How long things take has little relation to how much they matter. Swallowing an optional vitamin and a life-saving pill take the same few seconds. Fixing a minor corner case bug and a system-crashing major one might take the same time. This is why pure reactivity is bad. THREAD!
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Reacting is easier than acting on your initiative. It takes less imagination or judgement. Somebody has made a neat little to-do for you. When you react, your attention/energy allocation is determined largely by how long things take. Greasing squeaky wheel, sweating small stuff.
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By contrast, when you act instead of react, you have more control. You can outsource and automate more easily. You aren’t as locked into time commitments determined by others’ plans because you can tweak the plan itself, deciding what requires care and what can be neglected.
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You can’t entirely escape time. Execution is after all just a set of reactions to the consequences of your own intentions. And the mere fact of volition doesn’t make popping a pill or driving a mile take less time. The difference is, it’s leveraged time. What do I mean by that?
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It means you capture more of the positive, designed consequences of your own actions and escape more of the negative ones. You've used logic (whether agile experimental or fragile Rube Goldbergian) to shape causation in your favor. Rationality is time/attention/energy leverage.
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You can’t “manage” time. You can’t even “manage” attention or energy outside of a fairly narrow band. All you can do is limit the number of things you choose to react to. Create more room for YOUR logic to work, over that of others.
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Even the most benevolent person cannot always structure the logic of action to benefit you. The logic of their own needs will ALWAYS contaminate the reactivity pattern they impose on you, and there is ALWAYS a limit to how deeply they can grok the hidden logic of your needs.
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Parents, spouses, teachers, priests, bodhisattvas, social workers, doctors, AIs that read your emails, Google, coaches, therapists... nobody can set up your actions to be purely shaped by the logic of your own needs. Self-interest cannot be truly outsourced.
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Only YOU have access to all the information, conscious, unconscious, and subconscious, to act with self interest. Only YOU are uniquely firewalled off from others’ interests allowing actions based on that particular set of information. Self-Interest is a responsibility.
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Acting on self-interest sets up conflict with others acting on self-interest of course, but you’re not doing others any favors by curtailing it. Your self-interested actions are the peer review of the logic of my self-interested actions.
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Your refusal to react as I want reshapes my attempt at leveraged action. It forces me to contemplate the use of power and coercion to get my way. If I choose to use those, I’m being selfish rather than self-interested. Your self-interest is what helps me detect my selfishness.
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Anxiety is, in a way, conflict-aversion debt. When you consciously curtail self-interest, you let conflict debt accumulate in relationships. Your subconscious recognizes this and mints AnxietyCoin in your head to represent deferred conflict debt.
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Anxiety is a very poor way to process improperly expressed self-interest, since it does not carry the logic of leveraged time/action. So it just sloshes around screwing up all behavior somewhat randomly. Problems inappropriately expand to occupy anxiety available. Inflation.
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Anxiety particular leaks into reactions, because cues to react trigger our subconscious awareness of our insufficient self-interest. Yes, you read that right. There’s not enough self-interest in the world.
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Not enough people have the skill, self-awareness, and most importantly *courage* to fulfill their responsibility to be self-interested. Self-interest is not a natural and automated intuition. It’s a learned skill and an expression of nerve.
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The opposite of self-interest is not altruism but anxiety and unchecked excesses on the part of those who *need* your self-interest to recognize their selfishness and be forced to face the coercion and power they’re deploying.
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What they do with that is their moral dilemma. They may choose to change or not. Your job is to create that moral dilemma. That’s ultimately the stakes riding on your reactivity. Be self-interested, or be part of the problem.
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