Great post. The amount of motivation people need to do things varies widely. It's easy for me to go for a run because I enjoy it, but it's hard to write a status update because I find it boring. For someone else, the opposite may be true (shout out to the natural project managers among us). I think a key mistake that we make is considering the subjective amount of effort synonymous with this "willpower" thing. The power part of the word is the giveaway. For a muscular person, lifting a weight is easy. They have enough power and don't need much will. For someone weak, all the will in the world won't necessarily enable them to lift the same weight. If you subjectively feel like you're trying very hard to do something, that's not a sign of virtue, it's a sign that you're at high risk of failing. You should figure out how to make it easier (maybe you need to ramp up more slowly, get help, figure out how to get more excited about it, or reconfigure the task) or consider whether you're even doing the right thing.
Having said that, I do think there are people who go after ~everything with high energy, and people who have a hard time motivating for anything. Whether that's about willpower per se is unclear.
I feel like I've had debates about this in some shape or another with people for my whole life.
I'm naturally inclined to work hard, to take the difficult path. But it always hurts me a little on the inside when people don't realize working hard isn't the point. Or they fail to realize that people who are struggling are in fact actually struggling i.e. trying very hard to ameliorate their issues.
The ultimate irony being that many times the implicit idea behind working hard is to make things easier in the future - you lift weights so your muscles become more efficient, you train so you (or your body) can respond faster. It's all in an effort to make things easier.
So it's a bit of a triple threat for anyone who can't solve their troubles - you try harder, achieve less, and get judged harsher.
General public chatter about motivational architecture tends to presume functional cognition. Changing your perception of effort as loyalty instead of coercion still leans on this premise, implying an attitude adjustment can make things easier. I think this can be true to some degree, for some people, with a fat caveat.
So let’s wriggle face-first into this binary to see how it catalyses action: how do you channel your will? You can whip yourself bloody (the fervent ecstasy of the dedicated and disciplined!) or you can lovingly jerk yourself off while chanting affirmations (same thing!).
In the latter, effort’s pain is transmuted into an anaesthetising neural paste you can metabolise into kinder beliefs. The lacuna in the broader conversation is that some can do neither despite a desire or predilection for one or the other.
The assumption that a person has access to neuro-mechanical systems that reliably translate intent into action is my biggest gripe; it orbits too closely around the effort-as-morality Calvinism that hamstrings people whose desires are entirely, healthily intact: 'That lady with prehensile hands can climb a tree! Why won't my ulnar club hands let me do that?!’
What respect and guidance do we give, as a culture, to them?
I struggled to cut down my screen time for literal years. I would lie in bed, scrolling, fully aware I was wasting my morning and making myself miserable -- but I just could. not. stop. I finally gave in and bought a flip phone. Guess what? No smart phone, no excess screen time!
Occasionally, I see people mock dumbphone users along these lines: it's a willpower issue, just log off, etc.
I think there’s an important distinction between positive action willpower and negative action willpower. Solving the “I’m spending too much time on screens!” issue is - like you said - quite easy: just remove them from your vicinity and boom, that’s done. But once positive action (such as finishing a boring textbook) is required things become a lot more tricky and you won’t necessarily get the job done even if you remove yourself to a temple in Tibet with the textbook in your bag.
I really enjoyed reading this. Heretical and brilliant, thanks for writing it.
Willpower as a moral category is conceptually goofy. The cultural imagining of willpower as a neutral, static, cognitive trait that you can either righteously, effortlessly juice for unlimited virtuous energy or simply forsake (resulting in severe loserdom and psychogenic decrepitude) is a very funny folk-psych abstraction.
What is the animus of executive function? A hot moral muscle ain't it!
I went down a very depressing rabbit hole on Twitter the other day about this very topic.
Ozempic people described as 'drug dependent,' 'spiritually fat', 'ozempic-fishing'. Lovely lovely words my brain computed as 'whatever you do, you will never outrun being overweight, and it will always be your greatest fault'.
It's a fuckingly difficult thing to even think I'm worthy of something, let alone attempt to control the food noise. Those people cannot imagine the amount of structural and personal pressure. They have no idea what it is to not think ,but KNOW exactly what people think of you when they look at you.
