You’re wrong. Right now. We all are. And you just don’t know it yet. I guarantee it.
This appears to be a hard thing to accept. You don’t want to think about what you might be wrong about. But we all know we’re wrong, on some conceptual level. Very few of you would disagree with me if I said this to your face right now. Logically, it’s self-evident, given that we know so little. But if we’re discussing something… it could be a simple subject. One you think about every day.
- You don’t want to go to work today, it’s too much willpower.
- Just another drink.
- Voting’s a waste of time, things won’t change.
- I should really exercise, but I’m not going to.
- I want to do the right thing. But I can’t.
I’ve given plenty of advice to friends over the years, and it usually goes the same way. If any of your friends tell you, do you listen? Honestly, would you if they did? If you answer yes to this, then why aren’t you following your own advice in the first place?
Most of the time, these thoughts pass pretty quickly. If they start getting taxing enough, you do something about it and it goes away. Until next time. But how long does it take to resolve itself, given that you ignore it, day in and day out?
Do you ever stop to consider how many times a day you do this?
This has been bothering me. I have a lot of bad habits that I’m consciously aware of, but haven’t fixed. Why haven’t I? Seems pretty obvious now that I think about it. I’m forgetful, lazy, bad at focusing, and just as average a person as everybody else on the planet. I’m pretty good at failing to meet my own expectations.
I don’t think this is really any form of defect, though. It’s all a natural process of my thought patterns. And those I can only adjust so much. I suppose there must be a few gifted souls out there who are capable of achieving everything they want through sheer force of will, but for the rest of us, we have to cope with self-doubt, inadequacy, and everything else that’s an inherent part of the human condition.
And this is where being wrong comes in. Well, you are wrong about all kinds of things besides this, but I’m not here to judge. I want to focus on habits first. But there’s a trap here, that leads to Being Wrong. The first thing I think to do to correct this is to start structuring behaviors to correct my habits. Hack my habits, record things on paper, read more self-help books. But they’re all methods that work for some people, but usually only a self-selected few. It’s pretty scatter shot, in fact. You have to wonder why that is.
Again, a hypothesis speaks without me beckoning it. Perhaps there are various classes of mindset, that some form of self-help program would address. But it only works for someone in that given mindset, that’s similar enough to that neural pattern. Perhaps the problem is better addressed by identifying that pattern, and matching it to the appropriate self-help process. But how do we identify that?
For myself, I’m doubleplus self-analytical, so I’m very conscious of my own brain states. Being aware of them doesn’t help much in altering them, though. I must agree that the longer I’m here, the more it does feel like a passenger sort of relationship. So they must be altered through outside force of some form. I can certainly get myself to start taking more notes and attempting to establish some rituals. Writing more is one of them. This is largely in service to this idea of structured self-analysis. I’m not structured enough at the moment to maintain something like a diary, but it’s certainly possible to start constructing more posts. And this does certainly seem like a good place to begin.
I did promise myself to try to stay working on NaNoWriMo, but I’ve had a hell of a time maintaining consistency, because I was focused on trying to write coherently within a world that exists in my mind, and there’s just not enough structure there. So time for something completely different.
Structureal 