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ialdabaoth comments on Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves - Less Wrong
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So, I just had a weird turn at work, that's made it obvious that I can't stay here.
And when I ask myself, "what does Protagonist Brent do?", I immediately imagine powering through my flu, putting my most valuable possessions in my car, pointing West, and driving until I reach Berkeley - then finding an apartment and walking into start-ups and big companies and saying "I can code. I just moved here from Idaho. I need a job. What have you got?"
And then I don't do that, because I'm too dizzy to get out of bed, let alone drive 10 hours to Berkeley, and I have no idea where I'd stay, and I only have $3,000 to my name.
Because my imagination does NOT conserve detail, it just builds a narrative.
How do you work around that?
Hello Past Brent, this is Future Brent, aka the actor playing Protagonist Brent on the popular hit show, "Ialdabaoth".
Here's what you're missing:
"Montage".
It looks like Protagonist Brent has to power through recouperation, driving, interviews, hiring, etc. in a matter of weeks because you forget that Protagonist Brent's super-long slogs get edited down into a montage. Six months of work still takes six months, but Protagonist You gets to construct that into a montage-like narrative where the boring parts take up maybe two sentences each, and the cool parts take up minutes to hours of excitedly-narrated epicness.
But I, the actor playing Protagonist Brent, still have to slog through the full six months of work, so that we can pick the best highlights and edit it down in post-production to a few pithy, iconic representations of "this was hard work and there was lots of improvement and moments of triumph". The payoff of the slog is the moments of triumph and the distilled moments of "I can sweat for this", and neglecting them means a fake montage, which means Protagonist Brent doesn't look very epic.
And that itself can be motivating! When things are a slow slog, and you can't just 'flow' it, but are actively obsessing over the future in a way that prevents you from connecting to the present, stop saying "I can't wait to stop having to do this" and start saying "man, I can't wait to see what the highlights real for this is going to look like." Don't imagine the you that's STOPPED working the slog, imagine the you that's FINISHED working the slog. It's a subtle but profound difference.