I’ve followed a similar trajectory from ‘eugh plz no’ running to ‘joyful’ running via that same insight: “if a thing is enjoyable at least sometimes, then you can enjoy it 100% of the time you are doing it by just not doing it when you aren’t feeling it”. I grew up extremely unathletic and thought I hated running. As it turns out, I was confused. To give you a sense of just how confused: next month, I’ll be ‘competing’ in a Backyard Ultra in which I’ll run+walk the same 6.706km (4.167 mi) loop every hour, on the hour, until either (a) I quit, or (b) everyone else quits first. I expect I’ll enjoy the entire thing greatly. More importantly, despite it being a supposedly ‘gruelling’ endurance event of unknown distance and duration, I’m confident that I will at no point ‘force’ myself to do anything I don’t ‘want’ to do in any moment. I’ll just discover how many hours I have in me that day. Years ago, I thought that this kind of activity was for impossible Other People—people much better at inflicting suffering on themselves—and that all “I enjoy it” claims made about difficult/‘painful’ things were necessarily lies.
[At the risk of turning this comment into a long essay on a hobby-horse of mine,] I suspect that many LW-ish folks would benefit a lot if they started running/walking (‘wanning??’) and took your approach to it seriously. Two big reasons:
First, there’s a set of skills related to wholesome motivation that people can and should develop—something like how to cause yourself to do things that your brain has tagged as ‘hard’ or ‘unpleasant’ or ‘hardcore’ without ever relying on (or allowing) self-coercion or self-deception as psychological ‘tools’—and learning to “run when you feel like running” is an unusually cheap and accessible way to acquire the fundamentals of this skillset. Basically, I think that “being ambitious without habitually coercing/deceiving yourself in incoherent ways” is underrated. Many rationalists and LW-adjacent people I encounter don’t really seem to understand how to do this in any deep or reliable way; insofar as they do cause themselves to do things that they personally think of as hard or superficially-unpleasant, my impression is that they often rely on mental moves that are vaguely toxic. When I ask them about “using willpower” in detail, it often sounds to both of us as though they’ve taken harmful interpersonal mechanisms—guilt, shame, fear, dishonesty—and then weaponised these mechanisms against themselves. I claim that this is a bad strategy, and unnecessary, because “wholesome motivation” is a learnable alternative skillset. (Past Me was worse at this than Present Me is.) And while you can acquire basic “wholesome motivation” skills in many ways, going outside for a run gives you access to many tight feedback loops, which makes it easy to both
engineer your own tiny private mind motions (ie “Instead of slowing down as soon as you feel like it, pick a tree a little way further down the road to make it to first.”), &
discover small changes to attitude (“be cringe”, “think grandiose thoughts”) and context (specific music, a fitness device with real-time heart rate display) that work for you.
At least some of this stuff transfers. You can discover robust, you-specific alternatives to being subtly (or not-so-subtly) mean to yourself in the confines of your own skull for doing all sorts of things! I have been surprised by how much ‘run but only in a fun way’ has generalised for me.
Second, conditional on sticking to a “run when you feel like running” / “run iff it feels fun and flirty” rule, running/walking is relatively safe in a specific sense: it’s difficult to do this activity in a very unsafe way without realising it. This is not true for many kinds of exercise that have the ‘learn about your moment-to-moment motivation mechanisms’ property! Free weights are great, for example, but
(a) compound lifts require good form to execute safely,
(b) most adults have bad form by default [and need to unlearn many subtle things with the help of an experienced teacher],
(c) going close to failure often results in dangerously bad form, &
(d) even when you’re not ‘close to failure’, momentary lapses of attention can have catastrophic consequences. [I’m looking at you, deadlifts.]
While you can have harmfully bad form when running, it tends not to ‘feel good/correct’ in the moment, and the results are almost never so catastrophic. I paid a running coach to help me improve my form a few years ago, but I quickly realised that almost all of the best cues for maintaining optimal running form are variations on “do you feel bouncy and fun right now?” and “what movements & cadences make you feel like you want to keep running?” More importantly, the “stop when it doesn’t feel good” rule is itself a huge protection against overuse injuries etc. As a mate of mine likes to say: “There are two kinds of LSD. Both are serious drugs, and both can lead to transformational adventures., but Long Slow Distance running has a much better safety profile than The Other LSD, because you can end the experience the instant you don’t like what’s happening.”
