Self-Consistency and Doing What I Want
One big goal for my final semester was to clean out the clutter in my life. Last semester, I found myself constantly juggling too many activities and obligations, some of which I had already lost interest in continuing to do. I was living in a state of constant brain fog, preventing me from really focusing on what I wanted to work on (which recently has been my research projects - those have brought me simultaneously the highest highs and the lowest lows).
Where I faltered was in the specificity of my goal. What I really wanted to do was stop wasting time, because I’m graduating so soon. However, unconsciously, I conflated not wasting time with the very similar goal of don’t do what I don’t want to do.
Why is this bad? There’s a not-so-subtle but crucial distinction between “things I don’t want to do” and “things that would waste my time” - the sets (“things I don’t want to do” $\cap$ “things that would not waste my time”) and (“things I want to do” $\cap$ “things that will waste my time”) are both nonempty. I’ve been solid at regulating the latter - for example, earlier this semester I had been playing a lot of Marvel Rivals. But it’s mostly a waste of my time, so I’ve been trying to replace it with other activities like reading and writing that seem more valuable to personal development but are still relaxing from what’s traditionally my “work.”
However, the former set has bothered me quite a bit. The main example I have is going to swim practice. The weather had not been helpful to the case - going to swim practice on a slushy, ~10 degree night definitely is not something I want to do. But it’s also not a waste of my time - it benefits my fitness, improves my sleep quality, and overall improves well being. But I’ve slacked off and skipped many practices using the bad excuse that “This is not something that I want to do, and recently I’ve been not doing a lot of things I don’t want to do. So let me not go to swim.”
I’ve gotten better at locally applying my real goal and noticed substantial benefits. Forcing myself to go to swim because it’s not a waste of my time, even when I really don’t want to has been immensely impactful. Obviously, it helps intrinsically with my fitness, but I also notice some extrinsic benefits that I haven’t had for a while. I’m also going to sleep earlier more consistently. I’m eating better and more. I feel more focused on my projects and more motivated to grind through frustrating results or infrastructure. Overall, I feel more self-disciplined and consistent, all because I have been improving at disciplining myself in one particular “thing” that had been lacking before.
I think it has something to do with self-consistency - “how you do anything is how you do everything.” Because I’ve clarified the goals of not wasting time and not doing what I don’t want to do in a small case (going to swim practice), the distinction is becoming clearer in other areas as well.
Forcing myself to do things that I don’t want to do is tough. It also definitely damages the quality of the “doing”. There are days when I don’t feel like working on my projects, and forcing myself sometimes leads to poor work quality and actually more wasted time1. However, I think people are remarkably self-consistent in their behavior - we have entrenched values and goals that we unconsciously apply to all scenarios. It can be hard to all of a sudden change these values and goals in all scenarios. But, consciously changing them locally is a lot easier but can also still seemingly naturally ripple into global change.
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Ironically, I’m taking a break from working on my projects right now to write this post instead. ↩