punishment will lead to better behavior patterns in the future. Externally speaking, this may be true. I may achieve more in the short term as a result of putting myself under lash and chain. But eventually, this self-flagellation will lead to an inner misalignment that will completely sap my energy and sabotage my success.
Worldview (2), on the other hand, feels much truer to who I am, or who I could become. It accommodates the fact that I’m a dynamic, living organism whose needs evolve over time. It gives me the philosophical freedom to be more adaptable to the world around me, and rather than starting with the assumption that I must be coerced into doing what’s good for me, it assumes that my body and mind can work together to meet my needs in the long term. Within this framework, discipline arises because I am undergoing a continuous process of learning how to interpret the signals my body is sending me, not because I have deduced what is best and must force myself to conform to a predetermined conclusion.
Worldview (2) opens me up to developing a deeper understanding of what is actually good for me. Thus, discipline becomes sensible rather than compulsory. Once I understand what it is that I actually need, there is no reason to force myself to do anything else, because I intrinsically want to meet my needs.
One last point: worldview (2) is a more intellectually challenging mindset to cultivate than worldview (1). Oftentimes, our needs are like a crying baby—they scream and cry and cause a ruckus, but they rarely tell us what’s wrong in simple, easy-to-understand terms. Figuring out what we need requires a process of trial and error. Because it’s hard to do science under distress, we default to worldview (1) and just tell the baby within us to shut up. There are situations where there simply isn’t time to commune with ourselves. But we must be careful that this does not become our default option, lest we risk becoming estranged from ourselves.
I’m tired of tearing myself apart in the name of self-improvement. It’s an internally inconsistent and fatalistic way of living. My next era will be one of flowering, rather than one of mechanical coercion. This is the time in my life when I will learn to accept and communicate with myself, and in so doing I will make myself stronger and more adaptable. Undergoing such a process will require close attention to my internal state, which will make me more sensitive to pain. Nevertheless, it is better to learn where that pain resides than to pretend that it doesn’t exist at all. Once I am aware of it, I can begin to heal—and when I start to heal, all sorts of amazing things will begin to happen that I can hardly imagine right now.
I really like this piece. Something I’ve learned recently is that it’s sometimes rewarding to have and follow up on cravings (a certain food, or activity, like flying a kite even though the last time was elementary school). It defeats indecisiveness, and gets you out there doing things with a purpose.