Do you already do everything that you think you should?
I'd like to do more, but I think I'm probably fairly close to bumping up against my time/energy constraints. It's rare for me to waste time when I'm energetic and high-morale.
Sometimes I have days of low morale where I don't get much done, and don't try to force myself to do things because I know my morale is low and I'll likely fail. I'm experimenting with a few different strategies for cutting down on low-morale days.
Do you ever procrastinate?
I take breaks. I also sometimes let myself be distracted if I estimate that the time sucked up by the distraction won't be worth the willpower of forcing myself to avoid it. (I'm experimenting with daily meditation to see if it can make those willpower costs lower, since that seems to have been the case in the past.)
Is there anything you don't enjoy such that people who enjoy that thing have better lives than you, in your estimation?
Entertainment is the one case where your self-image model seems to fit fairly well: I avoid listening to Britney Spears, for instance, because I don't want to be the sort of person who likes Britney Spears. (Realistically I think I could probably learn to enjoy it if I wanted to.) But that doesn't seem like a big loss--there's lots of music/movies/TV that's compatible with my self-image already. Enjoying Britney Spears would mean either telling people I liked Britney Spears or keeping my interest covert and probably generating some sort of incidental feeling of insecurity related to this. Neither option appeals to me.
I'd like to have higher energy and better motivation (which might allow me to work on things with less willpower/energy expenditure), but those things seem to me to be more about trying out a wide variety of techniques and empirically determining what works.
Sometimes I have days of low morale where I don't get much done, and don't try to force myself to do things because I know my morale is low and I'll likely fail. I'm experimenting with a few different strategies for cutting down on low-morale days... I'd like to have ... better motivation (which might allow me to work on things with less willpower/energy expenditure),
Morale, and reducing the need for willpower / conscious effort, are things I've had success with using self-image changes, e.g. inspired by Naruto :) So...
...those things seem to me to be
Related to: Cached selves, Why you're stuck in a narrative, The curse of identity
Outline: Some back-story, Pondering the mechanics of self-image, The role of narrative, Narrative as a medium for self-communication.
tl;dr: One can have a self-image that causes one to neglect the effects of self-image. And, since we tend to process our self-images somewhat in the context of a narrative identity, if you currently make zero use of narrative in understanding and affecting how you think about yourself, it may be worth adjusting upward. All this seems to have been the case for me, and is probably part of what makes HPMOR valuable.
Some back-story
Starting when I was around 16 and becoming acutely annoyed with essentialism, I prided myself on not being dependent on a story-like image of myself. In fact, to make sure I wasn't, I put a break command in my narrative loop: I drafted a story in my mind about a hero who was able to outwit his foes by being less constrained by narrative than they were, and I identified with him whenever I felt a need-for-narrative coming on. Batman's narrator goes for something like this in the Dark Knight when he <select for spoiler-> abandons his heroic image to take the blame for Harvey Dent's death.
I think this break command was mostly a good thing. It helped me to resolve cognitive dissonance and overcome the limitations of various cached selves, and I ended up mostly focussed on whether my beliefs were accurate and my desires were being fulfilled. So I still figure it's a decent first-order correction to being over-constrained by narrative.
But, I no longer think it's the only decent solution. In fact, understanding the more subtle mechanics of self-image — what affects our self schemas, what they affect, and how — was something I neglected for a long time because I saw self-image as a solved problem. Yes, I developed a cached view of myself as unaffected by self-image constraints. I would have been embarassed to notice such dependencies, so I didn't. The irony, eh?
I'm writing this because I wouldn't be surprised to find others here developing, or having developed, this blind spot...
Pondering the mechanics of self-image
At some point in your life, you may have taken on a job or a project without knowing that after doing it for a month, it would negatively affect your self-image in some way. There may have been things that you always found very easy to do which, after some aspect of your self-image changed, you suddenly found yourself avoiding or struggling with.
It would be nice to be able to predict and maybe even control that sort of thing in advance. In general, I'd like a deeper understanding of the following questions:
If you've never sat to ask yourself these questions genuinely, I might suggest stopping here and thinking about them for a while. Simply taking the time to ponder these issues has lead me to many helpful realizations. For example:
I don't have anything like an inclusive, general theory of self-image, and I have lots of hanging questions. Can I come up with a reasonably finite exhaustive list of features to track in my own self-image, for practical gains? Does such a list exist for people in general? But even without these, asking myself the old 1-4 once in a while gives me something to think about.
The role of narrative
In my experience, personally and with others, the answers to questions 1-4 are not automatically transparent, even if we can find partial answers by asking them directly. So what other questions can we ask ourselves to understand our self-images?
It seems to be common lore that our self-images have something to do with narrative identity. I take this to mean that we process our self-images somewhat in terms of features and schemas that we also use to process common stories.
So, I've tried working through the following series of questions to get in touch with what aspects of my personal narrative cause me to experience shame, pride, indignation, and nurturance. I like to lay them all out like this to signal to myself what they're for and that I want to do them all:
Consequences. By asking myself these questions, I've come to some realizations that didn't result from asking myself the more direct questions 1-4. For example:
Does anyone have similar experiences they'd like to share? Or very dissimilar experiences? Or questions I could add to this list? Or well-reproduced psych references? HPMOR references are also highly encouraged, especially since I still haven't read it, and in light of this post, I probably should!
Narrative as a medium for self-communication
Like any method of affecting oneself, narrative is something one can over-use. But I think I personally have been over-cautious about this, to the point of neglecting it as an option and ignoring it as an unconscious constraint. To the extent that I now use it, I think of it as a way of communicating with myself, not to be used for trickery or over-selling a point.
To draw an analogy, if you tell your 2-year-old child "You trigger in me feelings of paternal nurturance", while this may be true, it's not communication. Hugging the child is communication. It's a language she'll understand. In fact, it's probably how you should teach her what "nurturance" means. In particular, it's not a trick, and it's not over-selling.
Likewise, when I'm convinced enough that something is true — like for once I should really try not feeling annoyed with a postmodernist to see if we can communicate — and it's time to tell that to my limbic system with some conviction, maybe it's worth speaking a language my emotional brain understands a little better, and maybe sometimes that language is narrative. Maybe I'll write myself a poem about patience. Maybe I already have ;)