I’m not completely certain if I had the right takeaway from your post, so feel free to tell me “that’s not at all what I’m saying”, but it seems to me you’re pushing a sentiment that changing ones behavior is easy.
This is a sentiment I strongly disagree with. I think it’s an incredibly unhealthy mindset that does few people any good.
Eating healthy and regular exercise is clearly good for me and within my long term interests and ‘easy’ to do, yet they are a constant source of struggle within my life. But it is not easy for me to do, if it was I’d be doing it without a second thought.
On the other hand, I never once worried about my weight, whereas my father spent ten years agonizing over 20 kilos. Why didn’t my father just snap his fingers and start eating the right number of calories?
Curing cancer by snapping my finger is impossible, so is snapping my finger and changing my brains neurons to find regular exercise and healthy diet easy. We all agree it would be crazy to feel guilt over the former, so why feel guilt about the latter?
We are all wired differently. What is easy for those you look up to, might be impossibly hard for you. What is easy for you, is be impossibly hard to someone else.
Be better than you were yesterday, that’s all anyone can ever ask of you.
I reposted this because I thought it was interesting, but I don’t agree with everything Schwitzgebel says. I certainly don’t do all of the good things that should be “easy” for me to do, morally or otherwise. (I’ve gained a lot of weight in quarantine, for one.)
If I had to say something I do believe, and which Schwitzgebel’s post reminds me of, I’d go for “some kinds of behavior are more amenable to change than we might think.” That doesn’t make moral behavior change easy, but it does seem to exist in a different category than calculus or rock climbing.
You flake, you run late, you disappoint someone, you don’t quite carry your load in something today, because it’s not convenient.
There are many ways someone could try to get better at not doing these things, and many of those ways would probably work (unlike ways one might train for El Capitan, if one is an aging academic).
This distinction does seem relevant to me. And I’d guess that many people on this forum have changed their moral behavior for the better at multiple points in their lives; some became vegan, some began to donate more, some just became kinder and more charitable people.
What is the difference between people who did these things and people who haven’t yet? Some of this may come down to circumstances outside of someone’s control (e.g. not becoming vegan for health reasons, not donating because it really isn’t affordable), but some of it seems to come down to “choosing not to be” in the Schwitzgebelian sense.
I don’t think this piece reveals anything too surprising, and there’s no single reaction I’d expect every reader to have. But I’ve found myself being more patient (choosing to be more patient?) since I read it, and I thought there was some truth in the piece.
My philosophy is to earn like upper middle class, live like middle class, and donate like upper class. One can typically accomplish this by roughly maintaining the consumption per person that one has earlier in life (e.g. college or grad school). Sure, there is temptation to have consumption creep as is happening in most of one’s peers, but it is not technically difficult like rock climbing, or nearly as bad as living with hunger on a diet. An exception for this being effective may be if one’s consumption is visible to those who determine how fast one advances in one’s career, and they don’t appreciate one’s choosing of charity.
I’m not completely certain if I had the right takeaway from your post, so feel free to tell me “that’s not at all what I’m saying”, but it seems to me you’re pushing a sentiment that changing ones behavior is easy.
This is a sentiment I strongly disagree with. I think it’s an incredibly unhealthy mindset that does few people any good.
Eating healthy and regular exercise is clearly good for me and within my long term interests and ‘easy’ to do, yet they are a constant source of struggle within my life. But it is not easy for me to do, if it was I’d be doing it without a second thought.
On the other hand, I never once worried about my weight, whereas my father spent ten years agonizing over 20 kilos. Why didn’t my father just snap his fingers and start eating the right number of calories?
Curing cancer by snapping my finger is impossible, so is snapping my finger and changing my brains neurons to find regular exercise and healthy diet easy. We all agree it would be crazy to feel guilt over the former, so why feel guilt about the latter?
Scott Alexander made this point wonderfully in his essay ‘Parable of the talents’.
We are all wired differently. What is easy for those you look up to, might be impossibly hard for you. What is easy for you, is be impossibly hard to someone else.
Be better than you were yesterday, that’s all anyone can ever ask of you.
I reposted this because I thought it was interesting, but I don’t agree with everything Schwitzgebel says. I certainly don’t do all of the good things that should be “easy” for me to do, morally or otherwise. (I’ve gained a lot of weight in quarantine, for one.)
If I had to say something I do believe, and which Schwitzgebel’s post reminds me of, I’d go for “some kinds of behavior are more amenable to change than we might think.” That doesn’t make moral behavior change easy, but it does seem to exist in a different category than calculus or rock climbing.
There are many ways someone could try to get better at not doing these things, and many of those ways would probably work (unlike ways one might train for El Capitan, if one is an aging academic).
This distinction does seem relevant to me. And I’d guess that many people on this forum have changed their moral behavior for the better at multiple points in their lives; some became vegan, some began to donate more, some just became kinder and more charitable people.
What is the difference between people who did these things and people who haven’t yet? Some of this may come down to circumstances outside of someone’s control (e.g. not becoming vegan for health reasons, not donating because it really isn’t affordable), but some of it seems to come down to “choosing not to be” in the Schwitzgebelian sense.
I don’t think this piece reveals anything too surprising, and there’s no single reaction I’d expect every reader to have. But I’ve found myself being more patient (choosing to be more patient?) since I read it, and I thought there was some truth in the piece.
My philosophy is to earn like upper middle class, live like middle class, and donate like upper class. One can typically accomplish this by roughly maintaining the consumption per person that one has earlier in life (e.g. college or grad school). Sure, there is temptation to have consumption creep as is happening in most of one’s peers, but it is not technically difficult like rock climbing, or nearly as bad as living with hunger on a diet. An exception for this being effective may be if one’s consumption is visible to those who determine how fast one advances in one’s career, and they don’t appreciate one’s choosing of charity.
+1 to Parable of the Talents being excellent, especially given EA’s relationship to scrupulosity.