Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

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There's a term for this called "revealed preferences." If you keep saying "I wish I could work sane hours" but actually keep making decisions to work insane hours, chances are you actually really just want to work insane hours.

I spent a lot of time being confused by this, listening to perfectly healthy young people with good paying jobs and no attachments telling me "I wish I could just drop everything and go traveling for months on end like you do" and then just sort of trailing off. "But You Can!!!" I always wanted to shout back. You just don't actually want to do that. Or you would. What that person really wanted was what they had: a stable comfortable job and a nice car and apartment, practicing for the day when they had a wife, kids, lease & mortgage to solidify that reality of "can't go traveling". Sounds pretty comfy, actually. If only they could come to grips with what they wanted and be happy with it.

It might be worth stepping back and looking at what you actually want. You just might find it's what you already have.

"Revealed preferences" used to be called "unconscious compulsions."

The phrasing is revealing, because "revealed preferences" suggests that your actions are somehow in alignment with your true core values, while "unconscious compulsions" suggests that your actions are destructive to your true core values, and you could consider doing some psychological work to realign them.

Psychology suggests the latter view is more realistic, especially if you're not getting any genuine fulfilment from a situation.

It also suggests that unconscious compulsions can be the result of external influences, particularly in childhood, and may not be true preferences at all.

These people may also be stuck in a local optimum, though. There are plenty of examples of people that finally do drop everything and go traveling or make some other deep change in their life, and end up much happier. But making that kind of decisions is not easy.

People can want more than just one thing. It might be fairer to say that they want all the things they say they want. But they want this other thing the most, and since this other thing isn't compatible with the others (can't travel the world and also be CTO) it wins.

I think that's fun to say but isn't really. The reason people don't drop everything and travel is not because they really don't want to, they have other fears and obligations. Perhaps some of those fears are not as justified as the person thinks and perhaps the barriers are more illusory than the person thinks but I don't think it is that really just prefer working for "The Man."

There is a danger to armchair psychological terms but it is extraordinarily fun to use them. :)

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