One of my “secret weapon” beliefs:
Freedom of the will exists and it’s part of the fabric of reality.
I used to believe those scienticians going on that “willpower is a limited resource”.
Looking back on it now, they didn’t have the first idea of what the will is or how it works.
(Neither did I, which is where the problem really started.)
You can’t just drop a concept like the will into a laboratory, ask some survey questions, run the stats package, and call it a solved problem.
If psychologists set out to study square triangles, I have little doubt that they’d end up with a slew of media articles and a pop-science book explaining why square triangles are real.
That flies with the “evidence based” (sic) crowd on reddit, but it isn’t touching the real problem.
Good science is one thing.
Using the prestige of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein to sell sloppy thinking flim-flam — while securing TED talks and publishing contracts — is another matter.
Consider this:
The willpower skeptics point out how difficult it is to resist temptation.
If you’re trying to lose the flab off your bee-hind, you won’t succeed by trying to resist the jar full of double-cream peanut butter Oreos.
The magnetic pull of the tasty but naughty foods wins out, sooner or later. The cookies only need be patient. You’ll get tired, distracted, or simply cave in to your raging appetites.
Sounds good on paper.
It’s totally wrong.
Earlier this year I went on a pretty hard diet that moved some excess flabbage off my lazy self.
Here’s two things I noticed about willpower.
First thing: The will makes decisions and commits to them.
The first thing I did was get the temptations out of house and out of sight.
Willpower isn’t necessary because I used my own will to make it unnecessary.
Framing willpower as the constant exercise of self-control against temptation completely ignores how real people act.
Second thing: Making choices is one thing the will does, but not the ONLY thing.
In the depths of a diet, you don’t want to mope around wishing for all the bad foods you can’t eat.
What you do is flip your attention away from what is missing and give your energy to what you are achieving.
If you’re looking at the process as deprivation, of course it sucks.
You’re still in fat-guy mode, thinking and feeling and wanting what the fat guy wants.
You want to stop being fat-guy, you’ve got to change away from that inner reality.
You aren’t resisting the temptation for bad foods.
You stop wanting them. You stop seeing them as desirable.
You do this with a change of attention.
Iris Murdoch once wrote that the will is nothing but the direction of attention. We’re used to thinking of the will as a kind of inner movement, like the 8-ball bouncing around the pool table. But this is a mistake. We’d be better off thinking of the will more like vision.
If you want to change your will, you don’t close your eyes, squeeze your fists, and choose real hard.
You turn your eye to look around in a new direction.
The scienticians studying willpower in the lab don’t know this because they aren’t interested in history of ideas or philosophy.
It’s true you can’t always choose what thoughts or feelings enter your conscious awareness.
But you CAN choose to give them your attention…
And you can choose where you DON’T give it if you’re facing an unwanted thought or desire.
Do me a favor and forward this to somebody that needs to read it.
Matt Perryman
https://matts.email