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It's not that willpower is bad; it's that willpower is a word that's being used for something that doesn't exist, that is a symptom of the interaction between d
by barrkel 10y ago
It's not that willpower is bad; it's that willpower is a word that's being used for something that doesn't exist, that is a symptom of the interaction between different systems. So rather than figuring out what is the cause of something, people point at the symptom, and say that willpower is lacking.
With that in mind, it's better to forget about the imaginary concept of willpower altogether, and look at reframing things so that different decision making systems come to the fore; or altering factors that are gumming up the decision making process.
The point at the end about stigmatizing people for lacking this imaginary attribute is particularly important. It's political, too; if you curtail people's freedom even in their best interests, it's easy to become corrupted from that position of power. Maintaining a belief in an invented character defect is a convenient way of deflecting the responsibility, but it's not necessarily any less evil.
- placebo 10y agoI once conveyed this belief to someone who had been through a path that is equivalent in difficulty to what the US nave SEALs have to go through. I told him that perhaps willpower is an illusion and it's basically has to do whether the net total of motivation is above or below zero given a set of circumstances. He answered that from his experience, motivation takes you up to a certain point but beyond it something else comes into play which he called willpower. I don't take the personal experience and interpretation of a single person to be much evidence for the existence of this vaguely defined concept called willpower, but just thought this anecdote would be of interest
- barrkel 10y agoAnd my message in this thread was an exercise in adopting a viewpoint, to see how it feels. I've found it sometimes useful to go to the far end of something to shift my default position. I think there is some effortful thing in the mind that sometimes needs to be engaged to accomplish something, but perhaps that effort is expended at a different level. Maybe it's constantly bringing a goal to mind, to support one decision making process. Maybe it's breaking a habit by avoiding what triggers it, or creating a new habit. Generally, expending conscious effort to change the tracks of the unconscious train, not by steering it. It's too facile to call it willpower though; I think it needs to be more strategic than that, and I think the baggage of the word is unhelpful.