Thanks a lot for writing this! I think this is a really common trap to fall into, and I both see this a lot in others, and in myself.
To me, this feels pretty related to the trap of guilt-based motivation—taking the goals that I care about, and thinking of them as ‘I should do this’ or as obligations, and feeling bad and guilty when I don’t meet them. Combined with having unrealistically high standards, based on a warped and perfectionist view of what I ‘should’ be capable of, hindsight bias and the planning fallacy and what I think the people around me are capable of. Which combine to mean that I set myself standards I can never really meet, feel guilty for failing to meet them, and ultimately build up aversions that stop me caring about whatever I’m working on, and to flinch away from it.
This is particularly insidious, because I find the intention behind this is often pure and important to me. It comes from a place of striving to be better, of caring about things, and wanting to live in consistency with my values. But in practice, this intention, plus those biases and failure modes, combine in me doing far worse than I could.
I find a similar mindset to your first piece of advice useful: I imagine a future version of myself that is doing far better than I am today, and ask how I could have gotten there. And I find that I’d be really surprised and confused if I suddenly got way better one day. But that it’s plausible to me that each day I do a little bit better than before, and that, on average, this compounds over time. Which means it’s important to calibrate my standards so that I expect myself to do a bit better than what I have been realistically capable of before.
If you resonate with that, I wrote a blog post called Your Standards Are Too High on how I (try to) deal with this problem. And the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares is phenomenally good, and probably one of the most useful things I’ve ever read re own my mental health
Thanks a lot for writing this! I think this is a really common trap to fall into, and I both see this a lot in others, and in myself.
To me, this feels pretty related to the trap of guilt-based motivation—taking the goals that I care about, and thinking of them as ‘I should do this’ or as obligations, and feeling bad and guilty when I don’t meet them. Combined with having unrealistically high standards, based on a warped and perfectionist view of what I ‘should’ be capable of, hindsight bias and the planning fallacy and what I think the people around me are capable of. Which combine to mean that I set myself standards I can never really meet, feel guilty for failing to meet them, and ultimately build up aversions that stop me caring about whatever I’m working on, and to flinch away from it.
This is particularly insidious, because I find the intention behind this is often pure and important to me. It comes from a place of striving to be better, of caring about things, and wanting to live in consistency with my values. But in practice, this intention, plus those biases and failure modes, combine in me doing far worse than I could.
I find a similar mindset to your first piece of advice useful: I imagine a future version of myself that is doing far better than I am today, and ask how I could have gotten there. And I find that I’d be really surprised and confused if I suddenly got way better one day. But that it’s plausible to me that each day I do a little bit better than before, and that, on average, this compounds over time. Which means it’s important to calibrate my standards so that I expect myself to do a bit better than what I have been realistically capable of before.
If you resonate with that, I wrote a blog post called Your Standards Are Too High on how I (try to) deal with this problem. And the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares is phenomenally good, and probably one of the most useful things I’ve ever read re own my mental health