Specifically, the assumption that your parents need to be proud of something... when, in fact, normal healthy parents are proud of their kids when they make mudpies or say "gaga" or something.
To put it another way, your brain has habituated to assuming that your parents' pride is supposed to be conditional on you doing something, and that it's therefore somehow "not right" for you to feel pride in yourself, unless you're doing something that would get your parents to be proud of you.
Isn't unconditional praise empty praise? Is getting a trophy at "Everyone Gets A Trophy Day" meaningful?
One of the reasons this sort of thing is difficult is because children are wired to believe their parents are intrinsically perfect, and that therefore any negative consequences of interacting with parents are considered to be your fault. If your parents aren't proud of you (giving you Status pellets), then you must be defective.
My parents were proud of my academic achievements. I wasn't, not really. Doing very well in school feels more like something that happened to me, rather than something that I achieved. On the other hand, my parents don't care that I've beaten Battletoads, or ascended in Nethack, or beat Space Megaforce on Tricky difficulty without continuing, but, dammit, I'm certainly proud that I managed to do it! (Unfortunately, as the saying goes, that and $3.99 plus sales tax will get you a pack of Magic cards - I have no way of making any actual money off of this.) For a long time, I've gotten at least some pride from sources my parents have disapproved of. On the other hand, I used to have peers to impress with my mad game-playing skillz. ;)
Of course, later on in life, we do gain the ability to criticize our parents, their values and behaviors. But by that point, the damage is already done: we've already adopted their rules for SASS allocation, tucked away out of conscious awareness. And thus, we rarely question them.
I've been arguing with my parents about the merits of video games since I was, what, twelve? My mom is still convinced the use of the word "boss" to describe the powerful enemy fought at the end of each level was a Japanese plot to make American workers less productive by making them unable to cooperate with their supervisors at work.
Because by default, we assume that at least our Status and Affiliation have to come from other people. The irony, however, is that the people who really have( SASS in their lives are the ones who learned good rulesets from their parents for when to give themselves* (and others) positive SASS.
I don't normally do the sort of thing I've been doing with you, with people who aren't paying me money to do so. But that's not as much a matter of needing to make a living, as it has to do with the fact that people who haven't put something important on the line in order to get my advice, aren't usually that motivated to stick with it through their resistance to the actual process of changing.
Thank you. I appreciate this. Really.
I have more to say in addition to the nit-picking I've already done in this comment, but I need to take a bit of a break right now, because I'm hungry and feeling a little down right now; I need to do something turn off the self-pity before I can start imagining myself into a different emotional state.
Isn't unconditional praise empty praise? Is getting a trophy at "Everyone Gets A Trophy Day" meaningful?
No, but unconditional praise is not the same as unconditional love. (The latter seems to be closer to what PJ was talking about as parental pride, if I'm reading him correctly.) They are too often confused. Unconditional love is important, but unconditional praise is harmful, as is conditional praise that is predictable enough that the child learns to anticipate it and act based on it, praise that is given like a reward (a "status pelle...
Note: this post is basically just summarizing some of PJ Eby's freely available writings on the topic of pain/gain motivation and presenting them in a form that's easier for the LW crowd to digest. I claim no credit for the ideas presented here, other than the credit for summarizing them.
EDIT: Note also Eby's comments and corrections to my summary at this comment.
Eby proposes that we have two different forms of motivation: positive ("gain") motivation, which drives us to do things, and negative ("pain") motivation, which drives us to avoid things. Negative motivation is a major source of akrasia and is mostly harmful for getting anything done. However, sufficiently large amounts of negative motivation can momentarily push us to do things, which frequently causes people to confuse the two.
To understand the function of negative motivation, first consider the example of having climbed to a tree to avoid a predator. There's not much you can do other than wait and hope the predator goes away, and if you move around, you risk falling out of the tree. So your brain gets flooded with signals that suppress activity and tell it to keep your body still. It is only if the predator ends up climbing up the tree that the danger becomes so acute that you're instead pushed to flee.
