Raptitude.com

An assassin is coming to kill you! At midnight tonight! Unless you do 100 pushups first, that is.

If this were true, you would do the pushups, no question, no problem. Any motivation issues would evaporate, thanks to your assassin. If the assassin did this every weekday, you’d have amazing pecs, even if you didn’t want them. Your fitness would become an inevitable result of circumstance.

The real question is how to get yourself to do 100 pushups, or some other rewarding feat, without an assassin coming to kill you. If your amygdala isn’t getting forcibly activated by an Anton Chigurh-like force, you have to rely on something else.

But why is that “something else” so much less dependable? Why is it so hard to just do the thing we think is best?

Someone emailed me a while ago and said, “Hey Dave, I notice what you mostly write about is self-control. Why all the talk about self-control?”

I do have my particular struggles with self-control, but I also regard the battle for self-control as the central theme of human history. Everything people argue about, all the news, all the political discourse, all the gossip and outrage, all the big religions, all the punditry and proselytizing — it all centers on what some person, or all people, should do or refrain from doing. All humans care about is good and bad, and the voluntary human actions that make good and bad happen.

Another word for this fixation on human self-control is morality. Everyone agrees that it matters what we do. A given person, at a given moment, might do a good thing or bad thing, and a lot hinges on that – much more than just that person’s own fate.

I know how to replace a kitchen faucet. If you have a janky old faucet that needs to be replaced with a smoothly operating new one, I can do that for you or show you how.

This wasn’t always true. It became true May 27, 2024, after pulling everything out of the under-sink cupboard, lying uncomfortably on my back inside it, and fiddling my way through several sets of internet-derived instructions.

The exact moment in which I became capable of faucet-replacing is hard to pin down precisely, but it was a real moment in time, sometime that afternoon, in that sweaty and contorted position under the sink.

Just before that, I had been dismayed to discover that the various hoses and hardware coming out of the fixture didn’t correspond to the ones in the instructional YouTube video. I could easily have abandoned the mission there, telling myself I’d “come back to it later” or “figure something else out.” Instead, I chose to lay uncomfortably a little longer, pondering the problem, testing my hunches. Within an hour I had a sparkling new tap that worked perfectly.

Now that I’ve done it once, the mechanics of faucet installation seem straightforward and self-evident, and I’m confident I could do it a hundred times over.  

The other day I closed a savings account at a tiny credit union branch. I expected it to take about five minutes, but the teller took so long that I started to experience time distortion.

I knew it had been at least fifteen minutes, but perhaps it was much longer. Twenty-five minutes? Forty? There was no visible clock, and I didn’t want to take out my phone. The young teller seemed to be Googling how to close an account while maintaining her professional bank teller countenance.

I waited patiently, occupying myself with an eyes-open meditation practice, and didn’t complain.

I did feel self-conscious though. There were only two tellers, and half of them were dealing with me while the other one, clearly more experienced, handled the rest of the line one at a time.

Another customer did complain, to the other teller.

She said, with an edge to her voice, “I would suggest that if a transaction is going to take more than ten minutes, it should be done by appointment,” and then went on to make a few more suggestions. The teller cited extenuating circumstances (scheduling problems, somebody is on lunch) and also said she was very sorry about that a few times.

Everyone in the tiny building heard this exchange, and it made for an uncomfortable few minutes for all of us.

A major online publication once reported in a profile on me that I had retired at 33. A few old friends and acquaintances reached out to congratulate me on my financial independence.

I think it was an honest mistake on the part of the reporter. I told her I had quit my job to write full time, and I guess she thought that meant I must have millions of dollars.

To be clear, I was not then, and am not now financially independent. The 100 or so people that actually know me could discern that just by seeing my kitchen. Yet perhaps 20,000 people read somewhere that I am. That means potentially 200 times more people are wrong than right on this question, because of an inference made by a reporter.

This scenario, in which there’s much more wrongness going around than rightness, is probably the norm. People make bad inferences like that all day long. These wrong ideas replicate themselves whenever the person tells someone else what they know, which the internet makes easier than ever.

