#none of the monk scenarios except for two I will choose when the time comes will make it into the fic I'm writing for her though

[cherryflight]

I will not go out of my way to lose body form and here’s why

I have never laughed harder at myself or the game than from this sequence of events:

put down blue soul sign in 3-2, because on this character I always will.  I’m a chronic roleplayer and she’s a helper.  Yes, even knowing the risks in Latria.

get Monk’d, predictably

host dies to enemies on stairs as soon as I load in

return to world in body form, retreat into prior boss arena to look up whether or not I have lost character tendency (world tendency can be whatever it ends up being organically but this character is meant to lean towards lighter tendency. again, chronic roleplayer).  Find out death to enemy mob doesn’t affect CT.  Breathe sigh of relief, continue towards Maneater

IMMEDIATELY INVADED AFTER DESCENDING THAT FIRST FLIGHT OF STEPS, probably by someone trying to get Monk’d.

dodge roll off a ledge in the fight, losing body form just as quickly

I love this game.  I love multiplayer and refuse to lock myself out of it.  I hope my invader got a good laugh, because I sure did

[vividlywriting]

Dbh and DND you say....( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). Alright, let's try this on for size: the main cast of Detroit: Become Human plays DND? Who plays what class? I imagine Millenial on a Mission Hank DMs but I'd be open to any of them writing a campaign and forcing the others to play

So my partner and I are pretty into DnD, and as he partook in my play through of DBH and listens to all my fanning out I asked his opinion on this prompt.  So I will put his additions or contradictions in here as well.  This is gonna be a bit long

Let’s start this off right!

DnDBH

Hank Anderson, millennial.

Has played DnD at least once in his life.  

It probably wasn’t his forte at the time, likely something his roommate pulled him into, and the campaign was probably a bust as it was.  

Has most likely played video games like Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldur’s Gate and liked them.  

He’s also played WoW and Guild Wars 2 at different times and for different reasons in his life

neither of which lasted super long, but he did enjoy them at the time

He honest to god hasn’t thought about DnD or anything even similar to it for a couple of decades until Connor found an old set of dice in the spare room (now Connor’s room) at Hank’s place

Now Hank is running a campaign and he has no gods damned idea how he got roped into this

He thinks it’s hilarious when he throws moral quandaries at his players, which all happen to be androids

He once had his players break into a government building to locate a prisoner for information, they were forced to choose between freeing the prisoner and escaping or leaving them behind.  

All of their information on the prisoner was shaky at best and they had no way of knowing if the character would turn on them later because they all failed their sense motive checks

He was dumbfounded when they managed to befriend the character, completely ruining the arc that had the character as the big bad

Hank is well over the “I roll to seduce” aspect of the game, and is thankful none of his players tried to do that more than once

The only time an NPC flirts with a player character is when Hank is trying to throw a player off/fuck with them and derives a lot of pleasure from seeing his players stumble and try to get out of it

Except for the time when it backfired on him

He finished two glasses of whiskey after that

Hank will not admit that he enjoys DMing, he often complains it’s a pain in his ass and he can’t wait until the whole thing is over

Hank agreed to test Markus’s homebrew oneshot…once

Hank Anderson, millennial, by Zeke

No bad guy at first but increasingly intricate moral quandaries

Before moral quandaries he forgets he can’t just throw puzzles at the players cause fuckin androids

General DMing

Almost everyone has DMed at one time or another based on their interest

Connor as a DM

Connor’s DMing style is very straight forward

He usually goes with premade campaigns, luckily there are a lot out there

He’s not the best at improv when his players go off the beaten path

But he’s very good at playing NPCs

Probably thanks to his programming as a detective, because he can play the NPCs’ emotions to a T

As a DM he is a little bit of a hardass though

Connor as a Player

Connor style of character play is much different than how he is in real life

He seems to enjoy the fact that he doesn’t have to “complete his mission” 

In fact he seems to enjoy causing as much chaos as he can, while still somehow doing what he needs to, and often by accident (or design, no one really knows)

