Bea and Hope
Imagine two people in their 20s, each trying to figure out what to make of adulthood. Bea is a striver, turning her mindset into a grindset at every turn. Hope is deeply concerned with self care, and suspicious of capital and its adherents.
Bea and Hope start out pretty similar: let’s say they go to the same college, both study psychology, and have comparable amounts of native talent. But Bea is attuned to signals that she should step it up, and Hope is attuned to signals that she should relax.
Case Study: Bea
Bea learns early on in her degree that the job market for psychology professors is extremely competitive, with dozens of qualified applicants for every job. Not only does she learn it, she internalizes it, and uses the scary fact to motivate herself. She hustles to publish papers and win contests, studies hard for the GRE to get into one of the strongest psych PhDs, and, once she’s admitted, spends every hour she can improving her resume. It never occurs to her to switch to a less competitive field, or even to just try teaching at a high school or community college, where the market is less competitive.
Holy survivorship bias, Batman, but let’s say Bea pulls it off. She does indeed, at the cost of ulcers, hemorrhoids, and badly cracked teeth (she grinds them in her sleep), become a tenured psychology professor. Surely she relaxes now, right? No! She’s been fighting for her life for years, and those habits die hard. She knows she theoretically is safe with tenure, but gets that succulent shock of anxiety whenever any academic in the country is cancelled or fired; she always clicks on and reads those news stories, so they’re algorithmically fed to her all the time. She feels like her research still has to be perfect, and maybe she fudges data a little bit (or a lot) so none of her effort is wasted. She doesn’t use her platform for anything courageous or even particularly interesting; the feeling of constant precarity that got her to this point only exists in her mind, as a habit, and it brought her success. She will never let it go.
Is Bea happy? I don’t know. Probably sometimes! But it’s an insecure happiness, the sort of happiness with high peaks that are married to low valleys, the joy of reminding herself that she made it sandwiched between two dark nights of worrying she might lose it. Wouldn’t it be better if she could chill out?
Case Study: Hope
Hope is aware, probably, that psychology is a competitive field. But she doesn’t worry too much about all that. She’s studying it for personal reasons, because she wants to understand her own mind and those of her loved ones, not so she can nab some cushy ivory tower job. In fact, Hope doesn’t think about her future career much at all.
College is hard for Hope. More specifically, “college is hard for me” is a thought that Hope has a lot. When she needs to complete a paper she has the label “executive dysfunction” close at hand. She often struggles to get appropriate accommodations for mental challenges she faces, and is eager to help others get the help they need for their own conditions. She identifies as a former gifted kid, and laments at how many of them - it really feels like all1 - now have ADHD and burnout.
After college, Hope flounders for a while, eventually landing a data entry job. The job is boring and makes her tired, and she leans into that tiredness, struggling to do the dishes or otherwise contribute in her group house. She’s pretty much always exhausted, though she’s still a fierce advocate for the neuroatypical and marginalized. Eventually, she determines that she has chronic Lyme disease.
Postmortem
Bea’s problem is too much motivation. Hope’s is too little. Bea’s hustle served a purpose and was admirable for certain specific reasons, but absent those reasons it’s a runaway train, making her unreflective, uninteresting, and perpetually anxious. Meanwhile, Hope’s rejection of worldly acclaim is a key component of dozens of holy traditions, but she never does anything and needs to buck up.
So why can’t Bea just adjust her motivation down a little, and Hope adjust hers up? It’s would obviously help! I posit that it’s because the mental move of “change my motivation” is fundamentally relative. It’s a moving target. You’re either pointed down or up. And whichever way you aim, if you keep going for long enough, you’ll go too far.
Bea constantly reinforces the notion, for years, that she must try harder. However much she works, she’s always unconsciously seeking evidence that it’s not enough. Early in her career, this may even have been true! It actually is the case that psychology professorships are scarce. But to some degree, she may try so hard for one because they’re scarce; it’s a convenient justification for ultracompetitive anxiety.
Hope, meanwhile, is constantly feeding the idea that life is too hard. Whatever her responsibilities are, down to and including mere homeostasis, they are too great a burden. And again, perhaps at some point this was adaptive. Maybe college actually was hard for Hope, and it was good for her to cut herself some slack. But once “cut herself some slack” became her go-to mental move, she was on a path to dysfunction.
Motivation, I’m suggesting here, can be like sailing between two whirlpools. Both the hustle whirlpool and sloth whirlpool are self-reinforcing: they create brittle mental toolboxes with prebuilt responses to every situation. Feel guilty every moment of rest, or overwhelmed every time you have to make a 5 minute phone call. Not great options.
Back to Reality
Most people don’t fall into degenerate motivational whirlpools. I do think there are some Beas and Hopes out there, and that both motivational extremes can be self-reinforcing, but a lot of people manage just fine. Why?
One reason is that reality is complicated, with tons of different dimensions of achievement. An anorexic person is dysmorphic about their weight, and feels too fat no matter how emaciated they get. But that same person might be totally fine with their bank balance, or the number of likes they get on Facebook, or whatever. Degenerate motivational extremes are self-reinforcing once you’re in one, but getting into one is unusual. If I have a garden I water once a week, I’m probably never going to see it as an onerous, nigh-impossible task, nor something I must get exactly perfect every time. I just won’t think about it all that much.
In fact, the existence of motivational whirlpools is an okay argument for something like Taoism: trust your basic homeostatic rhythm, and you’re unlikely to get stuck in a weird jailbroken setting where the correct amount of effort always feels like “more” or “less”. Bea got into trouble because she built a habit around a salient (but contingent) fact: “always work harder” was locally valid before tenure, but not after. Hope, meanwhile, got into trouble by leaning on (again, locally valid) theories. Self care is fine, but if you think about it too much you write yourself blank checks to sit on the couch feeling bad, which then becomes a nasty habit.
So… be Normal?
Maybe! Motivational normality is a great default. But sometimes you really are burned out, or acutely sick, and need to take it easy. And other times you really are in a crunch time, winner-takes-all situation and need to push yourself hard. So what should you do?
As a first pass, realize that “am I doing enough?” is a terrible open-ended question. It’s emotionally addictive to ask yourself, whether the specific addiction is always answering “yes”, or always answering “no”. But there’s no ground truth - “enough” is a moving target, and it tends to be in exactly the worst place. If you’re addicted to striving and are pushing too hard, “enough” will feel like even more. And if you’re doing very little, your mind will invent some reason why you deserve special treatment, and “enough” is even less. So the solution, if you can’t just be Taoist and do what you feel, is concrete goals. Set a specific objective, stick to it, and benchmark “enough” based on that.
Is this strategy a panacea? Definitely not. You can set a stupid goal, or specify it poorly so its scope creeps up or down,2 or get burned out for emotional reasons.
But if you keep asking if you’re doing enough, and the answer never changes, get specific. Enough for what?
She doesn’t hang out with Bea and her friends.
For example, the goal “exercise 5 minutes per day” can turn into either “stretching counts as working out, and I just so happen to do only the single stretch that’s easiest for me” or “yeah, my lower back got injured yesterday, but I have to do 100 burpees anyway or I’m a failure” if you’re not careful.