Most of the things we abandon were once exciting—they began as play. Then, almost without noticing, we turned them into work. Track them, schedule them, tie them to progress and identity, and tell yourself you have to improve. The fun drained out; we change how we frame the activity. The same mind that resists ten forced minutes can happily work all day when something feels optional, rich with reward, and free of burden. In other words, we don’t lose interest, we just load weight onto it until we drown in it.
Some definitions:
Work is done when trying to rid of something (a nagging boss or a long to-do list) or to achieve money or power
Play is done in expectation of a reward: chemical (coffee, nicotine), sense (pleasant visuals or sound, good flavor or scent, touch), sexual (tension, release), novelty, conceptual elegance or power, expression (of self, ideas)
Meditation is when aware of the present activity more than the future relief or reward
The mistake is thinking these are fixed categories. They aren’t. We slide activities from one column to another without noticing. There can be substantial overlap between the three groups. To make an activity more pleasant, palatable, or likely to happen, one needs to add or increase the amount and/or variety of rewards. Conversely, to decrease or stop an activity, remove rewards and reframe it as the pursuit of money, power, or a mere checking off of boxes.
In other words, make it something you have to do, introduce an accountability partner, tie your survival and social status with it, and you will have succeeded in making it a thoroughly unpleasant activity that will happen only if there’s really no other option. But often our intentions or desires are quite the contrary: the activity is to be encouraged and made a habit.
Add rewards but reframe it as 100% optional. It never has to be done, there’s no time allocated for it, no one will get angry if you don’t do it. There’s a certain sense of “emptiness” associated with it: the activity doesn’t consume space in your mind, it’s just out there if you want to do it in a given moment. There’s no conscious tracking or keeping score (although an external reward mechanism could do the tracking, such as the elaborate programs that make social media so compelling). There’s no sense of sacrifice or dedication. With all these negatives, it may seem surprising anything would happen at all. But the underlying truth is that things arise out of nothingness: when the mind is empty, you can take on a new project, but not if you’re already juggling ten of them.
So what happened with me with a fun hobby activity: it started with the promise of novelty, as an escape from other work-like things I was doing at the time. When the novelty wore off, there was no other reward and I was left with a sense of “I have to do it”, as if I have to practice to get somewhere with it. But no one was measuring or noticing my progress, if there ever was any. Add to it the setup cost (having to clear the table to setup the tools for the activity every time) and now I don’t do it at all.
Or to take instrument practice: you may have to do it because there’s a lesson every two weeks or so, but the subconscious mind makes sure to do all in its power to absolutely minimize the time spent on the activity to exactly and only the amount you force yourself through various spreadsheets and plans and goals: about ten minutes a day, after which you’re convinced that you’ve totally spent your “practice credits” and that my brain would be unable to continue at all until they get refilled overnight. But that’s not how the brain works: one can sustain an intellectual activity for eight hours a day or even more, given sufficient reward quantity and, crucially, type.
To take another example, hobby programming. I started working on an app and there was freshness and quick progress, and then the thing became much more difficult, requiring to keep in mind way too much of the program structure. The initial excitement wore off and progress stopped, and the brain thought it cannot touch the code ever again. Recently I split it into tiny programs and it feels fun again, though time will tell whether that’s not just the thrill of something new again. Having said that, on hobby projects, if they’re short enough, it’s actually entirely okay to be motivated by curiosity and the excitement of exploration. Surely that’s a part of what hobbies are for: find out what’s worthwhile, and then choose one or two things and make it your primary work for a deep dive into the topic.
You can only keep exploring new things if they’re short enough so they can be completed before the sense of newness wears out. What instead happens to me is that initial enthusiasm introduces me to big projects which then get left in a half-finished (or barely-started) state when a new one comes along. Then before I know it there’s a list of 150 things to do in my pipeline, none of which give any satisfaction since they go nowhere, but they still exert a nagging sense of “I should do this”, “I should work on this”.
I have recently restricted myself in such a way that new novelty projects go at the bottom of the 150-item list, while I only work on the things on the top of this pipeline, so a queue data structure. The queue length is growing, but being just a text file on a 2TB SSD, it’ll be a little while before I max out the capacity. It’s been just a few days or weeks, but already I’m feeling the futility of starting new things to escape the present. The new things become the present! The hedonic wheel spins faster and faster, while everything else stays the same, until I fall over in exhaustion, stop the wheel, dump my to-do list, and start from scratch.
Much the same happens when shopping: an exciting new thing is bought, placed on shelf, integrated into the background noise, another new thing is bought, and the endless loop of wasting money is joined. I’d do well to append the things to buy as a list in a text file rather than stuff taking up shelf space in the apartment. In fact, so far this year I have dramatically cut down on online shopping, with happy effect on the bank balance but no observable downside. The thought I got in Sedona was the right one: when I get the urge to spend money, I can go spend it on a cause I believe in. Give it to Wikipedia, or my favorite religious organization (if I had any); donate to a school or university; plan a trip with my love.
Then there’s the futility of ownership: if I have something inside “my” apartment, does that mean I own it? Just because others are barred from using it, doesn’t really make it particularly “mine” in any significant sense. Ownership in this sense makes sense for things that I use all the time or would be unwise to share with others: my watch, some clothes, toothbrush. On the other hand, I don’t gain much by keeping my books to myself, or the GPU that I use once a month. If only there was a good way of sharing these things!
The internet is magical as a way of sharing things without yourself losing any of it. Quite the contrary: the people who are best at sharing their work openly gain tremendously: others contribute to the work and they grow in respect etc.