He started with a classic rogue character build

Now he takes characters not often in the rogue class and building them in ways that end to his chaotic play style

Connor is the main reason Hank has had to set off random events or traps, e.g. rocks fall sort of situation, just for annoying him

Connor takes incredible care to keep his characters alive, somehow in spite of the trouble they get into

His character’s tend to have a much higher charisma stat that Connor portrays in real life, he takes it as a challenge for himself more so than his characters

Connor as a Player by Zeke

Likes to play Dex based characters

Likes the concept of spells and often leans towards characters that can do both sneaky stuff and magic

Tried playing evil alignment character once, went balls to the walls and then got banned from playing characters like that because even North was like “wtf”

Markus as a DM

Markus usually starts with a premade campaign

By the time the party gets through the first “dungeon” he’s tossed the script out off the window and is rolling dice and making it up as he goes along

His NPCs often sound a little the same

And when he digs into the homebrew style of DMing he likes to bring in scenarios that either play for or against his players personally

Markus as a Player

Markus avoids leadership character roles like the fucking plague

He actually leans towards the utility characters, buffing and healing the rest of the party

That does not stop the other players from looking to him to be the deciding factor in major decisions of the game

Sometimes he literally just rolls a dice to determine his character’s answer out of frustration

When anyone but Hank DMs he enjoys flirting with most NPCs to try and mess with the DM

He has flirted with enemies before

He has bedded enemies before

It is ridiculous how his lowkey background character playstyle manages to have that much charisma

He is usually the reason Connor doesn’t die in game, and he never lets him live it down

Markus as a Player by Zeke

Every once in a while Markus likes just playing a barbarian and raging

After the first campaign of him ending up as a leader character he just wants to play something simpler

Simon as a DM

Simon is a very thorough DM

He’s very keen on everyone enjoying themselves

But he’s also a very fair DM and if you roll a Nat 1 you’re gonna have to deal with the consequences

He actually really enjoys building homebrews, but he also has a handful of backup plans depending how the players move forward and how much time they have to play

His NPCs have a decent amount of variety, and they often come back into play later whether or not the players realize it at the time

Simon as a Player

Simon is probably the most diplomatic character player you’ve ever seen

His characters are usually quiet, and startlingly efficient

He plays arcane casters usually, and uses it about as equally against enemies as he does against the party to quell the in party bickering that tends to happen

He likes being useful, but more importantly he enjoys the fact that there are many times the party would have been screwed over if he hadn’t stepped up

It took about three sessions before the other players stopped underestimating him and his characters, they tend to be quite lethal 

Simon’s characters usually try to solve things without violence, or without deaths

Someone, either player or DM usually makes that impossible 

While Simon usually just sighs and says “ok then”, he often laughs at the resulting destruction

He has incredible luck with his dice rolls

Simon as a Player by Zeke

Tries making things with high charisma scores but usually ends up defaulting to Markus’s leadership who just tries to put back to simon

Really good in the cleric/healing character classes

North as a Player

Prefers playing, not DMing, the one time she tried to take over for someone to run a oneshot everyone died. 

It did not go well

Most of North’s characters fall somewhere between chaotic neutral to chaotic evil

The others have fallen in the Lawful side of the chart, lawful evil to be exact, and it is terrifying

Her characters change alignment the most as she plays based on how she feels towards other characters and NPCs

Despite that she has yet to fall into the Good column of the chart

Her characters are also either highly destructive or just plain really good at violence/fighting

She doesn’t have a preferred class type, she just likes doing as much damage as possible

North does like playing races that are often less liked in the campaign world

She also likes to retaliate to in game racism and has before collected a small gathering of NPCs she’s helped in someway because of this

As a character player she can be quite cold

She has yet to play a game where the DM included any sort of brothel, unless it is there for the sole purpose of being infiltrated and the workers being saved

Yes that was a game Markus ran

North as a Player by Zeke

Fighter, Ranger, Swashbuckler/Pirate Characters

Josh as a Player

He is just happy being a player

LOOT

This boy will find the loot and you may or may not know about it

He has killed the least number of people than anyone in his party

He prefers to not kill anyone if he can

Leave them out cold, or tied up, he’s even fine with dismemberment so long as they still have their life