Anyway, I'm mad. And your article helps <3
PS : just thought of a good reply : 'I've got a lot of willpower, and it's a good thing too, because it requires an extraordinary amount not to punch those people in the face."
I have no doubt that you have valid issues with people. But as someone that's lost 80 pounds in my 40s and kept it off, I have to say that you don't need a drug.
Keto and fasting. We've been told to lose weight the wrong all our lives, and if you do it the right way, it's simple. You literally cannot outrun bad diet in the sense that exercise doesn't cause fat loss. It can't. You have to eat in a way that lowers your insulin levels; that's literally it.
I don't think it's a moral issue at all. But I've got concerns that ozempic is going to have some long term side effects that will result in it being taken off the market. Much like Chantix is off the market for causing cancer--but before that it was well known for causing suicide and aggression.
Shortcuts that are ineffective or do more harm than good aren't helpful. I respect the author for sharing her experience with testosterone replacement, but for men, the preferable solution would be to *fix whatever is causing the low testosterone.* Obviously.
I'm truly happy that you lost weight by keto and fasting, but "just do a diet that has intense physical and mental side effects for lots of people" is a prime example of the phenomenon discussed in the post. My body happens to respond really well to high-protein and restricted eating windows, and that's made it fairly easy for me to bulk and cut over the years; many people are not so fortunate.
If you fast properly (follow the advice of Dr. Jason Fung, and stay in ketosis to avoid the blood sugar rollercoaster), it not only gets easier, it gets downright enjoyable.
Do what you want for your n of 1, but you mentioned high protein... *Keto is high fat, not high protein.*
Every hormone in your body except insulin works to release fat from your cells; being younger and male certainly helps. But fasting is arguably the shortcut here; all you're doing is lowering your insulin levels.
Dr. Fung is wildly successful in print and in the clinic; ***fasting reverses (cures) type 2 diabetes.*** And it's free. All you're doing is letting your body fix itself.
What could possibly be more of an effective shortcut than that? A few weeks of fasting to cure type 2 diabetes, or a lifetime of treatment that makes you worse while enriching the healthcare system?
I think a real shortcut in life, highly effective but quite bracing, is to face the feelings of helplessness that result from realizing that other people won't make the choices that seem intuitive to you, no matter how much you yell at them, and no matter how right you seem to be.
My original reply was to the lady who wrote "it requires an extraordinary amount not to punch those people in the face."
I'm not yelling, and Dr. Fung is right about reversing type 2 diabetes with fasting. I suggest checking him out, rather than engaging with me.
We may be helpless in regards to a great many things, including giving up on people making lifestyle changes when they're eating themselves to death. But we're not helpless in regards to treating obesity and diabetes.
People should know that fasting works, and the standard treatments are doomed by design. It's a life or death matter. I'm sympathetic to everyone here, having spent the majority of my life being overweight.
I sincerely hope that products like ozempic and covid shots do not have disasterous side effects. But big pharma has quite the (criminal) track record. And I humbly submit that deep down, you know I have a point and it bothers you, so you're more or less defending your wife with your replies to me.
Do what you want, sir. I'm happy to move on. But I'm sure as heck not yelling.
Fung’s book gets a 31% score on scientific accuracy. I doubt this will change your mind but perhaps consider that something that works for you might not work for others!
I partly agree: I think Ozempic is almost certainly going to have long term side effects; And probably almost all people can solve their health issues with diet and exercise (although I think it's a bit more nuanced than keto and fasting, but that's an aside).
But I also think there's a mental aspect to weight loss and health that goes largely unspoken.
I have struggled with binge eating, using food as an escape and yoyo-ing around with different extreme diets. These behaviours were driven by a belief of perfectionism (doing things 100% or not at all) and a belief of not being enough (seeking out things to fix me, make me feel like enough). This coalesced for me in a dangerous way where I would try extreme diets for short periods of time, over and over (culminating in trying carnivore for a week, which aggravated a pre-existing kidney issue and required surgery to fix).
And I suspect that this coupling of beliefs is quite common because of the predominant messages of our culture (productivity as self-worth, finding the thing that will make you enough, etc.)
No diet could solve these problems, the only thing that worked for me was surfacing these beliefs consciously and updating them.
Even if I was indeed taking Ozempic, my original comment was about how some of the discourse around Ozempic is making ME feel like whatever I do (even healthy weight loss) will never be enough to not be 'inferior in the mind of people' anymore.
