Here is a brief and beautiful blog post by Manav Ponnekanti, quoted in full:
I really cannot emphasise enough how important realising this was for me. Nothing is more powerful, addictive, anti-depressive—I daresay spiritual—than the feeling of motion, the rhythm of progress. The true sin and misfortune of being stuck is that you forget this, you forget what it feels like to be moving, so you cannot really price it in correctly. Instead, you try to get moving for some sort of abstract or philosophical or ideological reason, but these things can never compel a person strongly enough to get unstuck. The only worthwhile reason to move is movement itself, how good it feels, what it does to the way that you exist in the world.
In the future if I ever have to help get a person unstuck in life, I will not fall into the trap of appealing to their better nature, trying to awaken their mind to the possibility of moksha or eudaimonia or some other such fantasy of exalted liberation. Nor shall I engage in some sort of psychoanalytic perversion in which their stasis is deconstructed into extremely sensible and eminently solvable banalities. That soil is totally barren. I am just going to tell them whatever nonsense I need to to induce some agitation, stimulation. Here is the sophist’s vindication: language must be treated not as a medium of correspondence but as a musical instrument. Its tune must build towards a profoundly empty ecstasy; the contemplative stillness of true insight must be avoided at all costs. The goal is energy, energy alone, just enough of it to push my victim stumbling forwards, just enough of a kick for them to take two steps without realising it, a happy accident. Two steps! The first step is totally meaningless. You can have one good day and sink back into your old patterns like it’s nothing. You need 2 good days, 2 good days in a row. Then you have something to lose, something worth defending. You have a trend, you’re going somewhere, dim light peers through that great scrim.
I’ve been thinking about this post since Nostalgebraist shared it on Tumblr. Part of my motivation in quoting it is just to share it, since I think it’s great. But I’d also like to riff on it.
The Pareto Playbook
The main principles of physical health aren’t that complicated: sleep about 8 hours a night, eat mostly nutritious foods, and exercise regularly. Almost everyone knows which obvious things they could do to improve their health right now; for me it’d be “lift weights two to three times a week reliably, and consume fewer sugary drinks.”
There’s something called the Pareto Principle, which notices that in many domains, 20% of the inputs create 80% of the outputs. For being physically healthy this principle seems true. You can never learn what a macronutrient is, and still gain the vast majority of the health benefits of exercise.
Naively, you might think that the ideal strategy is thus to have a workout regimen just intense enough to capture the largest physical benefits. By the same token, the ideal mental health strategy would be to gratitude journal, spend time with friends at least once a week, and try to cultivate an internal locus of control. You could extrapolate the Pareto playbook to all areas of life, doing obviously correct actions and not sweating the small stuff.1 And in fact, if your life is currently in shambles, the Pareto playbook is perfect. But! Once you have the basics down, simply maintaining them neglects Ponnekanti’s “rhythm of progress.” Which is to say, the act of striving for the next rung of the ladder is a big part of what makes climbing the ladder fun; it’s easier to defend a gym habit where you’re fiddling with your supplements and footwear and rep/set ratios, than it is to defend a gym habit that never changes.
In the limit, the rhythm of progress gets you to pretty weird places. Someone who maintains it for a long time in the domain of health will say things like “yeah, we’re gonna start juicing dates to replace the maple syrup, because that’s got the best glycemic profile of any sweetener.” The value of this specific intervention, my ego as a guy who ate an entire pizza yesterday forces me to tell myself, is vanishing.2 But the value of staying on the road, of continuing to think about health, to imagine possibilities of healthfulness beyond even maple syrup, is exactly how you keep the spark alive.
This strategy isn’t the Tao, for the obvious reason that I am out here naming it, but I do think it’s a little Taoish.
Shout out to my friend Nate, whom I greatly admire and wish luck in his dateing endeavors.