When he does have to kill its in either one of two ways

Either he poisons them and they or most characters have no idea he did it

OR he makes it quick and clean

He plays the assassin class very very well, or he would if he actually did his job as an assassin

Josh as a Player by Zeke

Uses the loot for a good cause

Chaotic good or neutral good

Always good and opposite of north, by accident

Monk or brawler and always specifies he is doing non lethal damage

Stealthy monk - josh becomes one punch man

Kara as a Player

Kara is a healer

She’s learned the best builds to give you the best buffs all day long

Her characters are often pretty fragile though so the other players usually have to strategize around her to make sure she lives so she can make sure they deal the most and take the least damage

Her characters have all ended up rescuing someone or something at some point 

This has lead to her almost always having a companion animal or favors she can call in from NPCs later in the game 

It’s been pretty handy

Kara Player by Zeke

Witch, Druid, Shaman classes

Alice as a player NPC by Both of Us

Was allowed to join to play as an NPC, reprising similar roles, because the first one went over so well

She learned to make stuffed animals just to slam them on the board

They are always too big

It was a dragon

It only happened because she found Hank’s old copy of The Hobbit

When she plays as her NPC she jumped up on her chair and holds up a stuffed animal of a dragon and screamed “I am fire! I am death!” slammed the toy onto the board and yelled “ROLL FOR INITIATIVE!”

Hank’s response was to look at his confused players and say “Well, go on, do it.” because they didn’t think it was serious

Almost no one has it in them to actually kill her characters, even tho they only exist to be fought

So Hank has to come up with “an out” for the NPC baddie to get away

Because of this Alice gets really into high fantasy books and movies

Hank doesn’t mind babysitting her as much now

Luther as a Player by Both of Us

He only plays occasionally

Mostly oneshots not full campaigns

Plays the smallest characters he can

He knows what it’s like to be big, he wants to be smol

He made one min/maxed orc that was too broken to be used more than the one time

He’s a really soft spoken player, he doesn’t say much but he enjoys playing

The Jerry Gaming Collective

Is a thing

Find them on twitch

[flyingsassysaddles]

The Almost Dead

Tshering had found the almost dead warrior on the ground. More specifically, on the ground surrounding his small temple, a couple leagues away, buried in the blood-soaked snow.

It had been a normal enough day before he found the warrior. He had cleaned the temple, weeded his garden, fed his stray cats, and took his daily walk around the temple, trying to find inner peace and tranquility, when he had stumbled upon the half-dead Mongol. Literally, had tripped over the body and smashed onto the ground, something he was cursing himself for now as he dragged the man into his temple, and plopped him down on the floor. Now with the body in a secure location and no medical tools in sight, Tshering started to panic.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, there's a dead body in my temple,” Tshering muttered over and over again, looking for a towel or water or SOMETHING that could stop the startled wounds that had started to bleed again. Finally, he found his medical kit he kept in the back for just this type of situation and dashed back to the groaning man, who suddenly made clear that he was not in fact dead.

“Stay still,” Tshering advised as he knelt down and started ripping off the dirty closed of the now conscious man, who decided that just as he was about to get medical treatment was the best time to start wondering what the heck was going on.

“W-what? Where am I? Who are you? And what are you doing with- ARGH!” The warrior screamed in pain as his wounds were reopened and Tshering placed more pressure on them. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME?!”

“No, I'm trying to save your life. Hold still.”

“Don't you dare come any closer with that knife- HOLY SHIT!” The man screamed again, weakly trying to push the monk away as Tshering cut off all the bandages and started to dig out a rock that had buried itself on the large wound on the warrior’s chest. “STOP IT!”

“Do you want to die?” Tshering asked calmly.

“NOW I DO!” the warrior roared back. He kept trying to push away the healer in panic until Tshering decided enough was enough and got up to get something.

