Noticing something completely absurd about yourself

post by diegocaleiro · 2013-11-26T19:24:09.578Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 24 comments

I'm not sure this is something that can be consciously done, but in this post I want to prime you to consider whether something you do is really, totally, completely wacky and absurd. 

We have trained ourselves a lot to notice when we are wrong. We trained ourselves even more to notice when we are confused and to tell word confusion from substance confusion. 

But here is the tale of what happened to me today, and I don't think it qualifies as any of those:

I had a serious motivational problem yesterday, and got absolutely nothing done. So today I thought I should do things in a different manner, so as to decrease probability of two bad days in a row. One of the most effective things for me is going into the LW Study Hall (the password is in the group's description when you click this link). A very nice place to work that I recommend for everyone to check out, and do one or two pomo's every now and then.  

And I did, I gave myself ten minutes observing others working, and I noticed something remarkable: The property of the LW chat that causes me to be motivated is "Presence of long haired people". Yes.  Presence of people with a long hair. For weeks I had been trying to work out why it was efficient sometimes and not others. The most obvious initial alternative was that when there was a woman, I would feel more driven. I assumed that was the case. But I started getting false negatives and false positives. Today I finally came to terms with the fact. I am motivated by the presence of people whose hair goes to their shoulders. Women or Men. 

Now why did I not notice this before? Seems to me that basically it was such a far fetched hypothesis that I simply had no prior for it. In vain hopes of being rational, I would read about how we fear the twinge of starting, how to beat procrastination, and how to get things done, and valid as those were and are, they would never have given me a complete picture of the unbelievable things my brain thinks behind my back.

Maybe there is something similar taking place in your mind. Even if there isn't, just update with me on the fact that this is true at least for someone, and how there may be millions of other tiny absurd facts controlling people's actions way beyond the scope of imagination of any economist or psychologist.

I have now one more piece of understanding about what is it like to be me, about how to tame and steer my future behavior, and specially one more thing to tell people in awkward silence moments to break the ice and face the absurdity of reality. 

For obvious reasons, if you have long hair, I'd like to make an even stronger case for you to try to work and do pomos at the LW study hall. It's not only yourself that you'll be helping!  

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