I “should” be able to “just stop using shoulds”. (And I’m not proud to say it took me years to fully realize the inherent meta-contradiction taking place there!)
There’s not any inherent contradiction here.
Think of it like this: thinking you should want X is not the same as wanting X. That means you can want X, while still thinking you shouldn’t want X. If X is “tabooing ‘should’”, then you can want to taboo “should”, even though you think you should not want to taboo “should”. And this state of affairs is fine—it achieves the basic goal of wanting to taboo “should”, there’s no inherent contradiction. There remains a mismatch between what you think you should want and what you do want, but it’s entirely harmless and even beneficial in a way, since it lets you dodge the contradiction.
The hard part would be reaching such a state—you’d probably need some contradictory intermediate state. But the goal-state itself would be stable.
I didn’t see the contradiction in that the goal state was unreachable; I saw the contradiction as “I will should myself to the place where I don’t use shoulds anymore”, as opposed to something like “I wish I were the sort of person who used wishes instead of shoulds”. In the first case, you can’t remove the ‘last should’ because it’s structural to why you don’t have other shoulds.
There’s not any inherent contradiction here.
Think of it like this: thinking you should want X is not the same as wanting X. That means you can want X, while still thinking you shouldn’t want X. If X is “tabooing ‘should’”, then you can want to taboo “should”, even though you think you should not want to taboo “should”. And this state of affairs is fine—it achieves the basic goal of wanting to taboo “should”, there’s no inherent contradiction. There remains a mismatch between what you think you should want and what you do want, but it’s entirely harmless and even beneficial in a way, since it lets you dodge the contradiction.
The hard part would be reaching such a state—you’d probably need some contradictory intermediate state. But the goal-state itself would be stable.
I didn’t see the contradiction in that the goal state was unreachable; I saw the contradiction as “I will should myself to the place where I don’t use shoulds anymore”, as opposed to something like “I wish I were the sort of person who used wishes instead of shoulds”. In the first case, you can’t remove the ‘last should’ because it’s structural to why you don’t have other shoulds.