Enemies of Willpower

Or, how I attempted to write an Important Blog Post but delayed it over and over again, and decided to write about my attempt to write instead…

Willpower is a strange strange thing. One can spend all day prepping for it, cajoling it out of its hidey-hole, building it up piece by piece in preparation for some project … then it disappears just when you need it, abducted by its evil twin, Apathy, heralding the appearance of its cousin, Guilt.

Guilt and Apathy co-exist rather uneasily. Their alliance is necessarily infected by the truism of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, but really, they are cats of different stripes. Guilt is a nervous, high-strung and disorganised individual, swinging between extremes of anxious nagging and studious avoidance. Apathy is a chill-out laid-back comfortable depressive who yo-yos gently between mild dissatisfaction and insensate listlessness. Guilt will say lots of things but won’t do anything. Apathy doesn’t do anything, period.

Guilt is a pest, Apathy is a bum. Their fundamental modus operandi aren’t aligned with each other, much less so their personalities. So by any rational thought, Guilt and Apathy ought to be nemeses. How did they get inducted into the same dark brotherhood, set in opposition to the shining light of Willpower?

Perhaps because both are resistant to change. At its most basic, Willpower is the intent to inflict and engage in change. Change requires more effort than status quo, but Guilt is too scared and Apathy is too lazy.

While there’s no change on the horizon, all three probably fall into an equilateral triangle, like this:
(all oppose each other to some equal degree)

But once Guilt and Apathy sniff out any change that requires a significant amount of either courage or effort, the triangle quickly becomes isoceles, like this

And if these were vectors or forces in equilibrium, any beginning physics student will tell you that at any vertex in equilateral Fig. 1, the magnitudes of the vertical and horizontal components are equal, but in isoceles Fig. 2. the former is always more than the latter.

In other words, in Fig 1 (no change), Guilt, Willpower and Apathy are all fighting each other in an equal three-way battle. Once we get to Fig 2 (change), Guilt and Apathy might have mini internal bickerings, but are definitely united in an alliance against Willpower.

So the question is – how to make Guilt and Apathy fight each other instead? How to play off fundamental misalignments, incite dissent and leave Guilt and Apathy tangled up in each other so that Willpower has breathing space to act? How do we make the diagram look like this:

Anybody have any ideas?

Note: Before I wear out the personification and physics analogy (if there are glaring inconsistencies in the physics, please ignore them), here’s some background on these musings. Since going offline sometime in Feb, and on a rather questionable note , I wanted to write a post updating readers (if there are any left) about my life. Unfortunately I hit by, you guessed it, Apathy and Guilt!
And after writing about all that, I still haven’t written what I was going to write. Productive procrastination, indeed!

Inertia, Apathy, and the Risk-free life

Yesterday I wallowed in the half-asleep lethargy brought on by cold medicine, the kind that says ‘May cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate machinery.’ It was my excuse for bumming around the house, desultorily surfing the net, refusing a short stint to relief-teach at a nearby school, rejecting all social invites, being generally brain-dead, dull, negative, dead.

Of course, I was under the weather and needed to rest, but what came as a quiet shock was that my day of sick rest was no different from my usual day! I repeated the same pattern of time-wasting, committing to nothing, creating nothing, just hanging around and maintaining my current immediate needs like food, Facebook chatter, emails, picking up around the house, job-searching and sleep.

Clearly, one hits a minima at some point, and I think I’ve hit mine.

There is no risk in my current life. Inertia and apathy comes about when there is no risk, and no fear, making me slide comfortably down to sleepy la-la-land. Which makes me realize that everything I’ve done before worth anything has been motivated by fear/insecurity/deadlines… in other words, no simple certainty of success, or risk.

Somewhere along the line I’ve forgotten what risk tastes like, and was content to chug along. End result: end up lazier, narrow, smaller, flying under the radar. And it’s an exponential decline from there.

