This morning, when someone asked my friend how he was, he replied “complicated”. I offered to hear him out.
Throughout the conversation, we hit many of the points that I’ve seen young rationalists struggle on, myself included. I gave similar advice to what I usually give.
As per Gwern’s commandment, whenever you explain something thrice, write it down. Here’s the advice I kept coming back to.
You are not the ideal version of you. Therefore, to become the ideal version of you, you can’t make a plan that requires actions that only the ideal you could take. This issue comes up when he thought that he should be able to just follow his alarms in the morning instead of snoozing. Yes, his ideal self would follow the alarms, but he’s not his ideal self, and his just hurting himself by making himself wake up only to snooze and go back to sleep every morning.
A common way this manifests is by having an internal model that’s biased by never predicting that they’ll fail to follow up on an intention, or that their plan always succeed, or that they have their max energy every day, or that all tasks of the day go as planned, and no emergency ever comes up. Yeah, this would be ideal, but unfortunately that’s not the real world, that’s not the real you. If your plan is “I will work on fixing my life problems once I have finished all the work I should be doing today” then you’ll never work on it, because the work you should be doing is already too high a bar to actually achieve it.
To escape this, you need to build an internal model of your actual skills and competence, of your reliability, of what you like and dislike, of how much time various things take you to do, of your energy levels in a typical week. Once you have an accurate model instead of an “ideal” (aka overoptimistic) model, you can start making plans that can actually succeed, because they will be built to be achievable by the real you, instead of this fake “ideal” you.
One way in which pretending to be the ideal version of you can work is when you can just “fake it ‘till you make it”. Sometime, it does work to just do the thing like you knew it all along. But sometime, you try to just be the person who wakes up at 8am by setting alarms, fail repeatedly, and have to update that actually you can’t just will yourself into this, and you’ll have to be more strategic. Do try to fake it first in case it works. But as soon as you realize it does not work, abandon it.
This strategy is only one among many that can make your current self become better and get closer to your ideal self.
Another example is baby steps. You can start doing small version of the thing, version that are just barely outside your comfort zone or skill level, get good at them, and then increase a bit more. This usually looks way different from the fake it strategy. For example, you could set your alarm just a bit earlier than the literal last minute time before your first meeting, see how it feels, see how it makes your life better, build self trust by seeing that you can take control of your life, and then move it further back and see how it feels then.
And at this point I realize I’m basically rehashing the advice from Introspect, one of my favorite self-improvement book. “Baby steps” comes from there. There are many more, like do a 100 things.
Anyway, my friend said our conversation solved like 20% of his life problems! His probably way overestimating again, but it was nice to hear.
If you’ve got stuff you’d like someone to hear you about, come talk with me at Lighthaven :)