Inertia Anonymous

embracing my own agency

2010-09-22T13:16:00.003-04:00

For most of my formative years, much of my schedule was controlled by authority figures: schools and parents. When I was first in a position to have much greater control over my own time, I squandered it. Then I got a job for a few years, and my time was controlled, my efforts directed. After quitting it, I again squandered my time. I've had a few more cycles like that. Throughout all of this I tended to think of myself as lazy, and wondered how I could fight my own laziness.

It occurs to me now that years and years of taking orders from authority figures really fucked up my ability to manage my time, and to direct my efforts towards goals of my own choosing. Whenever I had time to myself, I just wanted to do nothing, perhaps because I was accustomed to goal-directed activity being unpleasant. And it was unpleasant partially because I wasn't the one setting the goals. I suppose these repeated periods where I squandered my time were when I rejected being an agent for someone else's goals, but was incompetent at setting my own and executing on them.

Anyway, I think that slowly over the last 2 years of grad school I've started to realize that my time is my own, and that the way I spend it today is a big part of what options I'll have tomorrow. (Perhaps "realize" isn't the right term; "act like someone who understands" might be more accurate.) I'm getting better at identifying what options I want to have tomorrow, and how to direct my energies towards those long-term goals. Maybe that's just behaving like a fucking adult, but it's big progress for me, and I feel pretty good about it.

I'm more productive at work now, allocating time both to short-term (applying for funding next month, teaching responsibilities, various new student administrative things) and long-term projects (developing a plan of study for my PhD work), and doing so far more efficiently than ever before, though with plenty of room for improvement. The same is true for home life. For example, last weekend I canned 23 liters of tomato sauce with some friends, to make some delicious local produce last into the winter. These are the kinds of things I've been saying I wanted to do for years now, and now I'm actually doing them. Items on my list for the near future include homebrewing beer and submitting a paper for publication, both of which will happen in the next couple months.

I'm trying to make similar progress with personal relationships. I've had very few deeply satisfying connections with other people, and the few I've had haven't lasted very long, probably at least in part due to my own failure to maintain them. I suspect I'll be able to apply these newfound abilities in this part of life as well. We'll see how it goes.

Aside from the personal utility I'm deriving from these changes, it occurs to me that the explanation I've hypothesized -- years of taking orders from authority stunting my ability to effectively identify and pursue my own goals -- could have enormous social implications if the same dynamic has been playing out for a large population, which - I - suspect - it - has. I'll have to think more about that.

Intertia revisited

2008-02-24T11:08:00.003-05:00

I don't think I have an inertia problem any more. Looking back, I'm not sure I ever did. Values that I had internalized from my social environment conflicted with other values, resulting in, well, conflict. What was really happening, in my life and in my posts here, was a struggle to make sense of the world around me and how I fit into it.

Having advanced my understanding of the world and my place in it, I no longer see my tendency towards laziness as a vice, quite the opposite in fact. I see it almost like a defense mechanism. My system was overloaded, so I shut down, preventing me from doing any more damage.

We here at Inertia Anonymous think of ourselves as possessing above-average mental faculties, but lament our inability to fully harness our natural ability; we call that gap laziness. But like Peter Gibbons, I now say that gap is because we just don't care.

To elaborate, it is clear that one common trait among us here is self-identification as "smart kids."

Cara: "we are not 'regular lazy people'. We are all overachievers"
WK: "anyways I am still a genius."
adspar (and dan): "Lazy Dan and I have often lamented that our most productive days ended 8 years ago when we graduated from high school."
Mox: "I have been relatively successful at my chosen path in life even while being super lazy."

Why do we think of ourselves this way? Well, we've always been told that we're smart, we got good grades, and we earned various academic awards. Why did all of that happen? Like Mario says, it is because we did well on tests. Well what do tests measure except the ability to tell authority figures what they want to hear, to regurgitate information that we committed to short-term memory simply to earn the approval of the authorities, to jump through fucking monkey hoops just to see a shining "A" on the "report card" that the school authorities sent out to other school authorities (not to mention our home life authorities.) School doesn't educate; it socializes. It teaches people to fall in line, not to question anything.

So we spent most of our formative years being rewarded for doing what we're told and following the rules. That had to have become part of our self-identity, at least on some level. But on some other level, we knew that part of our success was total bullshit. We knew that cramming wasn't learning, but we did it anyway. Why? It wasn't that we were lazy, it was that we just didn't care. We didn't care about learning the material, we only cared about the grade.

Here I'll switch back to the first person singular that I started with. I was pretty comfortable speaking in plurals in the middle, but now you all can decide if it would be appropriate the rest of the way.

Lamenting about my laziness in pursuing employment, I wrote that "I don't want this to turn into something like every school project that I waited until the last possible minute to get started." Why did I wait so long to do those school projects? Because I didn't want to do them! I just had to because that was how to get the approval of the authorities. That was how to earn their approval and advance through their system. I suspect it is some part of human nature, and I'm a bit more sure it is my own nature, to resent authority. And so laziness was, partially, my own little subversion of that authority. I saw getting a job is the exact same thing as a school project, which I seemed to realize enough to write it, but not enough to make more connections.

I wasn't ever really pursuing school projects, or employment opportunities because they were what I wanted to do (in my case it was the kinds of jobs I was pursuing, not having a paying job in and of itself). I was doing them because someone else wanted me to do, and I obeyed. In contrast, I was never lazy about pursuing what I wanted to do. Ignore for a moment any judgment of the productive value of a few examples: video games, sports, poker. I applied myself to those pursuits quite vigorously. I practiced and studied and practiced some more. I improved my skills and understanding, sought out more challenges, and generally did a very good job (literally in one case) at those pursuits. They just happened to be fairly worthless, but they did show that I have the ability to enthusiastically apply myself to something.

