What Is Willpower

Contents

1. The picture, stated fairly
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. The result read at its first clause
5. Where the push was supposed to start
6. What the strain is the strain of
7. What the word can still name
8. What gets easier
9. What it does not mean
10. What it costs
11. If this lands badly
12. An ordinary Tuesday

Someone says it in a kitchen at nine at night, or at a desk with a message half typed: I just need more willpower. Someone says it about somebody else, with a shrug or with envy: he has no self-control; she has iron discipline. Each sentence reports the same thing. Somewhere inside the person there is a force. On the night in question it was applied or it was not, and how things came out tells you how much of it there was.

The picture underneath is plain, and mostly kind. A pull arrives: the tin, the phone, the sharp reply. The will, in the picture, pushes back, and the stronger side wins. People are said to carry different amounts, and the amount is said to change with use, either built the way a muscle is built or spent the way fuel is spent. The picture gives a person something to do on a bad evening, which is to push harder, and something to be proud of on a good one, which is that they held.

Part of this should be kept. People do come through the same evening differently. Practice does change what an evening costs. And the strain is felt, which this piece does not dispute. The question is only what the strain is the strain of.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam is the same in all three. The quantity is read off the outcome and then offered as the explanation of the outcome. Strong is what we call the people who held, and held is the evidence that they were strong. A force known only by its results explains nothing the results did not already say. The one version of the picture that risked a prediction was the fuel-tank version, that effort spent on one task leaves less for the next. A large preregistered multi-lab replication in 2016 recovered an effect indistinguishable from zero. That is reported, and it was reported on this site before, in the temptation essay linked below. It is used here only to say that the picture’s one test went against it. Nothing below rests on it.

The neighbours

This ground has been walked near before, and it is worth saying where, so that the difference is visible.

What Is Temptation is the nearest, and it owns the pull. It says why a pull arrives with an address, it sets out the discounting result, and it reports the fuel-tank account of willpower and sets it aside. It also sets out the foundation’s position, heavier than authorship, and it states the same result in its second clause: you are not the origin of the pull, and you are the place where a response to it can be revised. This piece starts where that one stops. It does not ask where the pull comes from. It asks about the other side of the picture, the thing said to push back, and takes the clause of the same result that is quoted there and not read, the first one.

What Is Blame takes the result at the other end. It begins after the mark is made and asks who answers for it. Today’s piece is about the moment before the mark and the word we use for it.

The Archivist, written outside this series, says that a rule which survives only on your discipline has already failed, and calls that the plainest lesson in the history of business records. That is a finding about rules. This piece derives, from the foundation, why a person who reaches for discipline is reaching for a term the foundation does not provide. The Blender Marker, also outside the series, owns the sentence that the angle is not available to willpower. I do not go near the angle here, and I leave that sentence where it is.

One earlier essay, from before the foundation was written down, contradicts it on exactly this point. It is superseded in the open in the sources below, and left up as the record of a position.

The result read at its first clause

I work from a small set of numbered primitives and results derived from them, and the foundation is linked at the end. The one doing the work today is a result: R13, agency is relocated, not abolished; the human is the site of conscious responsibility. It is derived from two primitives. P8 says a condition is prior to what it conditions, and that where a person’s naming is itself conditioned by a condition, that person is not its origin: ideas have people, and people do not have ideas. P5 says the host can occupy a position from which its response to a readable condition is revisable.

Most readings of R13 in this series take its second clause, and for good reason: it says where the answer falls. Today it is read at its first. Relocated. A thing is relocated only if it stood somewhere else first. Where did agency stand before? The result does not say in so many words, and the primitive beneath it leaves one candidate. The place P8 takes the host out of is origin: the host is not the origin of the condition that has it. On that reading, the relocation R13 states is of the host’s standing, from the place a thing starts to the place a thing is answered.

One more piece of the foundation needs to be on the table now, and two more come a few paragraphs on, where they are needed. This one is P9: a condition conditions. The relation is neither causation nor agency nor inertness, and it does not intend. A condition has no wanting, no strategy, no preference.

Where the push was supposed to start

Take the man at the laptop. The picture says he had a push and it was too weak. The reading says something different about the two sides of the screen. On one side there is the idea that has him at 11:40, a grievance with a face. On the other there is an idea that had him at nine in the morning, the working relationship he would like to keep, the person he would like to have been in that thread. Both of those condition him, and neither intends anything (P9). Neither is his in the sense of being authored by him (P8). What is his is a mark: the sending, or the not sending.

The woman in the first case is not a counter-example. The idea on the far side of the biscuit tin, whatever she would call it, her year or her heart or her knees, had her in the shop, on a Saturday, with a list. She wrote the list. That was a mark, and it was made in a place where the contest was not live.

What the strain is the strain of

If there is no push, what is felt? The foundation’s answer starts with R8, that the human experiences only the quotient. Not the Actual, not the Expectation, but R. In the Reality Equation, R = A / E, and the denominator is complex and is brought unasked. It comprises prediction and ideas (P4). The host does not set it. The one thing the host feels is the ratio between what arrives and what that denominator held.

That settles one question and leaves another open. It settles that the strain of resisting, which is felt, is a reading of a ratio. A push the host applied would be a third thing, and the ratio has no term for one. It leaves open what the ratio is the ratio of in this case, because the foundation says what is felt and does not say, for each feeling, what it is a quotient of.

