Thanos comments on Celebrate Trivial Impetuses - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Alicorn 24 July 2009 10:36PM

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Comment author: Thanos 25 July 2009 09:23:57PM 0 points [-]

My trivial impetus is driving.

Some background is needed first. I grew up in a large family in the far North whose members were prone to loud talk and occasional hysterical theater. Scenery chewing, worse than James Blish on a bad day hysterical theater. So as soon as I hit sixteen if I was thinking on something deeply and one of these bouts came upon someone I would immediately hop in the car and go driving so I could continue thinking without the large scale distraction. So driving and thinking are somewhat paired with me by habit but as I've aged I don't like to drive anymore.
There are two things I do to encourage the habit - the first is to pick a new destination with some small reward for every "thinking road trip" (bookstore, candy store, etc.,) and the second is to occasionally random drive. This makes for interesting scenery that you usually haven't seen before, and sometimes even getting lost. How do you random drive? With coin flips at every intersection - left is heads, right is tails. It's akrasia btw to do something dangerous like drive while deeply thinking, but... the long established habit's unbreakable in my case.