So why was able to apply myself to diversions, but not to something more conventionally productive? Because the social and economic systems of our society aren't structured to maximize human fulfillment, intellectual development, creativity, etc. Those systems are structured to maximize profit, so as to concentrate power and control to an elite few. Individuals are just system inputs, to be manipulated in whatever fashion maximizes profit and condenses power and control. (This isn't to say that enjoyable, rewarding work can't be found; I believe it can. Its just that the system makes such opportunities hard to find. Among other things, they're almost always low-paying, which is an effective deterrent.)

This system is hugely destructive, and that's why I say my inertia was a good thing. It prevented me from fully taking part in that system, and thereby doing further damage to myself and others. I think my laziness in school somewhat prevented me from more fully absorbing the values and ideology that I would have needed to be a productive part of corporate America. So I'm glad I was lazy, because fuck that shit.

And by the way, I don't consider any of these insights particularly novel. Schools teaching obedience, corporate-controlled economies as destructive, these ideas aren't new. But they have been a revelation to me. For reasons already explained I hadn't been exposed to them, and so couldn't ever see how they've mattered in my own life.

As one last note, I've been rereading a lot of old Inertia Anonymous posts and we had some really cool conversations. I'd love to see more of that.

Sweet Irony

2008-02-18T15:12:00.002-05:00

It's too bad none of us is an artist, because we could probably get someone to pay us to show this webpage as a brilliantly self-referential digital-interactive-new-media-modern-art-installation-thingy.

He sees through my soul

2007-07-12T08:57:00.001-04:00

Doodle by Lee. The code for this doodle and other doodles you can use on your blog can be found at Doodles.

Brilliant!

2007-07-10T11:54:00.001-04:00

On the Moral Virtue of Jack Shit

Nine tenths of the evil and suffering in this world is rooted in the idea that something must be done. Why must anything be done at all? All the advocacy and protest in the world would pale in the face of practiced inertia. The way to confound the authorities is to sigh and take your time when they ask you to remove your shoes at the airport. The way to confound the terror-profiteers is to shrug and look for lunch. I am deeply inspired by the British who seem largely not to give a shit that some nuts tried to blow up something with a car. A nation of people who carry umbrellas on the sunniest days is a nation with an admirable relationship to fate. By failing to react, they have driven American conservatives into spectacular and hilarious conniptions, eructions of rage, howls, cries, squeals, belches of anger. It's a good show, and I'm jealous that I had no part in doing nothing to provoke it.

Mojo Rising

2007-04-15T21:17:00.000-04:00

After spending the last 2 days being fairly productive as motivated by a feeling of last-minute desperation, I'm finding myself randomly drifting towards unplanned and non-urgent productivity in my down time. This has happened to me a few times in the past, but I'd always inevitably let the momentum slip away. This time might have a better chance of sticking because 1) I now genuinely see that momentum as a good thing and 2) the projects instilling the sense of urgency are rather long-term but with lots of very important intermediate steps.

To be more specific, we're moving to Ohio for Kira to finish school starting in September. Planning has already started, and really has to get moving now, especially for selling the house, which is going to be a major effort for us. And slightly less pressing but more important in the long-run is applying to grad schools by December. That involves a lot of planning and effort too. Hopefully I'll be able to get my momentum up for the former, and then shift it over towards the latter.

blame someone else

2007-02-21T12:51:00.000-05:00

Paulp continues to be an I-Anon. We're all just victims of our formative years!

SOS

2007-02-19T15:03:00.000-05:00

PhD research ground to total halt . . . room hasn't been cleaned . . . in 6 mo? . . . % Thai/Indian takeout in diet increasing exponentially . . . inversely related to days cleanshaven . . .

honorary member

2006-11-30T20:14:00.000-05:00

paulp is an honorary i-anon

school thoughts

2006-10-28T01:19:00.000-04:00

I wanted to link you guys to what I just wrote on my personal blog. It is somewhat on topic for I-Anon, but mostly I just think you all are a good source of advice and I'd appreciate any thoughts you have on the matter.

ding ding ding

2006-10-26T00:34:00.000-04:00

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2006/10/do_deadlines_help_procrastinat.php

I'm not doing what I should be doing

2006-10-04T17:19:00.000-04:00

I am not lazy. I'm only misapplying my efforts right now. That's my latest thought.

I'm working right now on organizing a fundraiser for a group that I started with one of my professors and some other students. I spend probably half of my day working on this instead of doing lab work. I would spend more time if I could.

I hope that when I am a grownup doctor that I actually like doing it, because otherwise I'm going to have to quit. Why don't I just quit now? Because I'm pretty sure (maybe 80%) that I really want to be a doctor and do research, just not this kind of research. And I really can't just try that out without going through the 8 years of school and 6 years of residency/fellowship after that. It seems like that is crazy. Someone should make a simulator to try out jobs.

The list

2006-09-22T00:46:00.000-04:00

I wrote that Procrustes and Eden stuff more for fun than for direct practical value, but I copied it to I-Anon because it was somewhat on topic. Here is the actual list that I mentioned.

I specifically draw your attention to concept 2. I've been thinking about maybe trying to literally keep track of how I spent my time. I have to think that 99% of my time is spent on something that I've listed on this paper. I could just make a big chart and track a few days or weeks and see exactly how much time I waste. Maybe that will shock me into action, or at least help me identify opportunity for improvement. Thoughts?

Procrustes and Eden 2

2006-09-22T00:41:00.000-04:00

Eden

My list of distractions included things like video games, junk food, fantasy sports, and alcohol. They keep me away from my priorities. Last time I wrote about how the only reason my list of priorities looks like it does is because we've made so much progress that our lives have changed into something we aren't built to handle. We make all of our technological and cultural advances and for what?