The problem was never : how do I better tell people what to do.
if a business requires the founder work themselves to the bone every day and makes little money in the process, we can easily identify it as an inefficient business.
why don’t we apply the same logic to our lives in general? if I’m having to struggle and exert willpower to achieve something, it’s seen as noble and maybe even necessary for me to “deserve” good things in my life. but maybe it’s better to assume that a need for willpower indicates bad systems.
Great takedown of the willpower myth, and I agree wholeheartedly with just about all you say. But there's a bit of an internal contradiction built into writing as someone who used to be "pro" at toxic willpower. You succeeded at lots of things, won all the prizes, made it to the top of the mountain....only to realize that it's bullshit and you had turned yourself into a robot.
On the one hand, this gives you extra credibility and authority since you actually trained in the Willpower School: you know what it's like to get too close to the sun and burn your wings, You stared willpower in the face, and had the wisdom and confidence to turn away. It's an inspiring story that people can benefit from hearing. On the other hand, it might be hard to integrate the lessons if you are one of those people who has never succeeded at anything, was a "loser" in high school and beyond, maybe is disabled, has few or zero objective indicators of efficacy, struggles just to keep up with most people. It still takes enormous motivation and self-efficacy to be the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, or just to get up two hours early to write; lifting weights is hard with or without a personal trainer. To fill your life with forcing functions and behavioral architecture presupposes will*ingness* - if not willpower-ness - and reasons to care.
I think for some the biggest challenge is not the myth of willpower, but simply to be able to be willing. And this doesn't make them weak or bad, either.
alas, one of the great limitations of writing is that you are largely stuck with your own perspective. i could start each post with "this will only be useful to some of you," but then people usually don't need to be told. :)
"It obscures the fact that motivation is complex, and that there is massive variation in how hard some things are for different people."
This line really stood out to me and is something I'm constantly reminding myself. True empathy acknowledges this variation and therefore makes it much easier to be patient and understanding with others. It's an antidote to the reflex of judgment.
I feel like what annoys me a lot is when people draw me into playing a status gamified version of something instead of the actual game. Operating by turning engineering, social etc games into status games before playing them. Will power in this context seems to me like the status gamified version of agency
I've always thought of this as setting yourself up for success - putting systems and mechanisms in place to make it easier to do the right/hard thing. Which, as someone else said in the comments, is usually actually the thing that makes life easier down the road. So the whole thing becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
My alternate to "willpower" has long been the view that the most reliable approach to accomplishing something is to slowly, patiently, continuously and gently nudge the ecology of which you, as a personality, are an intermingled node arising within.
That means: always be making the whole environment of living just a little bit more the sort of place where you "naturally" do what you want to be doing.
In the short run, it's easy to make the ecology 0.1% better for "being who you want to be". In the long run, this compounds, and eventually you are "who you want to be" because every aspect of the environment helpfully pushes you that way.
Wow — I’ve never agreed so much with a concept that I’ve never actually thought about this clearly before. This was mind-opening, and so relatable. Thank you for writing!
Fucking Amen. I'm writing about similar things at this very moment. Well actually I'm writing this at this very moment, but to your point, humans love to simplify. I get it, its easier than seeking the messy truth. Maybe this is an oversimplification but the kinds of people who judge and write those kinds of tweets, I think also don't really have very Grand ambitions. It's easy to succeed when your bar is quite low. You on the other hand are a testament to The Duality and paradoxical nature of what it means to be human and I appreciate you.
Favorite line: “But I have more important things to coerce myself about”. I can be really disciplined, but if I am trying to be too disciplined in too many things at once my escape valve behavior blows up everything. Gotta pick your shots, carefully. Thank you for making that so Useful-ly clear. Great piece of writing
Great post. The amount of motivation people need to do things varies widely. It's easy for me to go for a run because I enjoy it, but it's hard to write a status update because I find it boring. For someone else, the opposite may be true (shout out to the natural project managers among us). I think a key mistake that we make is considering the subjective amount of effort synonymous with this "willpower" thing. The power part of the word is the giveaway. For a muscular person, lifting a weight is easy. They have enough power and don't need much will. For someone weak, all the will in the world won't necessarily enable them to lift the same weight. If you subjectively feel like you're trying very hard to do something, that's not a sign of virtue, it's a sign that you're at high risk of failing. You should figure out how to make it easier (maybe you need to ramp up more slowly, get help, figure out how to get more excited about it, or reconfigure the task) or consider whether you're even doing the right thing.
