Willpower pt.2

This is part 2, read part 1

Warnings: lightly nsfw

Today I’m going to get a little more personal. I want to keep talking about willpower, but also touch on drive, motivation, and desires, and where thinking of those concepts brought me.

I had this weird experience 5 years ago where I felt like I had lost my drive. I just couldn’t force myself to work on my projects anymore.

I thought that perhaps I lacked self-discipline or willpower. That’s what got me into the subject.

In the years before that moment, I used to have this thing where I couldn’t get to sleep if I didn’t do something productive that day, like hours of productive work. When I had nothing to do or was avoiding my work for some reason, I would instead play video games (League of Legends…) until I was too exhausted to stay awake and would crash out around 1 or 2 AM. So my life was a mix of intense work and intense distraction. Always doing something. I had to keep my mind occupied.

This drive allowed me to do great in school and on my personal projects. I felt like I could achieve anything I set my mind to. Except.. I didn’t because I kept hitting walls at the finish line.

I studied for months to get a life-changing job in big tech (FAANG). I passed all the online and phone interviews, and I received plane tickets for the final interviews and offers. But the second I succeeded, I would have a breakdown and cancel everything.

The official story I would tell myself and other people was something like: “Oh, I hate company X. I can’t bring myself to actually work there.” “Oh, I actually want to start a business.”

While the reasons were actually “true”, they weren’t the biggest truth. The biggest truth was that I was getting flooded by emotions I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t do it. Narrativized… Rationalized… I always came up with with a filtered truth. Something socially acceptable and palitable to myself too.

My confidence in my willpower was eroding though. I knew I could force myself to do anything, but I also knew that I would sabotage myself at the finish line. Still, I kept going, just shifting the focus of my drive.

So 5 years ago, when my latest project (my own business) was able to pay all my bills, it started to feel like some kind of a success.

That’s where I lost my drive. I felt stuck.

I went in therapy briefly. I discovered that I missed my previous job.. I hated learning that about myself. The entire point of the business was to not have that job anymore. To be unattached and free, and I was.

That was a piece of the puzzle but that wasn’t the whole reason. I felt like I could force myself to work, I just had no desire to do it. I kept thinking, “if only somebody needed me to work, if somebody relied on me. I could do it.” I knew I had the willpower, but I also had no desire/motivation to deploy that willpower.

I read some self-help around the topic at that time, but it seemed like they were mostly talking about ways to stop being flaky and use willpower consistently, which was never a problem for me. It was more like, I knew I could do it, I just didn’t want to.

I felt like the type of willpower I used in the past was a kind of violence against myself. I was repulsed by it. It felt toxic, it felt like a kind of suppression and repression of parts of myself I didn’t fully understand. I couldn’t bring myself back to it.

And those emotions were always there with a vengeance at the finish line, undermining me. I couldn’t trust myself. There was literally no point in even trying anymore.

Desires and motivation

I thought that I should instead focus on my desires and find a way to fan the flames of motivation.

One suggestion I saw online was to create a vision board of what I desired and have it be the first thing I see in the morning. I collected pictures of nice lakeside houses with a boat. I also wanted a nice, luxurious apartment in a big city with those big factory windows and high ceilings. I started walking near the lake in my town, probably the wealthiest area in town, trying to find that spark.

I didn’t work like I expected.

I caught myself one day getting angry at one of the houses. It had everything on my checklist. It was just so… lifeless? I thought, “I bet this sad old guy is lonely in his big ass empty house. How vapid, how wasteful.” There was definitely some envy there, but that wasn’t the full picture. I didn’t know those people; that was pure projection. Maybe they were really happy. I don’t know.

It got me thinking about my desires.

Do I really desire those things? What is it that I truly desire? Why do I feel so.. split here? I didn’t understand what that meant then, but I think I somewhat understand now.

The desires behind the desires

I began to be interested in the structure of desires. I watched a random Slavoj Žižek video one day, and one concept really resonated.