XBox. Text messaging. Terrell Owens. CSI: Miami: Brazil: Round Brown Asses. Cheetos. MTV. High Fructose Corn Syrup. Lazy Boy. Coors Light. McDonalds. Marlboro Reds. Prison Break. Pro Wrestling. Soap Operas. Girls Gone Wild. Las Vegas. Diet Coke.

Cheap thrills. Empty enjoyment. Artificial stimulation.

Our minds and bodies evolved pleasure mechanisms to reward behaviors that increased our chances of survival and reproduction, the prime example being the orgasm, the ultimate physical pleasure payoff moment, so pleasurable that men spend all of their waking (and many of their sleeping) hours trying to get to their next payoff. But nature made that payoff so strong that we found a way to trick our bodies into giving us that pleasure payoff without earning it by successfully finding a reproduction opportunity.

All of our distractions are various forms of masturbation. We evolved a taste for sweet and fatty foods because such foods were rare enough that they were nutritious for us in the quantities that we were likely to encounter them. Now we can pick up a Big Mac on every street corner and take 12 days off our life expectancy. We enjoy exchanging tidbits of news about the personal lives of the people around us because that information was valuable to our decisions about who to trust or be wary of in trade, battle, or sexual situations. Now we have tabloids and The Real World. We use drugs and video games and online chat rooms to stimulate some pleasure center in some way that is easier to achieve than nature intended.

Eden is of course a reference to the biblical garden of Eden, specifically the story of the 'apple' and the fall of man. The story more or less goes that God creates the first people - Adam and Eve - and gives them a wonderful place to live where they'll be quite happy. He specifically tells them not to eat fruit from one tree, a simple instruction that Adam and Eve ignore. Once they eat it, all hell breaks loose and God kicks them out of paradise and dooms them and all their descendents to a life of pain and inevitable death. All because of a stupid apple. And the thing is, Adam and Eve were perfectly happy before they tried that stupid fruit and realized how much else they were missing.

I've never smoked, but that's the best example of a behavior that gives people pleasure while inflicting damage upon them. And the weirdest thing is that smokers never knew they liked or needed cigarettes until they tried them. They could have gone their whole lives never needing a cigarette if they just didn't have that first one. Adam and Eve could have gone their whole lives happy as pigs in shit if they never tried the damn apple.

And the real beauty of the Eden myth is that the tree they got the fruit from was the "tree of knowledge." It opened their eyes and showed them that there was more to the world than their little garden, but that also opened up pain and suffering and poisonous snakes. I've written before about how freedom to choose isn't always such a good thing. Often times people are a lot happier if they don't have choices.

But I can't let go of the simple economic concept that options have value. Choices are supposed to be good! Where is the disconnect? I think it is that people don't usually understand the full meaning of the choices in front of them. If I've got the option to read a book that would educate me on the legal system or to sit in front of my TV and watch 4 straight Law & Order reruns, I reach for the remote control. TV is more entertaining. It is easier.

But what if I didn't have that choice? What if my options were to read the book or to stare at my wall? Now the book looks like a lot more fun. Plus I'd learn a lot more and be better for it. But when I'm confronted with the choice of how to spend my time, my stupid stone-age brain chooses the TV. Our fucking genius space-age technology is built for the specific purpose of tricking our minds into making us completely worthless.

We as a society are so damn good at producing highly effective entertainment. We make booze and reality TV and video games. They all push our pleasure buttons more effectively than the stimuli by which our pleasure buttons were made to be pushed, except we don't get the same rewards. Pretty much everything on my personal list of distractions is man-made, fake pleasure, cheap thrill, Garden of Eden fruit, masturbatory emptiness.

So my hope is that by realizing and openly acknowledging the problems these distractions cause, it will help me to be at least somewhat less distracted by them. By fully calculating the costs and benefits of my decisions, I'll be able to happily chose the more valuable option, even if it isn't as immediately gratifying. So that is my hope.

But my concern is that those calculations in the rational part of my brain won't be enough to override the other pleasure mechanisms already in place. That ends up sounding a lot like addiction, which is why I've cross posted this entry to my laziness addiction support group.

Procrustes and Eden 1

2006-09-18T02:44:00.000-04:00

Lists

In an effort to organize my life and make some changes for the better, I just sat down with a pen and paper and made some lists. The first list was of my priorities, and the second was a list of my distractions. After thinking about those two lists I made a third list of comments and observations about the first two, and the last items on that third list were "Procrustes" and "Eden." I want to write about those. It will take at least 2 entries. Here is the first.

Procrustes

My list of priorities broke down into 5 major categories. In no particular order they were: Making a living, relationships, health, enjoyment, and education. Each had several subpoints, for example health broke down to include sleep, diet, and exercise. Looking at my list of priorities reminded me of my favorite word: procrustean.

Procrustes was a bandit in Greek mythology who invited travelers into his roadside house, offering to let them use a bed that he claimed would precisely accommodate anyone regardless of their size. His invitation didn't mention that Procrustes guaranteed the bed's perfect fit by mutilating his guests - chopping off legs if they were too long, or stretching his short visitors on the rack. In modern English, "procrustean" is an adjective defined here as "producing or designed to produce strict conformity by ruthless or arbitrary means."

For the overwhelming majority of human history, defining one's priorities like I did (making a living, relationships, health, education, exercise) would have been preposterous, because they all were so interwoven that separating them would be silly. People made a living by doing whatever their parents did, usually hunting and gathering, in recent history farming, and very recently by specialized trades. They worked with the small tribe of family and friends that they spend their entire lives with, and they got their exercise from the work they did to put food in their bellies. Almost everything they learned was from watching and listening to elders and observing the world around them as they lived. Maybe if they were lucky they had some free time to sing songs or carve some wood, which was probably great fun they wished they could have more often.

