Sometimes I look back over my journal to see what is repeatedly on my mind. Complaints about PPE figure heavily:
2023/11/25: I have a philosophy essay to write and I don’t want to. I have a feeling [next term] will be like this a lot
2024/02/12: I’m looking at the word doc for my genphil essay now and just feeling an immense frustration that I am meant to write about such a stupid + boring + infuriating topic.
2024/02/14: found politics reading dull and wanted to be doing almost anything else
Yet I don’t like the idea of failing to do my work:
2024/02/19: [quiet quitting] feels ~deontologically wrong to me. Would be uncomfortable not following rules to hand in seven essays, etc etc.
Until about a month ago, I had been doing all the essays set. Not to the best of my ability, but with enough effort that I didn’t feel sheepish handing the piece in with my name at the top. The work was boring and felt unimportant, but also:
- I had signed up for the degree; shirking would be unvirtuous
- These were weighty topics that have been occupying intelligent minds for centuries. Who was I to dismiss them?
- Getting praise from tutors was rewarding
- Taking the risk of doing poorly in exams seemed imprudent
Charting your own, non-conventional path requires a level of self-confidence I might call arrogance. Deciding not to do a politics essay is to claim that I know better than the institution about what’s worth thinking about or spending time on. I think that paternalism can work well – external actors can often know what would be best for a person. Does this not apply to me in the case of where to devote my time? Is it just that the University of Oxford isn’t the expert whose judgement I trust best?
One thing I which helped clarify my thinking here is that there are inordinately many things I won’t learn. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever make my way through the first-year History syllabus, for instance. Given that I now no longer endorse studying PPE, it would be strange to privilege its reading list and work over everything else.
I’ve been spending time over the last few weeks on things which feel much more worthwhile to me: enjoying the sensation of sunshine on my face and grass against my toes, coding a dating app, making lino prints, polishing up essays on this site, pursuing assorted other projects. Doing them has also been fun! I’m happier now.
Preferences?
It’s hardly surprising that doing things I have an aversion to is less pleasurable than not doing them. But as Duncan Sabien notes:
many of our more ambitious goals (like earning a postgraduate degree) require a large number of more-or-less difficult, more-or-less arbitrary, and more-or-less thankless steps, few of which are intrinsically desirable on their own. We want the end goal, but we have to consciously marshal our resources in order to take steps toward it, fighting against “yuck” factors much of the way.
Perhaps by just following what I want to do at any moment, I lose my way towards the long-term goal in exchange for short-term comfort. In order to decide whether or not to abandon my politics and philosophy essays, I needed to be able to tell whether they were necessary steps towards something valuable. It was hard to know for certain, and my concern about avoiding imprudence was one of the main reasons I continued with them.
In the back of my mind – and what eventually won – was a brief comment from Brian Timar in his post on mimetic traps:
Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit.
Yes, often we need to do tedious or tiresome tasks in order to achieve our goals. But the fact that a particular goal involves a great number of tedious and tiresome tasks should lead you to re-assess whether or not it actually is a goal you want to pursue. In the language of Bayesianism, there is now new information which can be used to update your world-model. Doggedly persevering with something you hate leads to what I call losing your sense of taste.
I have never had much of a refined palette when it comes to food. I associated this with moral virtue – being unfussy was a point of praise and pride during my childhood. Similarly, until fairly recently I did not want to allow myself to care at all about my choice of clothes, because doing so would be a vain indulgence.
In these areas of life, and in academics, I have been undergoing a realisation along the lines of what Scott Alexander talks about:
“Oh! Wait! I have preferences!”
In the absence of that awareness, it is easy to go along the “default track”: apply to a high-status university, take a graduate job at a big corporate, settle down and live a respectable life. Camps like Atlas and ESPR try to shake participants off this path by imbuing them with a sense of agency, and I think this is really valuable. The flaw is that such communities have their own cultural norms and status hierarchies, which means that one set of mimetic traps may just be replaced with another. In particular, the very act of dropping out becomes prestigious, and following the default track is an embarrassment.
Elizabeth van Nostrand describes the result of this well:
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you authentically want something, or are trying to impress people with how ambitious you are.
I think there actually just isn’t an alternative to paying attention to your preferences. Does whatever you’re doing at the moment feel like real work? Are you enjoying the process? Is it helping you become the person you want to?
For the last word, Gavin Leech:
You cannot allow other people to decide what you want from life. This is the most likely single thing to ruin your life.
I’m glad to have my sense of taste back. Delicacy doesn’t need to be treated with moral disdain.