Success, at Least in Some Cases, Is Sensual Gratification
Or, why you aren’t really designed to be “self-disciplined”
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Q: Why is it so hard to be self-disciplined?
“I’ve made some bad decisions. I’ve lost a decade of my life to cocaine addiction. You know how I got addicted to cocaine? I tried it. The problem with drugs is that they work, right up until the moment they decimate your life. Try cocaine and you’ll become addicted to it. Become addicted to cocaine and you will either be dead or you will wish you were dead, but it will be only one or the other.”
These are at the words of Aaron Sorkin — the screenwriter behind acclaimed TV series such as The West Wing (1999–2006) and movies like The Social Network (2010), Moneyball (2011), Steve Jobs (2015) — during his commencement speech in 2012 at Syracuse University.
There are several movies that showcase the detrimental effects of addiction. Addiction is bad, nobody can deny that, but my question is this: if addiction is so bad for us, why do we get addicted so easily? Take a bit of coke and there’s no turning back. Even after making us the most intelligent animal, why did natural selection design us this way?
Today, let’s talk about a topic that has the most number of best selling books, yet we struggle with it all the time: self-discipline. More precisely, let’s look at self-discipline from the point of view of the modular mind.
If you have some form of addiction (cigarettes, drugs, porn, chocolate, whatever), there has been at least one occasion when you deliberated at length over whether to indulge in this form of gratification.
It might have been in the early days, when having tried it a few times you realised it’ll eventually become your master if you don’t stop. Or, it might have been in the later days when you were trying to quit but weren’t able to.
In any case, the deliberations often would have gone in favour of short-term gratification in the first few times. But as more and more time passed, you spent less and less time deliberating. The drive for immediate gratification became so strong that resistance almost became non-existent.
In your modular mind, there’s one module that’s asking you to indulge while there’s another that’s advising against it. There’s a war going on between them and what you do — indulge or avoid — depends on which of the modules win.
After the module favouring indulgence wins a few debates, its strength grows to a point where countervailing modules don’t even bother trying to muster counterarguments. This is the moment when you officially become an addict.
To understand why natural selection designed things that way, let us go back a couple of generations. Imagine an ancestor of yours twenty-thousand years ago — your great-great-great- (and so on) grandfather. Imagine him as a very young man. Imagine that one of his modules (let’s call it libido) is encouraging him to make advances toward a woman.
At the same time, another module is counselling caution, saying things like, “But maybe she’ll reject your advances and you’ll be humiliated, and maybe she’ll tell people that she rejected your advances and you’ll be further humiliated.” Or, if she already has a mate, the cautious module may say, “What if she tells her brawny husband about your unwanted advances and he beats you into a pulp?”
Now let’s say the first module wins, and your ancestor makes the advances. And let’s say it turns out the libidinous module was correct — the advances aren’t rebuffed, sex ensues, and the brawny husband is none the wiser.
Henceforth, whenever there’s a conflict between these two voices — one counselling sexual advance and the other counselling restraint — doesn’t it make sense to give the benefit of the doubt to the first voice? After all, it was right last time.
Also, the fact that it was right suggests two things to natural selection: it’s not outlandish to think women would find this particular man attractive, and that this man’s brain is good at picking up on cues of interest projected by women.
If, on the other hand, these advances had been rebuffed, and your ancestor had been humiliated and had become the laughingstock of the hunter-gatherer village — or, worse still, was roughed up by a brawny husband before becoming a laughingstock — then things would be different. Then it would make sense to give the libidinous module less power next time around, and it would make sense to give the module counselling restraint more power. After all, it was right last time. If the libidinous module were given more power, there’s a good chance your ancestor would be humiliated and fed to a lion next time he approaches a woman. Our self-preserving brain cannot allow for that.
Therefore, it makes sense that natural selection would design a modular mind this way where winning modules would amass more power whenever their plan of action is successful.
It’s important to note that success, at least in some cases, is sensual gratification. If the action of the libidinous module leads to an orgasm, then its advice will have far more weight next time. We should remember that the goal of our genes is to reproduce and spread. Orgasm is a good indicator of this, and hence this module has extra weightage.
Of course, this logic fails badly in the modern environment. The libidinous module that advises going to a porn site for sexual gratification will have more weight even though spending time at porn sites don’t do anything to enhance our reproductive prospects. It might in fact have the opposite effect.
Similarly, the module that in the hunter-gatherer environment would have motivated you to do something to impress your peers (to boost your self-esteem), might be asking you to snort cocaine to get a similar boost.
These short-circuited gratifications (via porn, drugs, etc.) can reinforce behaviours quite opposite to the kinds of behaviours originally intended to reinforce, thus making our system work against itself.
You can consider “self-discipline” as a module in your brain. If it wins the first couple of times, there’s a good chance it’ll thrive. For example, I struggle with myself to go to the gym everyday. There’s one module which advises me not to break whatever I’m doing. Then there’s another one, the lazy one, which doesn’t want me to exercise. Both work against my self-discipline module.
That’s why it’s strongly advised to take it slow in the beginning and not set super high expectations when you start something new. This way your “self-discipline” module gets a headstart. This is very important if you want it to win over other modules in future. In simpler words, if you make sure you hit the gym (or do any other activity) the first couple of weeks, it becomes relatively easy after that.
Addiction works in a similar fashion — via reinforcement of modules from their initial success. But the signal from your brain in this case is so strong that it is extremely hard (almost impossible) to reverse it once you’ve become addicted — be it porn, alcohol, cigarette, or drugs. The faux boost of self-esteem or orgasm without sex are outdated proxies, but the brain doesn’t know that. Thus the indulgence modules become all powerful and impossible to defeat.
The solution is simple but not easy. Listen to what Sorkin says in the speech: don’t try cocaine (or any other addictive stuff). Avoid at all costs. You are designed to get addicted.
Timeless Insight
We are social animals. Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important within our peers, culture, and society. The need to feel social connectedness shapes our values and drives much of how we spend our time.
Apart from that, we also seek a more personal form of gratification. We are driven to conquer obstacles, even if just for the satisfaction of doing so. The pursuit of completing a task can influence people to continue all sorts of behaviours. This is the reason we push ourselves while lifting weights, running the distance, and playing video games.
What I’m Reading
Everybody has theories. The dangerous people are those who are not aware of their own theories. That is, the theories on which they operate are largely unconscious.
— Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas
Tiny Thought
To criticize Islam does not make you an Islamophobe nor a hater of individual Muslims. To scrutinize radical feminism does not make you a misogynist. To question open borders does not make you a racist.
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