Our world is bizarre compared to that. We can choose from almost unlimited ways to make a living. We can spend our lives with anyone we want (who will agree to it) and not necessarily anywhere near the family and friends we grew up with. Most of our career options won't involve much physical labor, so we'll have to get exercise another way if we want to stay in good health. An astonishing diversity of food is widely available for relatively little cost. The education that is emphasized is highly formalized, the education that is most valuable is ridiculed, and entertainment is at our fingertips any time and fully customizable to our every whim.

My point making this contrast isn't to romanticize and glorify my imagined version of primitive life, though I am tempted to do so. I know enough to realize that the vast majority of human existence is a violent, cruel and painful story and I wouldn't want to give up my place for that. Nor is my (main) intent to criticize our world, though I certainly tend to do that as well. And it would also be terrible to overlook that fact that most of the people alive today are struggling just to survive, and that the silly problems I'm writing about are nothing compared to their struggle.

My point is that we were built for the primitive world, not the First World, and that's why it is so easy to lose track of our priorities. In the primitive world, all of those priorities were mashed together in a daily struggle for survival, so it wasn't important for evolution to weave into our minds a specialty to prioritize our lives the way I did with that list. In modern times we've made so much progress in so many real ways that daily survival isn't a struggle, but an inadvertent cost of that progress is that we're confronted with problems we aren't good at solving. Those problems aren't as bad as Procrustes cutting off my feet, but I still feel like I'm being forced to fit where I don't quite belong.

useful?

2006-09-17T11:10:00.000-04:00

useful?

woah

2006-09-14T16:22:00.000-04:00

I'm at work so I can't fully develop this idea but it just occured to me that laziness research could be a totally legit field of research in various behavioral sciences.

Like:

economics concepts of efficiency and utility
obviously all kinds of pyschology
biology of energy conservation vs expenditure, like actual fighting vs ritual mock combat (economics game theory here too I guess)
the anthropology/sociology of leisure

I'm thinking of this within the context of trying to come up with topics of research that might hold my interest. The irony within the irony.

What I Will Do This Week

2006-09-05T02:52:00.000-04:00

Sparks' recent foray into education has spurred me into action. That, and the fact that I've basically taken a 1 month vacation between conference-attending, friend-visiting, and moving across town, which took a hell of a lot of effort but doesn't really count as overcoming my laziness since it absolutely had to be done (deadlines again). Thus I give you, what I will do this week.

1) Deposit my paycheck so I can make my Steelers arbitrage bet.
2) Dissect 15 animals today.
3)Dissect 15 more animals tomorrow.
4) Stain all the damn brains from the dissections.
5) Learn how to measure gene expression in tissue isolates.

This will set me up to image the samples next week and go into my next vacation (a visit to NJ ca. the 24th) having actually done something.

This is a good test of whether IA can motivate me. Hope it works. . .

congrats Cara

2006-08-29T13:38:00.000-04:00

She just got married.

Progress?

2006-08-29T13:22:00.000-04:00

I still don't have a job, but now I'm officially a part-time graduate student. I'm registered to take this course in College Park starting Thursday.

My schedule now looks like this,

TuTh......11:00am-12:15pm F.........12:00pm- 1:45pm

which is going to make getting a "real" job impossible. I interviewed for a research internship at a marketing company in Chevy Chase that looks interesting and would provide some desperately needed income and allow me flexibility to work 20~35 hours/week on my own schedule and often from home. I hope that works out, otherwise I might have to deliver pizzas or something.

2006-08-10T13:36:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting here thinking that I'd like to become part of my couch and watch a DVD, but I'm too lazy to set up my new DVD player.

Let's all hold hands

2006-08-08T02:48:00.000-04:00

Well we showed some initial enthusiasm for interesting new topics of discussion, but as far as actually effectuating behavioral changes, it doesn't seem like I-Anon has gotten us anywhere.

From memory, suggestions in that vein so far include:

Just stop being lazy, guys. (Cara)
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (Mario)
Dude I just need some ritalin (Dan)
I like to use lists. (Cara)
Financial contract with myself (Mario)
Fight through the initial reluctance and then you get used to it (Adam)

One of my original hopes for this blog effort was that somehow we'd take on more characteristics of a support group - especially the part where we try to hold each other accountable, inspire each other, congratulate success, all that shit.

Along these lines, I have more bullets:

I'm still very unemployed and increasingly at a loss for how to proceed towards finding any kind of job that interests me. Suggestions?
WK hasn't written much but he does often give me job ideas/advice/encouragement. I'd like to see him write more stuff here.
Dan has yet to make an original post, although he's made a few decent comments on other people's posts. I feel like he is capable of exploding onto the I-Anon scene with a masterful manifesto for his first post. He's also capable of never doing a goddamn thing.
Cara started an original post but never finished it, and it is still sitting there unpublished. What she has contributed so far is the most unique perspective of the 5 of us I think. I still can't decide how much of that uniqueness is due to her writing style/personality as opposed to genuine differences in her manifestation of inertia, or her self-image/awareness in that regard. Either way, I'd like to hear more from Cara.
Mario has made a few very interesting posts, at least one of which (deadline theory) hasn't gotten nearly the response it deserves.
Frequent commenter Kira tends to voice views that seem most similar to Cara. Maybe that Cara "uniqueness" that I mentioned is some natural product of ovaries.
Recent commenter Walt's contributions have been a welcome addition.
If Kira or Walt or any other commenter have a good topic to add or are interested in being official I-Anon "contributors" let me know. There's still time to post an original entry before co-founder Dan.

let's not be lazy about how we define "lazy"

2006-08-03T22:18:00.000-04:00

The discussion about laziness and exercise took a turn with Dan's comment, enough that I think it deserves a new post.

