DRMacIver's Notebook
Well you gotta
Well you gotta
The Anakin/Padme meme seems to have occupied a useful conceptual shape in my brain. You’ve probably seen it.
The original goes:
Anakin: “I’m going to change the world.”
Padmé: “For the better, right?”
Anakin: (gazes in silence)
Padmé: “For the better, right?”
For whatever reason, this particular shape appeals to me, so I see the pattern over and over again.
Lately I’ve been thinking about it in the context of one of my corner of the internet’s recurring catch phrases. “You can just do things”.
Anakin: “You can just do things.”
Padmé: “That you want to, right?”
Anakin: (gazes in silence)
Padmé: “That you want to, right?”
Part of why I think about this particular pattern a lot is parenting. It’s common interaction with the child that I tell her she needs to do a thing,Such as have a shower, clean her room, do her homework assignments, all of the incredibly boring mundane cliched tyrannies of parenting. and she replies “but I don’t wanna”.
I have yet to adequately convey the magnitude of my lack of interest in whether she wants to or not through anything other than the deeply nuanced philosophical position: “Well you gotta”.
This doesn’t particularly work for persuading her you understand, but neither does anything else, and it’s a more accurate, more honest, and, I think, healthier position than trying to convince her to do it because she should do it because she wants the end result, because often she doesn’t care (or claims not to care) about the end result either and I don’t consider her opinion on whether she’s allowed to be stinky or have cavities or whatever to be relevant. I would, of course, much rather she care about those things too, but one of the goals of parenting is that it’s your job to make sure good decisions are being made.
There are plenty of things of course where the fact that she doesn’t want to do them is, in fact, and important and overriding consideration. I’m not going to force her to play a board game she doesn’t want to play for example.Though I will at least discourage her from quitting one midway through. The point is very much not that she should do whatever I (or her other parents) want. It’s the much more specific and important point that some things need to be done, and it doesn’t matter if you want to do them, they still need to get done and you need to be able to do them regardless of whether you wanna.
Another meme in my circles is non-coercion, which is the idea that you shouldn’t force yourself to do things. This also extends into non-coercive parenting, which is that you shouldn’t force your kids to do things. I suppose I don’t exactly disagree, but I think the details are important to get right, and when “doing something because you’re forced to” is treated as the opposite of “doing something because you want to”, something has gone very wrong.
Sometimes you want the ends and not the means. Sometimes you don’t even want the ends but have an obligation to do them.You could argue that you want to fulfill your obligations, but I would argue in turn that fulfilling an obligation feels very different from a positive motivation to do the thing most of the time. In these circumstances, forcing yourself to have to pretend to want the means in order to achieve the ends is very bad for you, because it forces you to basically lie to yourself about what you want. Being able to calmly, and without any particular joy in your heart, do the thing because it needs to be done is a much more valuable attitude to be able to take.
Some of this comes down to parenting for me as well, and this is definitely an attitude I’ve inherited from my parents. My parents are both functioning workaholics. My dad, in particular, is in his 70s and seems absolutely tireless to me.
Except, in fact, he’s not. He’s tired a lot. He’s got far worse sleeping problems than me - they run in the family, and he got them from his mother. So he often wakes up exhausted. And then he goes out and does a phenomenal amount of hard physical labour.
He once passed on a conversation he’d had with his mother about tiredness. Her advice went something like this: “Yes of course you’re tired. The trick is to not worry about it.I expect in the original version she sounded less like Lawrence of Arabia. You just have to get on with things anyway.”
At the time I hated this advice, but I’ve grown to see the wisdom of it.
When talking about cleaning the kitchen I made the point that you can choose to resent the fact that it takes an hour or accept it, and that you’ll have to do the same amount of work either way but it will be much more pleasant for you if you don’t spend it resenting the effort.
The same is true with needing to do things. You can resent them, or you can just do them because they need to get done, and the latter will be in every way more pleasant for you, and even if you’re not happy about doing the thing you will be a happier person for being able to.
It is, of course, possible to take this too far, and end up burdened by obligations that you don’t want because you’re the most reliable person in the room because nobody else takes on this attitude. I’ve ended up in that situation in past workplaces for example.
The most reliable and viable solution to this is to couple the ability to do things that are needful with the ability to ask “OK, but is this actually my problem?”, and a degree of conflict tolerance that allows you to make it other people’s problem when it should be.
But, personally, the solution I would most prefer but have never quite been able to manage is for other people to also adopt this attitude and stop being goddamn freeloaders.