That was a delightful read, thank you!
I’ve followed a similar trajectory from ‘eugh plz no’ running to ‘joyful’ running via that same insight: “if a thing is enjoyable at least sometimes, then you can enjoy it 100% of the time you are doing it by just not doing it when you aren’t feeling it”. I grew up extremely unathletic and thought I hated running. As it turns out, I was confused. To give you a sense of just how confused: next month, I’ll be ‘competing’ in a Backyard Ultra in which I’ll run+walk the same 6.706km (4.167 mi) loop every hour, on the hour, until either (a) I quit, or (b) everyone else quits first. I expect I’ll enjoy the entire thing greatly. More importantly, despite it being a supposedly ‘gruelling’ endurance event of unknown distance and duration, I’m confident that I will at no point ‘force’ myself to do anything I don’t ‘want’ to do in any moment. I’ll just discover how many hours I have in me that day. Years ago, I thought that this kind of activity was for impossible Other People—people much better at inflicting suffering on themselves—and that all “I enjoy it” claims made about difficult/‘painful’ things were necessarily lies.
[At the risk of turning this comment into a long essay on a hobby-horse of mine,] I suspect that many LW-ish folks would benefit a lot if they started running/walking (‘wanning??’) and took your approach to it seriously. Two big reasons:
First, there’s a set of skills related to wholesome motivation that people can and should develop—something like how to cause yourself to do things that your brain has tagged as ‘hard’ or ‘unpleasant’ or ‘hardcore’ without ever relying on (or allowing) self-coercion or self-deception as psychological ‘tools’—and learning to “run when you feel like running” is an unusually cheap and accessible way to acquire the fundamentals of this skillset. Basically, I think that “being ambitious without habitually coercing/deceiving yourself in incoherent ways” is underrated. Many rationalists and LW-adjacent people I encounter don’t really seem to understand how to do this in any deep or reliable way; insofar as they do cause themselves to do things that they personally think of as hard or superficially-unpleasant, my impression is that they often rely on mental moves that are vaguely toxic. When I ask them about “using willpower” in detail, it often sounds to both of us as though they’ve taken harmful interpersonal mechanisms—guilt, shame, fear, dishonesty—and then weaponised these mechanisms against themselves. I claim that this is a bad strategy, and unnecessary, because “wholesome motivation” is a learnable alternative skillset. (Past Me was worse at this than Present Me is.) And while you can acquire basic “wholesome motivation” skills in many ways, going outside for a run gives you access to many tight feedback loops, which makes it easy to both
engineer your own tiny private mind motions (ie “Instead of slowing down as soon as you feel like it, pick a tree a little way further down the road to make it to first.”), &
discover small changes to attitude (“be cringe”, “think grandiose thoughts”) and context (specific music, a fitness device with real-time heart rate display) that work for you.
At least some of this stuff transfers. You can discover robust, you-specific alternatives to being subtly (or not-so-subtly) mean to yourself in the confines of your own skull for doing all sorts of things! I have been surprised by how much ‘run but only in a fun way’ has generalised for me.
Second, conditional on sticking to a “run when you feel like running” / “run iff it feels fun and flirty” rule, running/walking is relatively safe in a specific sense: it’s difficult to do this activity in a very unsafe way without realising it. This is not true for many kinds of exercise that have the ‘learn about your moment-to-moment motivation mechanisms’ property! Free weights are great, for example, but
(a) compound lifts require good form to execute safely,
(b) most adults have bad form by default [and need to unlearn many subtle things with the help of an experienced teacher],
(c) going close to failure often results in dangerously bad form, &
(d) even when you’re not ‘close to failure’, momentary lapses of attention can have catastrophic consequences. [I’m looking at you, deadlifts.]
While you can have harmfully bad form when running, it tends not to ‘feel good/correct’ in the moment, and the results are almost never so catastrophic. I paid a running coach to help me improve my form a few years ago, but I quickly realised that almost all of the best cues for maintaining optimal running form are variations on “do you feel bouncy and fun right now?” and “what movements & cadences make you feel like you want to keep running?” More importantly, the “stop when it doesn’t feel good” rule is itself a huge protection against overuse injuries etc. As a mate of mine likes to say: “There are two kinds of LSD. Both are serious drugs, and both can lead to transformational adventures., but Long Slow Distance running has a much better safety profile than The Other LSD, because you can end the experience the instant you don’t like what’s happening.”