“Where are you going?” Eyes narrowed in suspicion, the wounded man watched as Tshering dumped a bottle of liquid into a cup and presented it to the warrior.

“Drink it. It'll help with the pain.”

“And I should trust you why?”

“Because I'm the only thing that stands between you and death by blood loss,” the monk snorted. The temple was silent for a couple minutes as he said nothing, before Tshering grew impatient and shoved it towards him. “If you don't drink this I will be the nearest candlestick and knock you out that way.”

The warrior looked straight into the monk’s eyes and saw that he wasn't exaggerating. Deciding that death by poison was better than death by stab wounds, he yanked the cup out of his healer’s hand and gulped it down. The world started to fade mere seconds afterwards, and just like that, the man was passed out on the floor.

“Much better. Okay, let's get you healed.” The monk spent the rest of the time putting on new bandages, replacing the warrior’s robes, before finally coming down to the man’s worst wound of all. His mangled leg.

The leg was in tatters, and fragments of bone peeking out behind the ripped gashes of skin. Half bottom half of the leg was in ribbons, and the top half didn’t look much better. Tshering gave a sigh of regret. The leg had to go.

He left the temple and returned hastily with a cutting tool in hand, cursing at the fact that he didn’t have anything else to do the procedure with. He sat down and took a deep breath. It had to be done quickly before it got more infected and killed the man once and for all. The dead tissue was already growing past the bloodied wounds, and Tshering pushed away every pacifist bone in his body and prepared to cut off the leg, cleaning and medical supplies ready, when the warrior again decided this was the perfect time to wake up.

“Ugh, I feel like I drank seven bottles of opium what- OH MY GOD GET AWAY FROM MY LEG YOU LUNATIC!” the man shrieked, trying to yank away his leg but then reeling in pain.

“Stop moving,” Tshering ordered, grabbing the leg despite protests and putting it closer.

“No, no, no. Please not my leg. Anything but my leg,” the man raved, weakly trying to move it and then staring into the temple ceiling, eyes growing cloudy. “My arm I can live with. My fingers I can go without. But not my leg. Please not my leg.”

The monk stopped dead and stared at the broken man before him. “I have to,” he explained. “If I don’t you’ll die. Best case scenario, you’ll never be able to use or move this leg again. Worst case scenario, well, you know what that is.”

“I don’t care! Just not my leg! Let it kill me if you have to! I’d rather die whole than live a cripple!”

“Well too bad, because you're going to live, one way or another,” Tshering declared, determination filling his heart before his eyes involuntarily gazed back at the warrior. H was lying there broken, a shell of what he must have once been. He had seen scars that had been inflicted over his body while he was redressing the man’s wounds, and knew that he must have been a great warrior of some kind. He had even found a dagger or two on the ground next to where he had lied in the snow. And now the man was sitting in a temple about to have his leg chopped off.       

“What’s your name?”

“Why do you care?” the man spat back, the look of defeat he had seen earlier vanishing into a look of hatred, one that obviously suited the man much better.

“Well, when you live, I’ll have to take care of you until you get used to having one leg. So what’s your name?” Tshering stated calmly, not looking at the warrior and getting his tools ready once more.

“What do you mean ‘when I survive?’ I thought I told you to let me die!”

“Nope. You're going to live.”

“Are you a doctor or NOT?! Let. Me. Die,” he commanded, before being wracked with pain. The monk appeared to consider his request before going up to get something from his medicine cabinet in the far right of the temple. When he came back, he was holding a glass of foul smelling liquid.

“Well? You want to die right? This poison will kill you,” he stated with a blank face, causing the warrior's brow to furrow in confusion. The monk was actually going to let him die? He looked at the poison for a couple seconds, before looking his mangled leg. Better the demon you know and won’t fill you with pain, he thought, gesturing for the poison. The monk silently handed it to him, and he gulped it down, wincing at the foul taste before lying back down, as the world started to get hazy.

Tshering could have danced with delight when he saw the warrior give himself an exorbitant amount of the knock out drug, and quickly went back to preparing for the operation. The man groaned before muttering something Tshering couldn’t hear.