Consider the possibility that most of the information being passed around, on whatever topic, is bad information, even where there’s no intentional deception. As George Orwell said, “The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.”

Sometimes you really can trade lead for gold. You may have noticed, for example, how much of a time-saver it is to stay a little late to finish a task today that you could finish tomorrow instead. Somehow that last little bit, which would only take a half-hour now, will eat up most of tomorrow morning if you leave it till then. It’s the same work, but somehow its size and complexion change drastically depending on when it gets done.

There should be some metaphysical law that stops you from getting such a good deal, but there isn’t. So you should go for it, and also become a hunter for such deals.

A lot of variables come together to make this sort of transmutation happen. If you’ve been working on something for an hour or two, your system is warmed up in all the right places. You have the relevant information loaded up in your mental RAM, the body is tuned into the relevant actions (flipping between spreadsheets, folding clothes, whatever) and the mind has dropped most irrelevant thoughts. What would take thirty more minutes in this state might take two hours from a cold start tomorrow.

Everybody used to be naked, all the time. Naked at birth, naked at death, naked while sitting around with people, naked while meeting strangers, naked while preparing and serving food.

This condition is hard to imagine, because everybody you’ve ever met has been in the habit of wrapping themselves in woven fibres. Coating our bodies with textiles is such a useful thing to do that everybody does it now. But the technology to do that had to be invented, and many people lived their whole lives before that happened.

In fact, many people lived and died before any material goods had been invented — at least anything more complex than sharpened sticks or stones. Biologically, those people were basically the same as us. They still had to stay warm, they had to keep their kids safe, and they had to eat. Just with no stuff.

One thing humans do sometimes is attribute undesirable qualities to a person who’s doing something that seems overboard or unnecessary. It’s still common to hear that people who work out a lot are “obsessed with their bodies,” or that people who drive expensive cars are snooty or vain.

I’m sure I’ve thought and repeated these things myself, and a lot more. They’re flippant judgments to make, but they seemed true enough, from what I knew.

One inference I made a lot was that super-organized people who keep strict routines are “control freaks” or are otherwise anal-retentive. They must be afraid of to the tiniest amount of uncertainty or disorder. I always believed a more relaxed, free-form approach to work and household was healthier – not letting things fall completely to the floor, of course, but also not needing to have every little thing in its place all the time.

I didn’t see a connection at the time between my dismissive opinions on this subject, and the fact that I had always suffered immensely from my own inability to stay on top of my basic affairs of work and household.

Last year I wrote a post asking readers to consider how much they’d pay for a hypothetical miracle medicine that lengthens your life, makes you happier, reduces anxiety, lowers risk of disease and injury, increases personal confidence, and literally makes you more attractive, along with dozens of other benefits.

The only catch is that you can’t pay money for it, not directly. You gain and maintain access to it by doing a few hours of manual labor per week.

The punchline was that this miracle medicine deal isn’t actually hypothetical; it exists in our world and is available on precisely the above basis. It’s called “regular physical exercise.”

Not everybody takes this deal –- a few hours of labor per week for incalculable benefits – which is crazy when you frame it this way. We pay a lot more for things that don’t provide anything approaching the same return. But humans are like that.

Time always feels like it’s speeding up, but you might feel like time has been going exceptionally quickly these past few years. The first few days of a new month quickly become the 11th, then the next day it’s the 23rd, and then your credit card is due and it’s a new month again.

It might also be hard to remember, when people ask, what you did with those weeks and months. “Oh, I’ve just been, uh, working and stuff, I guess” you might say, when you bump into an acquaintance at the grocery store.

For some of us, the 2020s have also come with a certain lingering mental fog, or poor memory, which is another reason it can be hard to generate an interesting report about what you’ve been up to.

Naturally I have a theory about this, maybe even a cure. The hypothesis I’m about to share is not entirely crackpot — there is some scientific evidence behind this, but I’m mostly going off of my own intuitions here. Tell me what you think.