Dan asked:

So are you saying you keep running because you're lazy? Or keep lifting weights because you're mentally lazy, but not physically lazy?

I've thought more about that question, as well as Cara's point:

if you don't make time for exercise now, you'll have to make time for illness later

I could say that I run because I'm so lazy that I don't want all my hard work to go to waste. Or that I'm lazy because I identify that future illness would take much more effort to overcome than the effort I have to expend now getting off the couch. So yeah, maybe in that situation I'm mentally lazy but not physically. Or wait, is it physically but not mentally...

"Lazy" can be just about anything. Some things that we call lazy could be called "efficiency" and others could be called "sloth." Laziness can be physical, emotional, intellectual, verbal, sexual, dietary, or literary. And lots of those aren't really problems. Intellectual laziness isn't a big concern if you are a construction worker. Physical laziness can lead to highly creative mechanical inventions. Sexual laziness isn't a big problem if your partner is dominating and energetic. Of course we can flip those all around and say that the 400lb professor is going to have professional and health problems because of his intellectual and physical laziness, and with no other redeeming qualities, he will probably have to purchase the services of a prostitute possessing a healthy sexual work ethic.

If we're all in agreement that some laziness is good and some is bad, then we'd probably all agree that it would be helpful to distinguish between them. When we say we're trying to fight laziness, what are we talking about?

Before I answer that, I want to get back to jogging, because I think I've figured out a much better way to express what I was struggling to say in the last post.

In a rational, big-picture way, I've always known that a jogging routine would be good for me, which is what Cara's point drives home. What I had always lacked was the will-power to act on that knowledge. When I was sitting there on my couch, I just didn't feel like going for a run. And if I somehow did get out there and run, I felt like shit and wanted to stop running. There was a conflict between the behavior that I calculated in a rational way and the behavior that I just felt like doing.

That is the laziness I hope to conquer. And I found it interesting to note that jogging seems to have a built-in way of reducing that feel/think conflict by making it feel better to run once you get over the initial hump. I find that I often want to get off the couch and run. And once I start running I don't wish that I was dead. Basically, running has the stay-in-motion aspect of inertia, not just the resist-motion part.

So to summarize:

I think the laziness that we find problematic, and that we are here to try to overcome, is the behavioral pattern resulting from a conflict between our feelings* and our rational planning.

* I'm probably just using "feelings" to mean "anything that encourages us to act in a way that undermines our rational planning. Which of course just gets us back to the whole executive function vs the rest of the brain conflicts. But I think I've still somehow advanced our cause... maybe?

one thing I'm not too lazy about

2006-07-28T14:21:00.000-04:00

Somehow I'm not completely lazy when it comes to exercise.

It helps that I join a lot of sports teams, which usually guarantees at least 1 weekly watch. But I've actually more or less maintained a jogging routine for the last 3 years. I have had slips where I've gone a couple months without jogging, but I'd estimate that between sports and jogging I've exercised at least 3 times a week for 50% of the weeks in the last 3 years, and at least 1 time a week for 80% of that time.

At various times in my life I had tried to pick up jogging but I absolutely hated it. I actually was on a track team for 2 years in maybe 7th and 8th grade, but I hated every minute of that too. But for some insane reason I started running again when I moved into this house, and I've stuck with it.

Mario's deadline theory is good, and I find that it accurately explains a lot of my behavior. But it doesn't explain jogging. I think inertia does.

What I've found is that once you get over the initial hump, regular exercise really feels good. You start to enjoy it and you just want to keep doing it. Aside from the more obvious physical benefits, being in good shape seems to help in lots of little ways. I sleep better - falling asleep more quickly, and waking up more easily after less sleep. When I was playing poker, I noticed I could concentrate more intently and play longer sessions. I think my mood is better when I'm in an active phase, which my girlfriend would probably corroborate. Whatever happens to your muscles a few hours after you use them feels really good, like some kind of natural drug. Plus I drink lots of Gatorade, and it tastes awesome.

So maybe there are other things in life that are self-perpetuating like exercise. But getting over that first hump does take a lot of willpower. But it kind of gives me a little hope, because I've been able to keep up with it, and the more I keep up with exercise, the little side benefits could probably help with other stuff. Better sleep gives me more hours I can be productive, and better attention span and concentration helps there too.

Lets all join the German Army

2006-07-28T14:17:00.000-04:00

German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord:

“I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!”

I'm Doing It

2006-07-24T15:42:00.000-04:00

Productivity has been par for the course over the last several weeks (sadly no grout was involved). I reviewed a paper for Animal Behaviour, finished a draft of a review paper I'm writing and sent that off to my advisor, and finished a ton of lab work and associated stats for our new proposal for the latest round of NSF grant submissions. Now I'm working on my poster for a conference in DC I'm going to next week. I'm also on the verge of finally getting a Massachusetts licence to replace my old Maryland one, and cancelling my essentially unused YMCA membership that I've had for the last few years.

The common thread? Deadlines. When I have to get shit done, I do, whether it's because of my advisor or because I'm moving and won't be near the Y anymore or because my license expires next week on my birthday. In my game theory course at MD Tom "Nobel Lauriate" Schelling used to yam on and on about the value of contracts, whether they be between different entities or the same entity (which he basically considered the same thing - to him, someone who decides to quit smoking and the same guy 2 weeks into quitting are totally different people, and the latter guy values quitting a lot less, which is why he usually fails). So I want to make a contract with my future self. My proposal? I'll send a sum of cash that's substantial to me (say a few hundred dollars) to one of you. You send it back if I fullfil some criteria that we set out ahead of time - like sending a photocopy of my new Massachusetts licence by an agreed-upon date. If not, you keep it.

Could this work?

2006-07-17T01:46:00.000-04:00

I'm fucking lazy.

say something!