“What was that?”

“I’m happy to die.” The monk stopped dead once again. The man was delusional, he told himself. These were simply the rambling words of a drugged man.

Why?” he asked despite himself, not knowing why he had said the words.

“I don’t have anyone anymore. I killed my best friend. My brother tried to kill me multiple times. I disowned my sister,” he confessed, gripping a rock that had stumbled into the small, forgotten temple. The floor shivered, cold seeping up and curling through the air. The scent of iron and blood drifted with it, and Tshering felt the frigid air burrow into his skin as the man spoke his dying words. “I betrayed my army, my general, to become a mercenary. And for what? For the money?” The warrior gave a bitter laugh. “I killed so many, done such horrible, horrible things I’ll never forget for as long as I live. I see so many faces when I close my eyes. I’m glad that I’ll never have to carry that weight again.”

“And so you choose to die?”

“Yes. At least I’ll finally get some sleep now,” he chuckled, staring at the roof with misty eyes, mouth curled into the first thing resembling a smile he had seen on the warrior. The monk couldn’t help staring, the emotion and just pure gratefulness dripping from his words and onto his lying heart.

“You’re not going to die.”

“What?”

“You are not going to die.”

“Why?” he mumbled, eyelids drooping with the drug finally taking effect.  

“Because you still have a life to lead.”

“I have none. I’ve done things that would your toes curl. I’ve done things that would make you stab that knife into my dead heart. When I die today, I won’t be missed.”

“What do you mean, ‘when you die today?’ You aren’t going anywhere.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m going to save you. After this, I’m going to make sure you get better. I’m going to save your life, and give you a life worth living.”

“I doubt you can do that.”

“Watch me. If you had stumbled upon a doctor, he probably would have let you die. Heck, most people would have,” Tshering shrugged, feeling a hand of determination seize his heart. “Unfortunately for you, you landed on the doorstep of the most idealistic, pacifist, and determined monk in all of Asia. So you’re not going anywhere.” The monk gave a steely gaze to the warrior, only to find the drugs had taken effect and he was lying passed out on the floor.

----

The procedure was over, and the Tibetan monk was washing his hands of the blood from the amputation when he heard a soft whisper coming from the crippled man behind him. He walked over to the man, and saw the face of the man, no longer drugged, eyes empty with emotion except a shred of one.

“My name is Munkhbat.” 

[pricelessmomentblog]

Rethinking Discipline

What is self-discipline? I think everyone has at least a hazy picture of what it means to be self-disciplined. From the outside, self-discipline looks like suppressing impulses to do things you shouldn’t do. Self-discipline means not eating too much, not succumbing to the temptation to check your phone every two minutes, ignoring what you want to do and doing what you should.

Everyone has experienced being self-disciplined—that time when you valiantly resisted an impulse you thought you shouldn’t follow. But, more often than not, we have the opposite experience: failing to be self-disciplined, succumbing to temptations.

This outside-view and numerous experiences would make it seem likely that we should all be experts in self-discpline. If not in practice, then at least in theory. We should know why we persist when we do, why we give up and what’s going on inside our heads in both cases. After all, experiences of self-discipline—both in failure and in success—happen every day.

Yet, I think this familiarity doesn’t necessarily equate to understanding. I’ve written about self-discipline for years, but recently I’ve had some experience that make me rethink what it might be all about.

Is Self-Discipline a Resource?

The easiest metaphor, and the one I’ve operated on implicitly for most of my life is that self-discipline is a kind of resource. Use more self-discipline and it will get used up and you’ll feel tired.

Intuitively this seems to be the case. With few exceptions, most people can’t endure indefinitely in a situation that requires constant willpower. Eventually we give up, and when we do, it seems likely that there was some kind of fuel that was used up in the process.

Scientifically, this also seemed to be the case until recently. Roy Baumeister’s research into ego-depletion was seen as a pretty solid edifice to the idea that there is a bottleneck in the amount of willpower you can expend, and when it gets used up you succumb to whatever temptation you’re facing.

