DRMacIver's Notebook
You create rules, rules create you
You create rules, rules create you
I used to be a huge Beeminder fan.In some ways I still am a huge Beeminder fan (certainly I’m a big fan of the Beeminder team), I just happen to be a non-practicing one. For those who don’t know, Beeminder is a commitment system. You say “I’m going to do this thing X times a week”, or “I’ll spend at most X hours a week doing this”, or any other commitment about your life that you can phrase as a metric.
One of the features of it I thought was extremely well thought out was the way changing this commitment worked, which is that you can change it at any time… and that change will take a week to take effect. You’re always allowed to let future you off the hook, but the fact that you don’t want to adhere to your commitment right this very minute doesn’t get you off the hook.
You can, of course, fail to uphold your commitment (“derail”), at which point you pay Beeminder a previously agreed penalty.You can also email them with an excuse as to why you should be let off the hook and an actual human will read it. Sometimes they’ll just let you off the hook, sometimes they’ll say “Are you sure that’s a good enough reason?” and maybe you’ll shuffle your feet and say “No I guess not” and pay them or maybe you’ll stick to your guns. It essentially makes the entire thing a sort of asynchronous negotiation between your past and future selves. You can decide what commitments you want to hold your future self to, and you can choose whether to break your current commitments to your past self, but you cannot forgive those commitments. You are forced to either uphold them or pay the costs of not doing so.
I think this is often a good model for trying to choose who to be, even when it’s not as cleanly mediated by beeminder. When I talk about necessity it’s really this sort of commitment made by your past self that I’m talking about. I don’t pay a financial penalty for failing to write daily, but I do pay the emotional cost by knowing that I’ve let down this thing that past me has committed to. At some point I will indeed decide to stop the daily writingTypically I keep it up for 1-3 months before it starts to lose the appeal, and that’s fine. But also… maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just keep up the daily writing forever, possibly with some modifications. Who knows?, but when that happens it won’t be because one day I’ve just decided I have enough, it will be because I choose to release future me from his commitments to writing.
Probably at some point in that time I will fail to write some day. That was nearly today, honestly. It’s not been a great day. This isn’t the end of the world. Maybe there will be a good reason for it and I won’t feel bad, maybe there won’t be a good reason and I’ll resolve to do better, but the important thing is that I will acknowledge that the rule was broken, and this was an important fact that I should respond appropriately to, and that I should consider this fact when deciding whether to break the rule or not - ask myself if I really need to or if I could in fact do the thing.
I think being able to choose rules that you follow and then stick to them is very important, and you can use them to shape your emotional reactions to things, and make aspiring towards be the sort of person you want to be easier.
One problem with the Beeminder analogyAnd part of why I don’t use Beeminder any more. is that it makes it sound like the rules you follow are mostly about creating negative emotions - they create ways of punishing yourself for not upholding the ideal. I don’t think this has to be the case. For example, with the daily writing there’s certainly a sort of “Ugh, I guess I’ve gotta” feeling because I know I’ll feel bad if I don’t do it, but then I follow the rule it feels good. There’s something very satisfying about writing every day, above and beyond the general satisfaction of writing. It helps elaborate a stream of thinking that ties thought into life in a way that I very much appreciate.
You can also have rules that are more lightweight or even purely positive. For example, one rule I live by is that I always say hello to ducks if I see ducks. Why? Dunno. I started doing it, and I enjoyed it, so I kept doing it. It’s not a rule I would feel guilty for not following, but it is a rule I actively try to follow and it pleases me to do so.
I think you can also do this by creating your own idiosyncratic categories and distinctions about the world. For example, I have a mental category of “proper meal” which is basically defined by it having to have three different vegetables in it.There is a series of complicated rules and codicils to this rule. For example: Neither mango, obviously, nor onions are vegetables, but a dish which combines mangos and onions counts as one vegetable. I’m aware this is a stupid piece of convoluted Byzantine logic, but also it’s obviously correct so shut up. I try to have at least one proper meal in this sense per day. I don’t firmly commit to doing this, but a day in which I have at least one proper meal feels better than a day in which I don’t, because I’ve decided that this is the sort of meal I should cook.
One of the things I learned with Beeminder is that you can’t add too many rules at once. It quickly gets overwhelming and you quit the whole thing in distress as your willingness to engage with the experience collapses under the burden of it. But for many of the rules we live by, the actual rule has long dissolved into being just… you. I occasionally reach for the proper meal rule when I’m trying to figure out what to do and having some explicit guidance would help, but mostly it’s just baked in to how I cook and eat. I don’t even think about the ducks rule, I just see ducks and I say hello. I brush my teeth twice a day, but that’s not a rule at all at this point it just wouldn’t occur to me not to and it would feel wrong until I fixed it.
But when you’re trying to shift who you are, particularly when you’re trying to more reliably be the sort of person you can only sometimes be, sometimes a rule and the ability to commit to it is just what you need. You’ll get the rules wrong sometimes, and when you do you absolutely need to be able to change them without guilt, but before you can change them you need to follow them.