2006-07-06T15:59:00.001-04:00

Someone write something.

Laziness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Laziness is the lack of desire to act or work in general"

Yeah that's me. Although I'll work hard on something every once in a while if it interests me.

"or to do an act or work that is expected of the person."

I'm not lazy in that way, because I pretty much always do work that is expected of me. That's why I got mostly A's in school, because I guess I felt that was expected. And when I had a job, I always did my job and usually went a little bit beyond, though not as far as I could have.

"In extreme cases, a generalized tendency to do nothing may verge on apathy and be a symptom of depression."

I verge. And I've sometimes wondered if perhaps I'm depressed, although I don't think I exhibit many other symptoms of depression. Or maybe I do, I don't actually know.

"What is considered laziness in any given instance, however, varies depending on cultural/societal context and magnitude, but it is generally considered a negative quality, as in sloth (see Seven deadly sins)."

Presumably we're here writing about it because we think our laziness is bad, or at least wonder if it is bad. I assume it is considered negative because it violates our sense of social contract - pulling our own weight. If our discussions delve into why laziness is or might be bad, we'll have to put it in societal context.

"Laziness can be considered an exaggeration of the natural instinct to do nothing that makes people get healthy rest."

Yeah. Except that rest is only healthy if it is interupted by killing a deer, building a hut, and running from bears on a regular basis.

"Laziness is usually associated with procrastination."

I procrastinate like a mofo. Always have. Living now without deadlines means nothing ever gets done.

"It has been argued that laziness is the source of many innovations that would have stemmed from the will to spare oneself a tiring job."

PokerTracker. PokerAceHUD.

"The expression "intellectual laziness" is frequently used to describe a tendency not to ask questions, and not to scratch too much behind the apparent, applying a kind of mental routine (availability heuristic) or just following the crowd (herd behavior)."

I'm generally pretty good about avoiding this, although I certainly fall for the tendancy to be lazy about questioning ideas that support my existing beliefs. But I'd say my laziness doesn't extent into the intellectual realm.

the 12 steps of inertia anonymous?

2006-06-26T19:18:00.000-04:00

Alcoholics Anonymous and other group programs use some version of the Twelve Steps to help their recovery from addiction. The 12-steps involve acknowledging and accepting help from a higher power. Since we've convened here to fight against our own laziness, we're going to be needing a higher power to turn ourselves over to.

I think there can only be one choice, so we will ask His Noodly Appendage to grant us strength. My only concern is that He might not support our cause. What could be a lazier way to make a living than chilling on a boat drinking rum while you wait for someone else to sail by so you can steal their shit? And yet pirates are His chosen people.

So somehow we'll need to find a way to make our Inertia Anonymous agenda compatible with Pastafarianism.

I apologize

2006-06-21T19:46:00.000-04:00

for calling it psycho-babble.

But for me, it doesn't seem that useful to discuss/examine/determine why people in general are lazy in this forum. Adspar listed our various occupations before, we are not "regular lazy people". We are all overachievers (even you Adspar) who are surrounded by crazier and harder working overachievers. Or at least I am. So to call myself lazy is a comparison. For me it's a comparison to others I work with or know and a comparison to my former self. I really used to like school/work, so it was much easier to not be lazy. Now that's not the case. It's hard to work hard at something you don't like to do. So for me it's more a lack of motivation. Although I am highly motivated to graduate, it's hard to do benchwork everyday. Lab work is draining and it doesn't work most of the time. For example, today I talked to my boss and we discussed that I should drop what I've been working on for the past 2 years and start over.

I don't really have anywhere else to go with this right now.

CBT?

2006-06-21T17:52:00.000-04:00

I hear constantly from a certain school psychologist about the virtues of modern psychotherapy. Armed with such novel techniques as "evidence-based research" and "randomized clinical trials" these crazy new "cognitive-behavioral therapists" have shown empirically that you can treat (some) unwanted behaviors by giving patients a better understanding of their problem - why it's harmful, why they act the way they do, and what sort of concrete steps can they take to stop.

Of course, I know nothing about CBT, but I like the idea of examining my thoughts and beliefs and reflecting on how they cause the problem. Maybe the sheer fact that I have been relatively successful at my chosen path in life even while being super lazy has contributed to a terrifying positive feedback loop of laziness begetting more laziness. But this might not be as rational as it first seems. While it's true that I may be able to get things done under this current "system" (if you can call reading all the Wikipedia articles on Die Hard at 3am instead of working on a paper that I'm supposed to be writing a "system"), I might be able to do even more with some different system. Laura always likes to bring up a story she heard in one of her school psychology classes about the effect of behavioral disorders like ADHD on really bright kids. The teacher was emphasizing that smart kids can have ADHD too, while still often doing well in school; however, if you diagnose these kids and treat them they often start to perform at an even higher level. Maybe my "it's been working so far, so it must not be that bad" thought process needs to change to "I could be doing better."

adspar: executive function drone

2006-06-19T23:33:00.000-04:00

I'm glad that I'm actually thinking about the executive function again (that is a wikipedia link). Actually maybe I'm not glad because that damn congnitive loophole rains loads of bullshit down upon us at any given time, and it frustrates the hell out of me. Mox specifically addressed the loads of bullshit and the source of frustration in his last post:

When presented with conflicting sources of information about their own actions, beliefs, etc., people will always justify them. In most cases, you can't nail anyone for this.
- Mox (unquestionable expert on this matter)

People aren't rational, don't care about truth, won't admit either of those facts, and I can't even blame them for it. And even if I could blame them, it isn't productive. But this is Inertia Anonymous, and we're devoted to the battle against laziness, not the battle against the dark forces of irrationality we see all around us. And so I direct the conversation back to where it should be: the dark forces of irrationality in me. As much fun as I might have pointing out the ways that other people's executive functions are spewing nonsense and fucking me over, it would probably be a lot more productive to examine how my own executive function is spewing nonsense and fucking me over.

