Big fan of both of your writings, this dialogue was a real treat for me.
Thanks! Glad you liked it.
But… I don’t want to end up net negative on agency. In fact my primary objective is to end up strongly net positive.
I think that the likely impact on agency is complicated. One question is the extent to which your current agency is driven by something like pain avoidance.
@Matt Goldenberg has a nice concept of a mode of motivation he calls “the self-loathing monster”, where one effectively motivates themselves by stacking on more fear/pain of failure to overcome the fear/pain of doing something. A classic example would be procrastinating until just before the deadline, and then at the last moment getting an urgency to complete the thing and doing it at the last moment while find everything very uncomfortable.
The more strongly one’s motivation is built like this, the more likely it is that there will be a loss of agency after the sources of pain are removed, as one hasn’t developed positive forms of motivation that could pick up the slack when the negative forms of motivation are removed. That’s not to say that such a person would be doomed to a lifetime of non-agency! It’s possible to learn positive motivation, but it’s going to take time. Possibly several years.
On the other hand, Tucker Peck has a nice talk (“Meditation and Social Justice” on this page) about the way that many important things are really hard, and that if you need to see success right away, you may have little chance than to burn out. In that kind of a situation, a more enlightened-y mindset may be exactly what you need:
If you look at how many, I guess millions of people, risked their lives to create social change and they did it and then in a lot of countries, it just disappeared, you know, very quickly. It was back [to] the way it used to be. I read two of Gandhi’s autobiographical books in this past winter. And you know, in South Africa, [...] he’s there for maybe 18 years and he finally is able to Improve the standing of the Indians in South Africa and then he leaves and everything goes right back to the way that it used to be.
It’s not the change isn’t possible, it’s that change is awfully slow and things that look like victories can turn out to be nothing. [...] So if you have an attachment to a sense of self, feeling like a failure is going to be a lot harsher than if you don’t. But if you have an attachment to the outcome, I don’t see anything you could do besides burn out. [...]
When you are able to—not completely lose the sense of self necessarily, [but] at least diminish it, or have periods when it subsides—you can go to this place where all of your actions can be motivated by justice, by compassion, seeing yourself equally valuable to everybody else. And there’s no sense of burnout because there’s nothing else to do. Like the idea of giving up doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing to give up.
When you read people like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi [...], the people who really lived the, religion of justice—they seem indefatigable. And they don’t seem to mind if they die from this. They sometimes don’t even seem to mind if they lose.
Thanks! Glad you liked it.
I think that the likely impact on agency is complicated. One question is the extent to which your current agency is driven by something like pain avoidance.
@Matt Goldenberg has a nice concept of a mode of motivation he calls “the self-loathing monster”, where one effectively motivates themselves by stacking on more fear/pain of failure to overcome the fear/pain of doing something. A classic example would be procrastinating until just before the deadline, and then at the last moment getting an urgency to complete the thing and doing it at the last moment while find everything very uncomfortable.
The more strongly one’s motivation is built like this, the more likely it is that there will be a loss of agency after the sources of pain are removed, as one hasn’t developed positive forms of motivation that could pick up the slack when the negative forms of motivation are removed. That’s not to say that such a person would be doomed to a lifetime of non-agency! It’s possible to learn positive motivation, but it’s going to take time. Possibly several years.
On the other hand, Tucker Peck has a nice talk (“Meditation and Social Justice” on this page) about the way that many important things are really hard, and that if you need to see success right away, you may have little chance than to burn out. In that kind of a situation, a more enlightened-y mindset may be exactly what you need: