I find this gets easier if you give yourself permission to eat lotuses if you want to. Then I don’t have to lie to myself about whether I am or not. I can just play Alto’s Adventure, or clear out my email, or whatever, and it’s fine. I just pay attention to the actual consequences — including the impact on what I later find myself wanting to do.
I examined this sentence for awhile, because it confused me. Then I noticed the difference in our experience:
It gets easier for you when you give yourself permission to do it when you want to, because you’re in a world where, for the most part, you expect the world to also give you that permission.
Most of my orientation to the world has taught me that even if I WANTED to eat lotuses, the world would do its damnedest to stop me—which means that my brain has only received intermittent rewards from lotus-eating.
This means that something deep in my brain treats every opportunity to eat lotuses as a dice roll that may or may not actually provide hedons, and decides that the only way I’ll ever get hedons is if I TAKE EVERY OPPORTUNITY GIVEN ON THE CHANCE THAT MAYBE THIS ONE WILL WORK.
I didn’t design this system, but that seems to be its current configuration.
Anyway, this is just to point out that this strategy is only going to work in certain circumstances (high abundance and low existential stress), and is unlikely to work from an externally-reinforced scarcity mindset.
I examined this sentence for awhile, because it confused me. Then I noticed the difference in our experience:
It gets easier for you when you give yourself permission to do it when you want to, because you’re in a world where, for the most part, you expect the world to also give you that permission.
Most of my orientation to the world has taught me that even if I WANTED to eat lotuses, the world would do its damnedest to stop me—which means that my brain has only received intermittent rewards from lotus-eating.
This means that something deep in my brain treats every opportunity to eat lotuses as a dice roll that may or may not actually provide hedons, and decides that the only way I’ll ever get hedons is if I TAKE EVERY OPPORTUNITY GIVEN ON THE CHANCE THAT MAYBE THIS ONE WILL WORK.
I didn’t design this system, but that seems to be its current configuration.
Anyway, this is just to point out that this strategy is only going to work in certain circumstances (high abundance and low existential stress), and is unlikely to work from an externally-reinforced scarcity mindset.
This thread contains interesting discussion of different experiences before, but I think contrast with your own in a complementary way.