Accidental anti-akrasia effect I’ve recently discovered:
I recently set my watch to hourly chime (first time I’ve used it in over 5 years) so that I could get up at least once an hour and walk around a bit. That’s met with some success, but what I’ve found is that whenever the chime goes off, my sympathetic nervous system takes a jolt, and if I was in the middle of something unproductive, I start to berate myself with statements like “You’re going to die someday, what have you got to show for it? Reading your RSS feeds? Writing emails? Come on, ya pansy, do something!” (This didn’t start as a conscious decision, so much as a realization that an hour had just gone by without my noticing it, which fed into my death aversion. Maybe that’s a small version of what a midlife crisis feels like.) It’s not perfect, but it does seem to make me more productive for the first 15 minutes of each hour than I normally am.
Maybe that’s a small version of what a midlife crisis feels like.
In my twenties (late ’80s, early ’90s), my friends and I used to talk about having a mid-life crisis every six months. Oh, the angst of Generation X, in the now-lost-to-history last years of the pre-Internet era. (I’m quite enjoying my actual middle age.)
Accidental anti-akrasia effect I’ve recently discovered: I recently set my watch to hourly chime (first time I’ve used it in over 5 years) so that I could get up at least once an hour and walk around a bit. That’s met with some success, but what I’ve found is that whenever the chime goes off, my sympathetic nervous system takes a jolt, and if I was in the middle of something unproductive, I start to berate myself with statements like “You’re going to die someday, what have you got to show for it? Reading your RSS feeds? Writing emails? Come on, ya pansy, do something!” (This didn’t start as a conscious decision, so much as a realization that an hour had just gone by without my noticing it, which fed into my death aversion. Maybe that’s a small version of what a midlife crisis feels like.) It’s not perfect, but it does seem to make me more productive for the first 15 minutes of each hour than I normally am.
In my twenties (late ’80s, early ’90s), my friends and I used to talk about having a mid-life crisis every six months. Oh, the angst of Generation X, in the now-lost-to-history last years of the pre-Internet era. (I’m quite enjoying my actual middle age.)