What does this have to do with modern-day akrasia? Back in the tribal environment, elicting the disfavor of the tribe could be a death sentence. Be cast out by the tribe, and you likely wouldn't live for long. One way to elict disfavor is to be unmasked as incompetent in some important matter, and a way to avoid such an unmasking is to simply avoid doing anything where to consequences of failure would be severe.
You might see why this would cause problems. Sometimes, when the pain level of not having done a task grows too high - like just before a deadline - it'll push you to do it. But this fools people into thinking that negative consequences alone will be a motivator, so they try to psyche themselves up by thinking about how bad it would be to fail. In truth, this is only making things worse, as an increased chance of failure will increase the negative motivation that's going on.
Negative motivation is also a reason why we might discover a productivity or self-help technique, find it useful, and then after a few successful tries stop using it - seemingly for no reason. Eby uses the terms "naturally motivated person" and "naturally struggling person" to refer to people that are more driven by positive motivation and more driven by negative motivation, respectively. For naturally struggling people, the main motivation for behavior is the need to get away from bad things. If you give them a productivity or self-help technique, they might apply it to get rid of their largest problems... and then, when the biggest source of pain is gone, they momentarily don't have anything major to flee from, so they lose their motivation to apply the technique. To keep using the technique, they'd need to have positive motivation that'd make them want to do things instead of just not wanting to do things.
In contrast to negative motivation, positive motivation is basically just doing things because you find them fun. Watching movies, playing video games, whatever. When you're in a state of positive motivation, you're trying to gain things, obtain new resources or experiences. You're entirely focused on the gain, instead of the pain. If you're playing a video game, you know that no matter how badly you lose in the game, the negative consequences are all contained in the game and don't reach to the real world. That helps your brain stay in gain mode. But if a survival override kicks in, the negative motivation will overwhelm the positive and take away much of the pleasure involved. This is a likely reason for why a hobby can stop being fun once you're doing it for a living - it stops being a simple "gain" activity with no negative consequences even if you fail, and instead becomes mixed with "pain" signals.
So how come some important situations don't push us into a state of negative motivation, even though failure might have disastrous consequences? "Naturally motivated" people rarely stop to think about the bad consequences of whatever they're doing, being too focused on what they have to gain. If they meet setbacks, they'll bounce back much faster than "naturally struggling" people. What causes the difference?
Part of the difference is probably inborn brain chemistry. Another major part, though, is your previous experiences. The emotional systems driving our behavior don't ultimately do very complex reasoning. Much of what they do is simply cache lookups. Does this experience resemble one that led to negative consequences in the past? Activate survival overrides! Since negative motivation will suppress positive motivation, it can be easier to end up in a negative state than a positive one. Furthermore, the experiences we have also shape our thought processes in general. If, early on in your life, you do things in "gain" mode that end up having traumatic consequences, you learn to avoid the "gain" mode in general. You become a "naturally struggling" person, one who will view everything through a pessimistic lens, and expect failure in every turn. You literally only perceive the bad sides in everything. A "naturally motivated" person, on the other hand, will primarily only perceive the good sides. (Needless to say, these are the endpoints in a spectrum, so it's not like you're either 100% struggling or 100% successful.)
Another of Eby's theses is that negative motivation is, for the most part, impossible to overcome via willpower. Consider the function of negative motivation as a global signal that prevents us from doing things that seem too dangerous. If we could just use willpower to override the signal at any time, that would result in a lot of people being eaten by predators and being cast out of the tribe. In order to work, a drive that blocks behavior needs to actually consistently block behavior. Therefore attempts to overcome procrastination or akrasia via willpower expenditure are fundamentally misguided. We should instead be trying to remove whatever negative motivation it is that holds us back, for otherwise we are not addressing the real root of the problem. On the other hand, if we succeed in removing the negative motivation and replacing it with positive motivation, we can make any experience as fun and enjoyable as playing a video game. (If you haven't already, do check out Eby's Instant Irresistible Motivation video for learning how to create positive motivation.)