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.
Conversation
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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