Three types of "should"

Examples?

I'm struck by the assumption in this essay that you have a clear distinction between your own values and other people's.

I think that having a clear sense of personal identity can be difficult and not everyone may be able to hold on to their own perspective. I am concerned that this might be especially hard in an era of social media, when opinions are shared almost as soon as they are formed. Think of a blog/tumblr/fb that consists almost entirely of content copied from other sources: it is nominally a space curated/created by "you", but really it is a lot of other people's thoughts aggregated with very little personal modification. That could be a recipe for really poor internal coherence.

It's pretty standard psychologist's advice to have a journal where you write truly private reflections, shared with literally nobody else. I imagine this helps in constructing a self with boundaries.

Relatedly, "self-affirmation" (really kind of a misnomer: it means writing essays about what values are priorities for you) has a large psychology literature showing lots of good effects, and I find it extremely helpful for my own thoughts. A lot of self-help seems to boil down to "sit down and write reflections on what your priorities are." Complice is this in productivity-app form, The Desire Map is this in book form, etc.

I would respectfully disagree with the notion that "internalized shoulds" as you put them are universally undesirable. I think there is a distinction to be made regarding whether one voluntarily internalizes a new set of values, versus whether those values are forcibly imposed from outside.

For example, I am currently taking up an exercise regimen. One of the ways I motivate myself is by telling myself that I want to be healthy, so I should go exercise. This is opposed to telling myself I should do something because someone else told me to do it.

Another example is that my friend wanted to get good at art. But he was inexperienced, so everything he drew at first sucked. But he kept telling himself that in order to become good he "should" draw every day. In the initial stages, before his art improved to the point that it became its own reward, that internalized should was the only thing keeping him going.

I think that "internalized shoulds" are a stage that every new habit that you're trying to build goes through before it becomes an internal motivation. We shouldn't prematurely cease building habits because we feel that resistance in our own minds.

I tried tabooing "should" from my thinking a few years back, and it went quite well. The worst type of "should" I started to notice is one which I don't think is on that list - it falls on a spectrum between the just world fallacy and the planning fallacy. It's "should" used epistemically.

It comes up a lot in group discussions at work. Examples:

"As long as we <do thing we probably won't actually do>, it should be fine."

"We haven't tested it much, but it should work."

"We followed <unreliable documentation>, so it should work."

In each of these examples, if you substitute "will" or even "will probably" for "should", then the implicit claim sounds a lot more questionable. But "should" shoves off responsibility, makes it feel like its ok to rely on something, because it's not our fault if it's wrong. Even if it's really likely to be wrong.

My concern is that there are some share of people who might have internal desires to do harmful things to others and are smart enough to evade consequences, for whom "internalized should not" is the only thing keeping them from doing those things.

Isn't the "internalized should" a re-invention of the superego.

I'm not sure that it makes sense, at our current level of knowledge of scrupulosity, to declare that anything is "the" cause of scrupulosity. I have no doubt that what you say is *a* cause of scrupulosity, but the term is deliberately quite broad. For example, clinical OCD can cause scrupulosity, but that's not related to internalized "shoulds", it's related to the mind's tendency to obsessively think about things it's trying not to think about.