I tend to pride myself on impartiality, seeking truth without prejudice. All that intellectual honesty self-righteousness is standard for my personality type, but so are the weaknesses that I constantly make excuses for. And there is the contradiction, because if I don't apply that impartial truth-seeking to myself, I'm just another executive function bullshit drone.

The Laziness Module

2006-06-12T16:17:00.000-04:00

Cognitive science was always one of my favorite academic subjects. I took 2 cognitive science courses in college and countless biology courses concerned with animal behavior. My current discipline, neuroethology, is really just cognitive science on organisms we're allowed to manipulate/kill/cut up and look at. And the modularity of the mind was always something I was interested in. However even more that the existance of mental modules, which I think is pretty interesting but not really that surprising, is one particular outcome of having mental modules - confabulation, sometimes called the problem of "cognitive dissonance." The common use of the term jives pretty well with the technical meaning of the term - when presented with conflicting sources of information about their own actions, beliefs, etc., people will always justify them. In most cases, you can't nail anyone for this. You've certainly had the experience of having an argument or debate with someone who is defending a particular position, backed into a rhetorical corner by your series of devastatingly logical points, only to have the person somehow continue to defend their position. They claim either that you don't understand what they're talking about, that you've somehow misrepresented their opinion, or they bring up a new point and claim it's the one they've been defending all along. As a matter of course, people simply make up an explanation compatible with their beliefs about themself (namely, that they are right) - confabulation. Infuriating, really.
Fortunately, brain-damaged people in a laboratory setting have no such recourse, since we can empirically measure what they do. Plus, they're brain-damaged, so they're inherently not as crafty. The best examples of these types of studies have been done on split-brain patients who have had the connection between their two brain hemispheres severed to reduce the transmission of really bad seizures from one side of the brain to the other. In the process, the flow of information between the two sides is cut off, and a beautiful science experiment is born. As Carruthers, an expert in the philosophy of mind, puts it so well in an article currently in press:

This patterning in the confabulation data suggests that people are engaging in self-interpretation in all cases. And this suggestion is confirmed when we turn to look at perfectly ordinary cases where neither of the above conditions holds, but where the mind-reading system is denied access to some of the crucial data needed to construct an explanation. These occur in people who have undergone commissurotomy (separating the two halves of the brain), whenever data are presented to the right-brain alone (such as a card saying, ‘Walk!’) in such a way as to cause behavior (getting up and walking). In such cases the mind-reading system (which is located in the left-brain) will confabulate an explanation (such as, ‘I was going to the fridge for a drink’) with all the seeming-obviousness of any self-attributed thought or decision. (See Gazzaniga, 1998, for discussion of many such examples.) At the very least it follows that the mind-reading system itself has no knowledge of when it does or doesn’t have access to the agent’s thoughts and intentions. And the most plausible explanation is that it actually has no such access. (Carruthers P. 2007. The illusion of conscious will. Synthese 96. In press.)

(Didn't know before today that this guy is Chair of the Philosophy Department at UMD. Go Terps).

This begs all sorts of useless "free will" and "what's it all about" questions that I won't go into (let me put it this way: if you're sane, you can accept the fact that you get hungry because of physiological processes in your body that you don't control, get over the fact that your behavior is "biologically determined," and just enjoy your fucking sandwich), but also brings up the question - why are we so god-damned lazy? And, more disturbing, can we ever really know? And can we ever fix it?

the root of all laziness

2006-06-08T01:38:00.000-04:00

One negative aspect of blogging for me has been that the cathartic act of getting all my ideas down in words can feel so satisfying that I'm content to abandon those ideas in favor of new ones. It feels kind of like finishing a crossword and throwing it away, except unlike a completed puzzle, a lot of the ideas have value beyond my first application of them.

Over a year ago, after reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, I wrote this awkward, sprawling rant. It contained two related ideas that I wish I had explored more fully, and that could be very relevant to us here at Inertia Anonymous:

modularity of mind
our "conscious mind" may not have full access to modules

The concept of modularity implies the inevitability of modules conflicting. Meanwhile your conscious mind doesn't know what to make of the erratic impulses/behaviors resulting from those conflicts between modules. So as an example, some kind of pleasure module tells you to keep drinking while some kind of poison control module tells you to vomit. Irrational behavior ensues, and the next morning you wonder why you had that last drink.

So I'm thinking that a lot of internal struggles could be analyzed in this modularity framework, and specifically struggles with laziness. Are there inertia modules that tell us to avoid change and conserve our energy? Could looking at our battles with laziness as struggles between inertia modules and our semi-rational conscious minds be helpful to us?

So far our i-anon community includes:

the dude: M.D. student
mox: biology Ph.D. student
cara: M.D./Ph.D. student
adspar & WK: amateur evolutionary psychology enthusiasts

Considering that lineup, I'm hoping that this generates some interesting discussion.

A Propitious Start

2006-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

My invite had been screened out by my spam filter. Of course, I didn't know that, since I never take the effort to check my junk inbox for incorrectly sorted mail.

Food for thought

2006-06-06T13:46:00.000-04:00

Some quotes that I think would be a good basis for a full conversation:

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.
David Dunham

Efficiency, intelligence, laziness. 2 out of 3 of those are on my resume...

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness; no laziness; no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
Lord Chesterfield (1694 - 1773)

Why is it that we're all so painfully aware that our time is limited, and yet we waste so much of it.

It's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't care.
Peter Gibbons

Are laziness and aimlessness the same?

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

I think that bark/bite is a better contrast than bark/growl, but we get Sammy's point.