So how to drag myself outta that muck? Actually, I exaggerate. Things aren’t that bad, with jobs and social life etc getting somewhere. The problem of inertia and apathy is actually located closer to the heart – the lethargy I feel when questioned about what I love and what I want to do, and the quiet little very sian feeling that it doesn’t really matter. Contrast this to my previous post where I swore that I must must must find a passion. I think I’m facing a slide into the Quester’s Apathy, or at least a questioning of the belief that I will find what I love.

Note to self: beliefs are often almost religious in nature. By this I mean, no matter how much rational and reason prop it up, there will always be a gap and you got to take the last leap of faith and say, regardless of anything, I believe!

On second thought, isn’t believing, beyond rhyme or reason, but the pure act of will, actually the greatest risk of all? The thought that I will find what I love, and I will jump into the abyss after it (if necessary), and f**k all notions of money, prestige, expectations, opinions?

I am still uncertain about my appetite for risk in life, especially in such large ideological doses. So let’s start small again. More in another post, on how to structure my day-to day life to bring about practical and manageable risk, and eliminate inertia!

A Life of Ease…..

is no life indeed.

It’s 2008, and I’m back home in Singapore, pondering what to do next. Again. Three months ago, since I left America, I’ve traveled to Spain, France, and Laos. But mostly what I’ve done is one or two desultory part-time jobs and a lot of lazing around at home, waiting for a saviour to hand me my destiny on a platter.

But that won’t happen. And so I can’t think out of this mental box that I’ve created – the notion that I can’t take any action until I figure out what I really want to do. And that’s a really bad trap to be in. It makes you wake up late, peruse the career books and job listings (but not actually apply to anything), swing wildly between almost-revelation and despair…. until even uncertainty gets too comfortable, and you get used to feeling it and ignoring the vague sensation of quietly sinking into somnolence.

Analysis paralysis. Bad decision making. Poor metacognition. Call it whatever you want, but oh, it’s there.

I want to feel alive again, and not quite so useless. Lack of motivation or direction happens when you’re lazy and unfocused, and it becomes a pretty vicious cycle with ever decreasing energy levels.

What I need now is Action. I am, simply put, stuck in a rut. And a very comfortable rut it is. Still, ruts can sometimes be instructive, holding up a mirror and forcing me to see the gaps in my life-planning, the weakness in my thinking, and most importantly, my ignorance of the world, my dependence, and unwillingness to grow up. So, what to do now? How shall I move on?

Here goes. Some ideas, from the rusty brain.

Instead of ‘what should i do next’ I ought to think about what to do next, and think about where I want to be in 10 years, 20 years, etc etc. This is the time-honoured practice of setting goals. They can be miniature ones, like ‘today I’m going to write my blog again’, to long-term goals of financial independance. And of course, life goals like writing a novel (and getting it published), and walking all of the AT. The point is, write them down! And then break them down! And the start doing them!

Also important is the idea of setting up a daily habit, so that each day doesn’t pass in a blur. With the notion that you can learn discipline from it, and that habits gradually become a natural part of your life. I’m going to try to 1. wake up early and 2. do yoga or go running and 3. journal or draw or blog.

Hmm. Look at the sentence above. What’s the problem with it? Well, the first part is try. In order to get anything done, the operative word is don’t just try, DO. Excuses have a tendency to compound. Which is why some people (like me!!) need a carrot and a stick to enforce discipline. I have two wooden boxes. Every day I get it right I’ll drop some money into the large box. Every day I miss out, I take that amount, plus 10 percent interest, out of the large and put it in the small. It starts compounding, if you serially miss days. Once a month I do an accounting, and the money in the large is for me to spend on me, and the small goes to other people (Alumni fund, anyone? hehe). Voila! A mini-economy! (Am off to place a dollar into the large box now)

Lastly, and the hardest thing to convince myself of is, there are no wrong decisions. Some decisions may be better or worse, but there are no wrong decisions! Every next step leads from the previous one, whether continuously (I like this job, let’s continue) or tangentially (meh, maybe something else) or in total reverse (time to go to grad school and study physics!). I’m in my mid-twenties, which is plenty of time to try new things, and conversely, plenty of time to waste worrying about doing the wrong thing.

So, with that, let’s see me take some Action!