Having said that, I do think there are people who go after ~everything with high energy, and people who have a hard time motivating for anything. Whether that's about willpower per se is unclear.
I really like this way of framing the issue!
I feel like I've had debates about this in some shape or another with people for my whole life.
I'm naturally inclined to work hard, to take the difficult path. But it always hurts me a little on the inside when people don't realize working hard isn't the point. Or they fail to realize that people who are struggling are in fact actually struggling i.e. trying very hard to ameliorate their issues.
The ultimate irony being that many times the implicit idea behind working hard is to make things easier in the future - you lift weights so your muscles become more efficient, you train so you (or your body) can respond faster. It's all in an effort to make things easier.
So it's a bit of a triple threat for anyone who can't solve their troubles - you try harder, achieve less, and get judged harsher.
Loved the post!
thanks so much! i love the framing as a kind of self-loyalty, rather than self-coercion -- trying to make things easier for your future self.
General public chatter about motivational architecture tends to presume functional cognition. Changing your perception of effort as loyalty instead of coercion still leans on this premise, implying an attitude adjustment can make things easier. I think this can be true to some degree, for some people, with a fat caveat.
So let’s wriggle face-first into this binary to see how it catalyses action: how do you channel your will? You can whip yourself bloody (the fervent ecstasy of the dedicated and disciplined!) or you can lovingly jerk yourself off while chanting affirmations (same thing!).
In the latter, effort’s pain is transmuted into an anaesthetising neural paste you can metabolise into kinder beliefs. The lacuna in the broader conversation is that some can do neither despite a desire or predilection for one or the other.
The assumption that a person has access to neuro-mechanical systems that reliably translate intent into action is my biggest gripe; it orbits too closely around the effort-as-morality Calvinism that hamstrings people whose desires are entirely, healthily intact: 'That lady with prehensile hands can climb a tree! Why won't my ulnar club hands let me do that?!’
What respect and guidance do we give, as a culture, to them?
I struggled to cut down my screen time for literal years. I would lie in bed, scrolling, fully aware I was wasting my morning and making myself miserable -- but I just could. not. stop. I finally gave in and bought a flip phone. Guess what? No smart phone, no excess screen time!
Occasionally, I see people mock dumbphone users along these lines: it's a willpower issue, just log off, etc.
I say, if it works, it works. Take the shortcut.
I think there’s an important distinction between positive action willpower and negative action willpower. Solving the “I’m spending too much time on screens!” issue is - like you said - quite easy: just remove them from your vicinity and boom, that’s done. But once positive action (such as finishing a boring textbook) is required things become a lot more tricky and you won’t necessarily get the job done even if you remove yourself to a temple in Tibet with the textbook in your bag.
I really enjoyed reading this. Heretical and brilliant, thanks for writing it.
Willpower as a moral category is conceptually goofy. The cultural imagining of willpower as a neutral, static, cognitive trait that you can either righteously, effortlessly juice for unlimited virtuous energy or simply forsake (resulting in severe loserdom and psychogenic decrepitude) is a very funny folk-psych abstraction.
What is the animus of executive function? A hot moral muscle ain't it!
This is a great encapsulation of the absurdity of the concept!
I went down a very depressing rabbit hole on Twitter the other day about this very topic.
Ozempic people described as 'drug dependent,' 'spiritually fat', 'ozempic-fishing'. Lovely lovely words my brain computed as 'whatever you do, you will never outrun being overweight, and it will always be your greatest fault'.
It's a fuckingly difficult thing to even think I'm worthy of something, let alone attempt to control the food noise. Those people cannot imagine the amount of structural and personal pressure. They have no idea what it is to not think ,but KNOW exactly what people think of you when they look at you.
Anyway, I'm mad. And your article helps <3
PS : just thought of a good reply : 'I've got a lot of willpower, and it's a good thing too, because it requires an extraordinary amount not to punch those people in the face."
"Those people cannot imagine the amount of structural and personal pressure" exactly
> spiritually fat
Jesus Christ WTF I can't 😭 This is the most ridiculous thing I've heard
Memorized too many bible verses or something.
