The Siren's Call
Greek Sirens were sexy half-bird half-women who would sing beautiful mesmerizing songs to lure sailors passing by the island they inhabited. The only solution the Greek men found was to tie themselves to the mast of their ships until their boat sailed so far away tehy couldn't hear their songs.
But what if they just made a bet with their fellow sailors that they could stay on board their ship and if they don't they have to give their friends $10,000 worth of buried treasure. Would that work as well? Maybe?
This is the solution I have somewhat found to my own short-term video and screen addiction. In the Smartphone Theory of Everything, Derek Thompson astutely notes that it's not the smartphone that is the problem but what it displaces that hurts people. He says, "The strongest version of the case against smartphones is not that phones are poison but that they are a displacement machine: When you're staring at your screen, you're not sleeping, socializing, playing outside, watching TV, or learning." Socializing, deep work, focus on hobbies, etc. When people have to forego the smartphone they fill it with better uses of their time. Maybe there are negative things but they are less optimized uses of their time that's for sure. Maybe you go to a bar to drink with friends and sure their is the poison drinking business you're entertaining, but more importantly is... the friends we made along the way.
And so drunk one night and sick of having so many ideas for projects or goals and not following through on any of them I venmo'd my friend $50 and texted him saying "If I don't go play a game of squash tomorrow you can keep my money." He replied "okay, send proof when it's done." And thus began a new tradition of sending money to him each night with a list of tasks I intend to complete for the day ahead. If I don't finish them, then he keeps my $50 and if I finish them and text him proof, I get my money back. This has worked for the 3-4 days I've tried it so far. My new addition is one of the tasks will be "writing the next days tasks" so that I don't lose momentum and decide one day not to do it. The only question I still have about this is does it diminish my internal motivation and replace it with an external motivator and so far my verdict is...maybe? I don't know, but one of the things I said I'd do was send him $50 for this blogpost and I definitely waited until 11pm to do it but I wouldn't have done it at all if I didn't have this motivator so who knows.
The other inspiration for this idea was this guest post on Bryan Caplan's blog. The author explained how he pays his daughter to work farther ahead at math homework and it is totally up to her volition on whether or not she actually does it. She can decide to stop, but he has set up a willing funder if she wants to make some extra cash in exchange for getting further ahead in math. This anecdote really fascinated me and led me to think, can I just do that for myself instead? I do think a big part of the helpful effects is that by forcing myself to write down and share with a friend the exact things I am doing the immediate next day to advance my goals, I am forced to pick exactly what will make progress rather than in an ideation faze I can easily come up with so much overthinking and extra reading to do about a subject before committing. But crucially, the "proof" photo means that it has to be something I can take action on within the time frame so I'm measuring inputs rather than something more ephemeral like "learn about x". I can control the inputs. I can control if I go to the library and if I'm there I'm way more likely to continue reading. This does make me think in a society with AI that takes over everyone's jobs and people are mostly reduced to brainrot mush all day numb from entertainment, could the government or philanthropy pay people to do productive things for themselves and society and we all pay into a pot from our taxes that they then divvy out for completing pro-social activities. For example, what if we paid people to exercise? We already implicitly do with cheaper health insurance right? Why don't we just say we'll pay you $50 a week if you exercise the recommended amount each week. We can figure out the way to do quality checking but harder things have been done by humanity than check if someone did the thing they said they did. What about hanging out with friends? or even doing a hobby? Is this dystopic? Maybe, but incentives matter a lot is all I've learned from this self-experiment.