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I 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 tha
by placebo 10y ago
I 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.