This is an absolutely unhinged comment to make.
I have no doubt that you have valid issues with people. But as someone that's lost 80 pounds in my 40s and kept it off, I have to say that you don't need a drug.
Keto and fasting. We've been told to lose weight the wrong all our lives, and if you do it the right way, it's simple. You literally cannot outrun bad diet in the sense that exercise doesn't cause fat loss. It can't. You have to eat in a way that lowers your insulin levels; that's literally it.
I don't think it's a moral issue at all. But I've got concerns that ozempic is going to have some long term side effects that will result in it being taken off the market. Much like Chantix is off the market for causing cancer--but before that it was well known for causing suicide and aggression.
Shortcuts that are ineffective or do more harm than good aren't helpful. I respect the author for sharing her experience with testosterone replacement, but for men, the preferable solution would be to *fix whatever is causing the low testosterone.* Obviously.
I'm truly happy that you lost weight by keto and fasting, but "just do a diet that has intense physical and mental side effects for lots of people" is a prime example of the phenomenon discussed in the post. My body happens to respond really well to high-protein and restricted eating windows, and that's made it fairly easy for me to bulk and cut over the years; many people are not so fortunate.
If you fast properly (follow the advice of Dr. Jason Fung, and stay in ketosis to avoid the blood sugar rollercoaster), it not only gets easier, it gets downright enjoyable.
Do what you want for your n of 1, but you mentioned high protein... *Keto is high fat, not high protein.*
Every hormone in your body except insulin works to release fat from your cells; being younger and male certainly helps. But fasting is arguably the shortcut here; all you're doing is lowering your insulin levels.
Dr. Fung is wildly successful in print and in the clinic; ***fasting reverses (cures) type 2 diabetes.*** And it's free. All you're doing is letting your body fix itself.
What could possibly be more of an effective shortcut than that? A few weeks of fasting to cure type 2 diabetes, or a lifetime of treatment that makes you worse while enriching the healthcare system?
I think a real shortcut in life, highly effective but quite bracing, is to face the feelings of helplessness that result from realizing that other people won't make the choices that seem intuitive to you, no matter how much you yell at them, and no matter how right you seem to be.
My original reply was to the lady who wrote "it requires an extraordinary amount not to punch those people in the face."
I'm not yelling, and Dr. Fung is right about reversing type 2 diabetes with fasting. I suggest checking him out, rather than engaging with me.
We may be helpless in regards to a great many things, including giving up on people making lifestyle changes when they're eating themselves to death. But we're not helpless in regards to treating obesity and diabetes.
People should know that fasting works, and the standard treatments are doomed by design. It's a life or death matter. I'm sympathetic to everyone here, having spent the majority of my life being overweight.
I sincerely hope that products like ozempic and covid shots do not have disasterous side effects. But big pharma has quite the (criminal) track record. And I humbly submit that deep down, you know I have a point and it bothers you, so you're more or less defending your wife with your replies to me.
Do what you want, sir. I'm happy to move on. But I'm sure as heck not yelling.
https://www.redpenreviews.org/reviews/the-obesity-code-unlocking-the-secrets-of-weight-loss/
Fung’s book gets a 31% score on scientific accuracy. I doubt this will change your mind but perhaps consider that something that works for you might not work for others!
I partly agree: I think Ozempic is almost certainly going to have long term side effects; And probably almost all people can solve their health issues with diet and exercise (although I think it's a bit more nuanced than keto and fasting, but that's an aside).
But I also think there's a mental aspect to weight loss and health that goes largely unspoken.
I have struggled with binge eating, using food as an escape and yoyo-ing around with different extreme diets. These behaviours were driven by a belief of perfectionism (doing things 100% or not at all) and a belief of not being enough (seeking out things to fix me, make me feel like enough). This coalesced for me in a dangerous way where I would try extreme diets for short periods of time, over and over (culminating in trying carnivore for a week, which aggravated a pre-existing kidney issue and required surgery to fix).
And I suspect that this coupling of beliefs is quite common because of the predominant messages of our culture (productivity as self-worth, finding the thing that will make you enough, etc.)
No diet could solve these problems, the only thing that worked for me was surfacing these beliefs consciously and updating them.
