Growing up I internalized ideas about self-discipline that, in retrospect, were rather unhealthy. Like:

  • You should be very hard on yourself. If you don’t do “enough”, you should yell at yourself.
  • Hard work will be effortful, it will be a grind. You should be gritting your teeth and tensing your neck and shoulders until you’re done.
  • If you have a goal, you should work towards it at all costs, even if it doesn’t feel good.

Unsurprisingly, this mindset culminated in some mental health disasters (as well lots of lost sleep and generally poor life experiences) in my early twenties. Once I hit my breaking point, I finally learned how to let go, to accept things as they are, and to have compassion for myself.

A few years into this healing journey, I discovered the memeplex of non-coercion. The specific view I have in mind is that espoused by critical rationalists like David Deutsch and Lulie. Lulie talks about it here.

They call it the fun criterion. It’s the view that you should only do something if it’s fun. Or, put another way, you should never coerce yourself into doing anything. It should never be true that part of you is forcing other parts of you into submission to accomplish some task. This framing is a very good antidote to the “grind at all costs” mentality that I had in high school.

But over time I’ve come to conclude that the fun criterion goes too far. It stretches a reasonable principle (that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself) into something that’s either (1) too abstract to be useful, or (2) actively counterproductive.

Here’s what it looks like when the fun criterion becomes actively counterproductive: it makes you believe that you should never be uncomfortable. That pain, unpleasant experiences, and just feelings of effort altogether are always to be avoided. If you’re ever even slightly unhappy with what you’re doing in the moment, you should not be doing it.

In fairness to advocates of the fun criterion, I don’t think this is quite what they advocate. As Lulie herself points out in the video, working hard can be a totally good thing! Sometimes you actively choose to make sacrifices, like starting a keto diet, and this is compatible with the fun criterion. It doesn’t necessarily feel great when you have cravings for sugar, but you choose to stick to the diet because you get other benefits from it, and eventually the cravings go away. In the words of Lulie, “it’s still fun”.

But this is, in my view, the other failure mode of the fun criterion: “fun” starts to mean something so fuzzy that it no longer makes sense to have an entire criterion predicated on it. If you have a craving for a cookie, and you choose not to eat the cookie, is your current mental experience best characterized as “having fun”? More to the point, if someone is trying to quit a cigarette addiction and is experiencing withdrawals, would we describe their internal mental state as “fun”?

One could argue I’m strawmanning the fun criterion by conflating the colloquial definition of “fun” (enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure) with the critical rationalist definition of “fun” (the absence of internal conflict; or, the absence of coercion by one part of the mind onto other parts; or, most abstractly, the refusal to shield any one kind of knowledge from criticism).

But the critical rationalist definition seems to be missing something about human psychology. First of all, internal conflict arises literally all the time. It’s hard to imagine being durably free of internal conflict unless you’re literally enlightened. And more pressingly, while internal conflicts can generally be resolved, it often takes significant time and effort to do so. It’s often better to just act in the world rather than try to resolve all internal conflict before doing anything, even if the action involves privileging one part of your self to the detriment of the other parts.

When someone is in the middle of withdrawals from an addiction to heroin, I don’t think we can reasonably expect the person to just “resolve” the conflict and satisfy the needs of all parts of their mind. There is a part of their mind that has become significantly dysregulated and wants heroin at all costs (literally), and the only sane response is to resist the compulsions of that part.

The failure mode that I fell into with the fun criterion is feeling like if I ever feel even slightly unsure about doing something, then there is some internal problem I need to resolve before doing it. Or that there’s some creative solution I need to come up with that allows me to avoid doing the thing. In other words, it became an impossibly high bar for doing anything, and created this unnecessary voice in my head (a new source of conflict, ironically) that was always asking “but is this fun enough??”

The conclusion I’ve come to is that some amount of self-discipline is Fine, Actually. Sometimes, it is actually a reasonable choice to do something you find definitively not fun, because not doing it will generate other problems for you.

Of course, even while doing not-fun things, it’s possible and highly valuable to maintain equanimity and self-compassion. It’s always a bad idea to tense your muscles or grit your teeth any more than strictly necessary (and it’s generally not necessary unless you’re at the jaw-clenching olympics). Hating yourself, or doing things you hate every day for some far-off fantasy of success, is a surefire path to long-term damage. But, you should accept that it’s not always gonna be fun.