Structure

2006-06-04T06:08:00.000-04:00

Lazy Dan and I have often lamented that our most productive days ended 8 years ago when we graduated from high school. We've considered a few theories as to why we accomplished so much more back then, and I think a big part of the reason is structure.

I absolutely HAD to be at school by 7:30am, which meant I HAD to leave home by 6:45. From there I had a series of obligations until classes ended at 2:45pm, and then usually sports or activities until 5pm. Maybe a few hours to relax after the 45 minute drive home, depending on how much homework I had. In bed by 11pm, up around 6am. Repeat 5 days a week.

The contrast between that life and the life I've chosen for myself the last year couldn't be more stark. I've had no structure whatsoever, and any attempts to add some have failed or been abandoned. Maybe they've fallen short because there was no external threat of discipline: no detention for skipping class, no bad grades for incomplete assignments, no losing my scholarship if I get bad grades.

That threat of discipline eliminates options, and I guess I'm more productive when I don't feel like I have many options for how I spend my time. The mentality was "well I've got to be here, so I might as well get things done." In the absence of discipline, I have unlimited options but my #1 option is always to do NOTHING. "I don't have to be anywhere, so I don't have to get anything done!" I could try to impose some discipline on myself, but in college I quickly learned that the threat of self-discipline is an idle threat.

I'm taking care of my mother's dog this week while my parents are on vacation. Mello Yello wakes up and howls at 5:30am until someone takes her outside. She gets a bowl of food at 8am, half an apple at 12pm, and another bowl of food at 8pm. She needs to go outside every 3 hours or so until 11pm.

Mel is forcing some structure upon me. Maybe having to cut up an apple for golden retriever isn't as demanding as a calculus class, but I'll take what I can get.

Today is only the 2nd day I've had her, and here I am being (semi)productive and writing something motivational. Perhaps by the time I take her back next Saturday I'll have found a job, registered for night school, implemented a rigid workout routine, and started that screenplay I've been meaning to write.

Can Dan battle inertia?

2006-06-03T15:15:00.000-04:00

How long will it take Dan -- a founder of Inertia Anonymous--to actually CONSTRUCT his own blogger name? Is this even up for debate or just a hope of futility that man has never known?

Imagine going back to the early days when Mark Cuban took over the Dallas Mavericks and told himself, "What? Whoever said anything about building a team? New stadium? New players? Dirk who? Dude I'm just the owner...I just want to watch basketball." Or perhaps think to the incipient stages of Microsoft when Billy Gates told his partner Paul Allen about his newfound goals, "Paul, I gotta tell you something. I'm in a predicament here, you're putting me in a tight spot...I mean I know I'm the founder and all..but no one told me I had to do some actual work here...I just wanted to live in a 30 million dollar house and accumulate a net worth of 50 billion dollars. Is that too much to ask for?"

This blog has already accomplished its mission if it can get its own god-forsaken founder to sign up for a blogger name. To the day this occurs, we will have living proof that mankind's potential is indeed limitless.....imagine the possibilities.

"Doing Nothing" by Tom Lutz

2006-06-03T14:25:00.000-04:00

Dave Barry:

I have often been accused of slacking. When I wrote a weekly humor column, people were always saying to me, "So . . . you write one column a week?" They wouldn't come right out and say the rest of what they were thinking, which was: "And how long does that take you? Two hours a week?" But I knew.

What these people failed to understand is that the hard part of writing is not the typing part, but the thinking part. If you were to come into my office, you would most likely see me engaged in some activity that did not appear, to your untrained eye, to be work. You might see me clipping my toenails, or exploring the vast information resources of the Internet, such as the site that tells you what song was No. 1 on the record charts on any given day for the past 60 years. Or you might see me thrashing around with my electric guitar in my futile but ongoing (for nearly four decades) attempt to learn the guitar part to "Paperback Writer," which was No. 1 on my 19th birthday.

You'd probably think I was slacking. But you would be wrong. Because while I am engaged in these seemingly pointless activities, I am thinking about a critical writing issue, such as: Which is a funnier-sounding mineral name, feldspar or potash? It takes hours of grueling mental effort to solve that kind of problem, but you, the reader, see only the finished product (feldspar).

Task at hand: get a job

2006-06-02T15:17:00.000-04:00

I decided about a month ago that I need to get a job, but for 2 or 3 weeks after that I had a lot of trouble getting started. I just couldn't bring myself to put a resume together. And I just couldn't bring myself to search for jobs on monster.com and other places. I don't want this to turn into something like every school project that I waited until the last possible minute to get started.

So my current battle against laziness is on the job front. I'll post updates on my progress.

After weeks of stalling by saying I was perfecting my resume, I finally sent a copy to a recruiter who found me on monster. His specializes in placements in commercial and retail banking, which isn't exactly what I'm looking to do, although it is something I'm well qualified for that would pay well. So its good to have options, and more important to just get started.

Getting started

2006-05-30T12:36:00.000-04:00

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
George S. Patton (1885 - 1945)

I'm excited about this new blog idea. While part of me wants to plan it all out before I get started, I'll defer to the wisdom of General Patton and just commence with the posting.

The hope for this blog is to build a community of people who inspire each other by writing about our battles against laziness. The idea is to harness the power of group psychology as a motivational tool:

by sharing successes and failures, in hopes that we all can learn from them
through constructive criticism, helping each of us hold ourselves accountable for our own (in)action.
by fostering a spirit of competitiveness to drive us to higher achievement
by harnessing the team mentality, creating a sense of obligation to others to help drive us when personal motivation falters

I expect that early in the life of this blog, discussion will be geared towards planning the way this collaboration will work: who? when? why? how? I'd like to see that discussion to lead to a mission statement. As those plans are made I expect the blog posts to be more devoted to essays on relevant subjects.

Whatever direction this takes, I hope it is a positive experience for anyone involved.