Even if I was indeed taking Ozempic, my original comment was about how some of the discourse around Ozempic is making ME feel like whatever I do (even healthy weight loss) will never be enough to not be 'inferior in the mind of people' anymore.
The problem was never : how do I better tell people what to do.
You talked about punching people in the face because of the way people on twitter indirectly made you feel, madame.
I hope you feel better.
Correction : I said I had enough self-control NOT to punch them in the face, Monsieur :) And yes, I hope I will feel better too.
if a business requires the founder work themselves to the bone every day and makes little money in the process, we can easily identify it as an inefficient business.
why don’t we apply the same logic to our lives in general? if I’m having to struggle and exert willpower to achieve something, it’s seen as noble and maybe even necessary for me to “deserve” good things in my life. but maybe it’s better to assume that a need for willpower indicates bad systems.
Excellent reminder to start my morning with. Thanks!
Great takedown of the willpower myth, and I agree wholeheartedly with just about all you say. But there's a bit of an internal contradiction built into writing as someone who used to be "pro" at toxic willpower. You succeeded at lots of things, won all the prizes, made it to the top of the mountain....only to realize that it's bullshit and you had turned yourself into a robot.
On the one hand, this gives you extra credibility and authority since you actually trained in the Willpower School: you know what it's like to get too close to the sun and burn your wings, You stared willpower in the face, and had the wisdom and confidence to turn away. It's an inspiring story that people can benefit from hearing. On the other hand, it might be hard to integrate the lessons if you are one of those people who has never succeeded at anything, was a "loser" in high school and beyond, maybe is disabled, has few or zero objective indicators of efficacy, struggles just to keep up with most people. It still takes enormous motivation and self-efficacy to be the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, or just to get up two hours early to write; lifting weights is hard with or without a personal trainer. To fill your life with forcing functions and behavioral architecture presupposes will*ingness* - if not willpower-ness - and reasons to care.
I think for some the biggest challenge is not the myth of willpower, but simply to be able to be willing. And this doesn't make them weak or bad, either.
alas, one of the great limitations of writing is that you are largely stuck with your own perspective. i could start each post with "this will only be useful to some of you," but then people usually don't need to be told. :)
"It obscures the fact that motivation is complex, and that there is massive variation in how hard some things are for different people."
This line really stood out to me and is something I'm constantly reminding myself. True empathy acknowledges this variation and therefore makes it much easier to be patient and understanding with others. It's an antidote to the reflex of judgment.
I feel like what annoys me a lot is when people draw me into playing a status gamified version of something instead of the actual game. Operating by turning engineering, social etc games into status games before playing them. Will power in this context seems to me like the status gamified version of agency
Paraphrase of Proverbs 26 v27: Fools fall into traps they lay
I've always thought of this as setting yourself up for success - putting systems and mechanisms in place to make it easier to do the right/hard thing. Which, as someone else said in the comments, is usually actually the thing that makes life easier down the road. So the whole thing becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
My alternate to "willpower" has long been the view that the most reliable approach to accomplishing something is to slowly, patiently, continuously and gently nudge the ecology of which you, as a personality, are an intermingled node arising within.
That means: always be making the whole environment of living just a little bit more the sort of place where you "naturally" do what you want to be doing.
In the short run, it's easy to make the ecology 0.1% better for "being who you want to be". In the long run, this compounds, and eventually you are "who you want to be" because every aspect of the environment helpfully pushes you that way.
Wow — I’ve never agreed so much with a concept that I’ve never actually thought about this clearly before. This was mind-opening, and so relatable. Thank you for writing!
Thanks so much, Jamie!
Fucking Amen. I'm writing about similar things at this very moment. Well actually I'm writing this at this very moment, but to your point, humans love to simplify. I get it, its easier than seeking the messy truth. Maybe this is an oversimplification but the kinds of people who judge and write those kinds of tweets, I think also don't really have very Grand ambitions. It's easy to succeed when your bar is quite low. You on the other hand are a testament to The Duality and paradoxical nature of what it means to be human and I appreciate you.
what a nice comment!
Favorite line: “But I have more important things to coerce myself about”. I can be really disciplined, but if I am trying to be too disciplined in too many things at once my escape valve behavior blows up everything. Gotta pick your shots, carefully. Thank you for making that so Useful-ly clear. Great piece of writing
thank you!