Cases one and two show it. The woman’s strain on a Tuesday evening is small, because there is nothing in the house that could arrive. The man’s is at its maximum, because everything about that night is arriving against an expectation that held a colleague who had never done this. Hers is small with two years of marks behind it. His is large with almost none behind it. Neither strain says how hard either person pushed, because neither person was holding a quantity of that kind.

What the word can still name

Strike the force and the word is left with its use. People who say they have willpower are pointing at something; the cases show that much. The question is what, among the things the foundation makes available. There are two candidates, and both are on the host’s side. One is the position P5 describes, from which a response to a readable condition is revisable. The other is the mark that the response leaves. A condition is readable once it has been named, because naming is what makes the relation conscious (P7). Both are the host’s, in the sense R13 gives: they are where the answer is made.

Run the cases through it. The woman occupied the position months ago, on a Saturday, with the biscuits readable as a thing she would eat and a week of evenings in front of her. The mark was a shopping list. By the evening in question there was nothing to read. The man did not occupy the position at 11:40, or not for long enough; the response that was sent was made from inside the grievance. The colleague at the dinner had no occasion to occupy it at all, because the condition never became readable as an offer. What differs among the three is not how much each person pushed. It is where each was standing when a mark was made, and when.

This also says something about the praise. When we admire a person’s discipline, what we have in front of us is a run of marks and a record. What produced them is an arrangement of positions and times that may be quite invisible, and the admiration is read off the marks. The fair question to ask of a disciplined person is what they arranged, and which of their pulls were never readable to them.

What gets easier

The picture has one strong card, which is that willpower trains. People do get better at evenings. If it is not a push that has been strengthened, what has?

The foundation’s route runs through the record. Records update expectation forward and never reopen (R2). A mark made from the position goes into the record as an Actual, and it cannot be taken out. The denominator is not the host’s to command, and the foundation is plain about that; the one thing that can teach it is what has happened. So the host’s only road to its own expectation runs through its marks, and it runs one way, and it is slow.

This is a more modest account of training than the muscle, and a more accurate one about what can and cannot be done on a given evening. A muscle can be loaded today and be stronger on Friday. A record is not made stronger on Friday. It is longer on Friday, by exactly the marks that were made. There is no schedule, and the foundation I read gives no basis for promising one.

What it does not mean

It does not mean the strain is imagined. The strain is the one thing in this account that is certainly felt, and on the reading above it is a reading of something that is happening. It means only that the strain is not a gauge of a push.

It does not excuse the 11:52 mark. The mark is in the record and cannot be taken out of it, and it is the man’s. The piece on blame takes that question up from the other side, and this piece does not change its answer. The man did not lack a quantity. He made a mark, and he can make others, beside it, which is the only direction the record allows.

It does not say that arranging your life is the whole of the matter, or that willpower is just environment design under a grander name. Moving the cupboard is itself a mark, and it is made from a position, at a time. What this account adds is where to look: not at the size of a push, but at where a person stands when the mark is made.

And it does not say that every host can reach the position equally easily. P5 says the host can occupy one. I find nothing in the foundation about how readily, or about what sets that, and I have left the question open below.

What it costs

It costs the story of one’s own strength, along with the story of one’s own weakness. The woman is not strong and the man is not weak. That takes away a sentence people value, I held, if it is meant as a report on a quantity, and it takes away a sentence people dread, I have no willpower, which is a verdict about a quantity. With the quantity gone, the verdict has nothing to be about. What is left is a plainer and colder question: which mark, from where, and when.

It costs the explanation if only I had more. The next step is not more of anything. It is a smaller, earlier and duller thing, usually a thing done in daylight to an evening that has not happened yet, and there is nothing grand to be felt while doing it.

It costs the borrowed admiration. A person who is praised for discipline can no longer be asked to carry the praise as a trait, and a person who admires another can no longer take the other’s record as a quantity to be matched.

And it costs the piece something. I have kept using the word willpower throughout, because hardly anyone on a Tuesday says the position the foundation describes. If construction 03 is wrong, the word does name a quantity after all, and what this essay calls a record is a reserve with a better story. The ledger says what would show that.

An ordinary Tuesday

These are practice and not grounds. They are revisable on evidence, and the first test of any of them is whether it lets you make a mark you would otherwise not have made.

1. Find the mark, not the feeling. Before the evening, write down the single act that would leave a mark: send, open the tin, buy, click. Most of the evening is strain, and strain is not the part that goes into the record.
2. Name what is on each side. One sentence for the idea that has you at eleven at night and one for the idea that has you on a good morning. The grievance. The working relationship. Naming does not weaken either one. It makes the contest readable, which is the precondition of any response.
3. Move the mark earlier. Ask what you can do in daylight that makes the 11:40 moment smaller: the draft folder instead of the send button, the tin in another house, the phone charging in the hall. That is a mark too, and it is the one most people already make without calling it anything.
4. Read your strain as a report. When it is high, ask what arrived against what you expected, not how little you have. Then ask whether anything about the arrival can be changed by tomorrow.
5. Ask of the disciplined what they arranged. Of a person you admire, and of yourself on a day you were admired, ask which pulls were never readable. It makes the admiration smaller and the method larger.
6. Keep the run short and the place the same. The same mark, from the same position, at the same hour, is how a record gets long. Count the marks. Do not count the days you felt strong.