However, Baumeister’s work has also fallen victim to the replication crisis in psychology. Whether this is truly an invalidation of his theory, or the presence of statistical complications that go over my head, I think remains to be seen. For the moment at least, it appears that science doesn’t have a definitive answer to the question of what is self-discipline.

Although less scientific, the concept of energy management dovetails nicely with ego-depletion. The fundamental idea is that there are different stores of an abstract quantity of energy and that managing this resource, and not time management, is the key to productivity. This has also been a foundational idea in my own thinking on productivity and I’ve written in support of it quite often.

What if Self-Discipline Isn’t a Resource?

I just got back from an intensive 10-day silent meditation retreat. Some of the experiences bordered on insanity, and perhaps I’ll share more about them when I’ve had time to process them. But one of the aspects of my life it shed light on was this concept of self-discipline.

Going on a meditation retreat is like becoming a monk for ten days, except instead of even the duties one would have as a monk, there’s just more meditating. There’s no speaking, no phones, no computers, no reading, no writing, no exercising and no sex. Instead you wake up at 4am, meditate for ten hours per day, with short breaks to stretch your legs and eat two meals a day.

The outside-view of the meditation retreat is that all of the worldly pleasures you’re giving up will be the temptation. That you’ll be tempted to speak, want to eat in the evening, crave checking your phone or do something fun.

I can’t speak for others’ experience, but in my case, none of that was hard at all. The thing that’s hard about a meditation retreat is the meditating. Because even when you have nothing to do, there’s still a lot you can do: you can look around at things, walk around a little, scratch your face, change your position. When you meditate, even those minor pleasures are discouraged. Instead you’re to sit as still as possible and focus on some object of meditation, say your breath or sensations in your body.

Needless to say, meditating requires a lot of self-discipline. But is it the kind of self-discipline that gets consumed as a resource?

At first, that answer seemed obvious to me: the longer a meditation session went on, the more willpower I’d need to resist the urge to quit and go do something else. My back and legs would hurt, so I’d want to change my posture. I’d want to daydream about something else, engage in a little mental theatre imagining this scenario or that one. Yet—according to the technique—whenever this happens you’re to remind yourself you’re here to work and shift your focus back onto something happening right now.

As the days wore on, however, I started to notice something about my own self-discipline that seemed to contradict the resource metaphor. Sitting still and doing meditation was hard, but it was hard to the degree to which I was somewhere else. If my attention was fully focused on what I was doing, and not on, say, thinking to myself about how long this will last and when I’ll be free, the act got a lot easier. The longer attention was paid to the meditation without these interruptions, the easier it got.

This suggests a very different model of willpower, one based on attention and mental habit patterns, instead of a consumable resource.

A Closer Look at Self-Discipline

The idea is still very speculative, but here it is: at any moment, there are mental habit patterns that are compelling you to engage in some kind of action. Move. Change your posture. Think out a plan to solve this problem.

In addition to these mental habit patterns, there’s a broader quality of attention. What is being paid attention to in this particular moment. What is filling the field of your consciousness, at varying degrees of precision and intensity.

Self-discipline occurs when there is a mental habit pattern encouraging some further action and the attentional response is to not engage in that habit pattern. Not to resist it or try to push it out of your thoughts, but just to ignore it.

One metaphor that comes to mind is it is as if your mind is full of tons of whiny children who all want you to do something for them. At any particular moment, you can engage your attention onto one of the children—either by trying to fulfill its wishes, trying to argue with it or telling it to shut up. Or you can just see it and not react.

When you ignore it, the impulse will still be there, but it will eventually diminish in intensity, over both the short and long-term. Over the short-term, it will eventually quieten down because no thought, sensation or feeling can be permanent. They’re all unstable and eventually decay to normal neuronal background levels. Over the long-term, it will become less noisy in the future because that impulse, through being frustrated, is conditioned to be quieter next time.

If this model is true, then self-discipline isn’t a resource at all. The problem is simply that voluntary attentional control is itself a somewhat random process that has ups and downs, starts and stops.

These ups and downs, or to use the term from Buddhism, arising and passing away, of both the impulses and one’s voluntary control over focus will occasionally create gaps, particularly in the short-term, where one succumbs to temptation. That’s because one’s impulse exceeds the attentional resources to not pay attention to it in that moment, and you succumb. However, no resource was consumed either before or after, simply an inevitable result from somewhat noisy processes competing for control over your body.

Side note: I’m creating a dichotomy between volitional control over attention and the impulses that impinge on it. This is probably not accurate. It’s probably better to say that the impulses of discipline are themselves one of the voices, but it’s that this is the voice you’re trying to amplify with attention while the others are being ignored. My explanation is probably a little less accurate, but I think it’s a bit easier to wrap your head around than the deeper idea that there’s no one thing really in control when we think of voluntary control.

Why Does It Feel Like Self-Discipline is a Resource?

This then raises an interesting question, why does it *feel* as if there’s a resource being used up, if the reality is just competing habit patterns in the mind and “voluntary” control over attention, why does it feel like we can run out of willpower. If I’m able to resist an urge for five minutes, why can I not do it indefinitely?

I think there’s three reasons for the seeming presence of an underlying resource. The first is environmental feedback. The second is in thinking of averages instead of individual events. The third is that knowledge of time is itself a feedback signal that influences our habits.

Environmental feedback can happen when, as one persists, the urge gets stronger and stronger because there is continued reinforcement in the form of bodily sensations that make it feel stronger. Hunger works like this. When you’re a little hungry you can easily resist paying attention to it. When you’re starving it’s the only thing you can think about.

In this model, some activities of self-discipline will create an increasing intensity until they are satiated. These intensities cannot reach infinity, so there’s always the possibility of someone resisting even the most intense urges when the voluntary control over attention is even stronger, but these are rare because it is very unusual to develop that kind of self-discipline (and probably harmful, in most cases—such as diseases like anorexia or pain-seeking behavior).

While meditating for instance, as you sit for longer, your body itself becomes increasingly uncomfortable. This means that it can be very easy to sit for 20 minutes, but very hard to sit for 2 hours, if your volitional control habits aren’t very strong. It’s simply much more likely after the 2-hour mark that the habit pattern to quit will overwhelm you.

This idea may seem to be bringing back the idea of a resource in a covert form, so it’s important to understand the distinction: nothing is getting used up. The only thing modulating behavior is the relative strength of different mental habits, and feedback from either the outside world or internal sensations, can trigger those habits with different intensities.

The second reason that willpower “feels” like a resource is that, if we consider it a stochastic process, there will always be an expected value. A Poisson process is a statistical model that envisions this nicely. In such a process, events always have some small probability of occuring in every moment. This creates an average time between events, but it doesn’t create a “building up” of energy that needs to release itself if an event doesn’t happen soon.

The third reason for willpower seeming like a resource is that one of the regulators of habits is itself a kind of knowledge of time. One powerful mental habit is that if you’re in some kind of discomfort, either physical or psychological, and you believe that this situation will persist for a long time, the urge to take action to change it becomes much stronger.

This tendency of the mind became very clear while meditating. In normal life, this mental habit can receive reinforcement from a clock or some internal pacing rhythm, which tells you roughly how long you have left. If it is a short time, this mental habit doesn’t react as strongly. If it’s a long time you need to persist, it can be a stronger urge than almost any other.

While meditating, however, one doesn’t have external time cues. Therefore this mental habit frequently gets frustrated because the amount of time left may be a few minutes or it may be over an hour, and you have no idea. Once again, by ignoring this urge to ask how much longer the experience will be, this time-habit diminishes in intensity.

What are the Implications of an Attention-Habit Versus a Resource Model of Self-Discipline?

All of this may sound a little too technical. Most people probably don’t even think of self-discipline clearly enough to see it as a resource, nevermind asking whether that is a simplification. Why bother thinking about this?

I feel like this idea, if it turns out to be correct and properly applied, opens up many new ways of thinking about self-improvement. So many of the things we want to achieve in life are based in requiring some kind of self-discipline. So many of the negative things we experience that we’d like to be free of are also mental habits of this sort.