It’s called fetishistic disavowal. (Sounds fun, I know 😅)

He has this strange story about a man whose wife tragically dies. Yet, he doesn’t cry; he doesn’t seem to be grieving. He becomes obsessed with his late wife’s hamster, takes care of it, and loves it. Then, one day, the hamster dies, and the man falls apart. He’s devastated.

The logic is that the trauma of his wife’s death shattered his entire world, and it was unbearable. The fetish object then appear to “patch” over reality. It’s a stand-in that lets him keep living. The man simultaneously knows she’s dead but acts as though she’s still there via the hamster that she loved. They call this “I know very well, but nonetheless…”.

So, according to the theory, fetishes aren’t just sexual perversion, but rather a normal part of how people survive trauma. Sometimes, survival requires structured denial and distortions to avoid exposure to the unbearable.

The fetish stands in for the missing subject that cannot be fully accepted. What is really interesting to me is that the fetish is both an idealized substitute and shield against the Real.

So, in a sense, behind every fetish, there is a fear of the real subject. Like for a more classic example, the foot fetish is taking a body part and idealizing it, and placing all the sexual energy into it, therefore allowing the person to engage with their desire toward the woman without being confronted with the reality of the whole woman. The foot substitutes for the whole woman, but also shields against her.

Same thing with, let’s say, people fetishizing sex. It’s taking a part of something and making it way bigger and more important to actually protect themselves against something like true intimacy.

That phrase.. “I know very well, but nonetheless…”. It was exactly how I felt about my desires for the house and the boat (and the money to afford them). I know very well that it won’t make me happy, but I still want to do it. I even suspected that it might become a burden on me instead of a liberation. I began wondering what was behind my “fetish” for that lakeside house.

Reading about motivation, I eventually got to Maslow and his famous hierarchy of needs from his “A Theory of Human Motivation”.

It hit me that what I really desired was safety. I wanted to be able to be isolated from the world. I wanted a lake next to my house to have less people around me and an escape hatch. I wanted a place in a big city where I could also escape to if I wanted, and be anonymous in a crowd. I wanted to not have to rely on anybody.

I knew I was avoiding achieving my desires for some reason. Still, it never occurred to me that my desires themselves were avoidant desires.

The destabilizing reality behind the fetish is that I wasn’t perfectly fine, rational, and logical like I thought I was. I was hurt, I was traumatized. I couldn’t truly trust people or the world, yet I still craved safety.

Also it was easier for me to chase something external than to face the reality that what I needed to do is change internally. If someone told me that 10 years ago, I don’t think it would have registered with me, but I believe it today. I wasn’t ready to hear this. Those things happen in their time I guess. It’s really destabilizing to radically change your self-conception like that.

I think the reason I couldn’t push myself to work anymore was that I was actually healing. I learned to care less about what other people think and their expectations of me. I got more distance from the people and situations that caused me harm, and I felt safer. I wasn’t in survival mode anymore.

Integration

Willpower is still valuable and useful, but now I try to use it out of a place of love and curiosity.

Instead of denying parts of myself and suppressing entire emotions, I try to give everybody a seat at the table. My desire to express myself and make a game (and a blog) is one of those parts you are witnessing right now.

Growth is sometimes to admit that you are a victim. Not to stop there but also not to skip right over it. We wear armor, not because we are strong, but because we got hurt. Then we deny we are armored because, otherwise, we would have to face that we were hurt and maybe even broken. Growth is stripping away the distortions. Seeing things clearly. Then, we can repair things if we want to. - Me

It’s not easy, but that’s growth, I guess. Being a victim isn’t that rare, actually, it’s part of life. We are probably both victim and aggressor in different contexts. We live in a society that guarantees a minimum level of physical wellbeing, but no such guarantees of mental wellbeing :

We fail to take responsibility, to act productively in the interest of ourselves and others. And in our attempts at a better life, we are often severely limited or thwarted by the immature and socially inept behavior of ourselves and others. There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life—I will be your daughter’s abusive boyfriend, your belligerent neighbor from hell. And you will never grow wings because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be. But it is not how life has to be. Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. - Hanzi Freinacht, The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

Humm.. that’s enough for today. Thanks for reading, hope that helps.

Next time I want to talk more about integration, I’ll talk about IFS.