I don’t have an exact picture of how to use this idea yet, but here are a few specultative suggestions for where it might be useful:

Building a “now” habit. The mental habit of taking mildly unpleasant conditions and making them seem excruciatingly unbearable if they are imagined to persist for a long period of time is quite a strong one. Does this mean it might make more sense to work in a room without clocks? So the feedback signal from this mental habit becomes less precise and therefore more unstable over time? In practice it could be replaced with a bell or timer indicating the time allotted for the task was finished and one could make an adjustment.

Ignore, don’t engage. Habits get stronger with use. At the behavioral level this is clear, but I believe it is also true at the mental level. To “use” a mental habit is to engage in it in any way. Trying to fulfill it, suppress it, even feeling guilty about having it are all forms of engagement. Just let it be, and don’t do anything. The Buddhist wisdom to simply accept a reality takes on a subtle meaning here of not engaging leading to mental freedom seems to be putting this idea into practice.

Far more self-discipline and control is possible than we realize. The idea that we have to succumb to certain temptations, that we couldn’t possibly put in *that* much effort or that life would be unbearable if it weren’t like X, Y or Z, may be false at a fundamental level. By slowly building habits of attention and letting ones you don’t want extinguish, much of the internal conflict you feel over what you should be doing and what you actually do might go away.

Applying this Idea in Recursive Stages

Part of what always bugged me about Eastern philosophies was that they told you to “accept” reality as what it was, but isn’t my own non-acceptance part of reality and therefore what I should accept? This seemed like a straightforward contradiction and I didn’t know my way out of it.

Now I see that the answer is that there are different levels of mental patterns and sometimes to counteract a particularly strong one you need a lot of attention onto an alternate pattern. However, this alternate pattern eventually creates its own weaknesses and so to go further, you have to give this up as well. This means that the idea of accepting non-acceptance has to proceed recursively, first working on the bigger picture and then onto subtler and subtler realities. If you just dismiss the whole notion because you know it eventually self-contradicts, you’re missing the progressive aspect.

What does this mean for self-discipline?

Well I can imagine starting out where one feels that they have no self-discipline at all. Here, this person needs to have fairly crude mental habits to rectify the worst of their impulse control. In this area, setting minimal habits to put even a tiny amount of effort into the task might be necessary.

Later, once some mental control structures have been built that avoid being completely at the whim of negative impulses, one might try setting up systems: things like GTD, fixed-schedule productivity, weekly/daily goals and other systems that work over a longer time-scale. These can placate somewhat that strong tendency of the mind to look for escape when the current unpleasantness will last for too long. By forming a structured system with a predefined escape time, you can build a habit of working hard inside that structure.

However, further levels of self-discipline might transcend this system itself. By reducing the impulse to do other things to a low enough level, one might be able to “work” on whatever you need to do nearly continuously as if it were a fun activity.

This isn’t to say that one *should* work continuously, obviously there is more to life than work. Rather its to say that the unpleasantness of work, the desire to have leisure time when you’re supposed to be working, would go away.

These successive layers of self-discipline, resulting in an extreme of an effortless kind of action, would require a lot of patience to slowly develop. Because going deeper into the structure involves working against the structure previously established, there’s always a risk of not realizing impulsive habits have been building up and losing the entire structure and needing to partially start over. However, that may be a worthwhile price to pay in the long-run.

As I said previously, there’s a lot to explore here and I’m not even certain that this is true. However, it lines up more closely with neurobiology than a resource-based theory of self-discipline, so I’m willing to accept it tentatively. Whether one can reach this theoretical end-goal of endless, effortless action, is still an open question, but the possibility is very interesting nonetheless.

Side Note: Robert Wright’s book, Why Buddhism is True, discusses many similar ideas, so if you think this discussion is interesting and want to hear from a better meditator and scientist than I am, you may want to check it out.

Rethinking Discipline syndicated from https://pricelessmomentweb.wordpress.com/