I draw my bow and let the arrow fly.
Does it strike the target? Does it split my last arrow down the middle, quivering amid concentric circles? Does the audience gasp and break into applause?
Not the right questions. They will, in fact, drive us to madness and ruin.
There’s often an audience in the stands, but it would be better if the stadium were deserted or if the crowd roared in inscrutable silence. Better if bullseyes earned no prizes. Better if targets existed for calibrating future efforts rather than dispensing dopamine and deciding who wins shiny things.
Perhaps this is naive and unfair. These rewards I’m dismissing form the sweet candy trail mankind followed from disease, famine, and poverty into a land where these outcomes are usually optional. Undoubtedly, extrinsic incentives will lead our species to future successes — of a kind.
But on a personal level, society’s candy trail is sometimes a cancer, a deformer of noble instincts and personal standards. Reflexively following it may turn us into exactly what we don’t want to be.
In a speech at Harvard University, the billionaire investor Charlie Munger said:
“I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.” — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Poor Charlie’s Almanac
An honest person — unless they’re a sage or a saint — will look at themselves and see they’re underestimating how much they’re molded by incentives. We think we march to the beat of our own drum, but fail to notice its a rhythm leaking from a speaker society rigged up behind the memetic curtain.
If you can’t see it in yourself, see it in the world.
* Politicians are incentivized to win a narrow base of supporters and sow division.
* Individuals are incentivized to accumulate and enjoy easy spectacle — money, houses, fancy cars, TikTok.
* Students are incentivized to complete homework and turn in passable essays, not master material. They follow their incentive and let ChatGPT write their essays. Meanwhile, universities are incentivized to issue credentials costing a small fortune and much time. The causal link between mastery and the means of ascertaining mastery is broken.
If we want education to bestow more than credentials, if we want politics to be more than pandering to a mob, if we want society to worship more than bread and circus, we need better incentives. Perhaps we can start with increasing skin in the game.
But what of us? Society is outside our control, after all. But are the inventives? Are we free agents who can set our own agenda?
On the surface, there are reasons to doubt:
* Turn your beloved hobby into a side hustle and watch it become drudgery.
* Allow audience capture to mold you and you’ll come to hate creation and being “a public intellectual.”
* Let reelection fears guide your vote and you’ll be the unprincipled politician you hated when you were young.
Let me give you another take on incentives: “Fixing incentives” means making the right thing more lucrative than the wrong. There’s a problem with this — making the right thing the more externally profitable option is often impossible or so contentious it’s impractical, particularly on shorter time scales.
If restructuring incentives is the only path from our moral morass, then we’ve concluded we’re lazy delinquents only steering clear of crimes because we fear jail, only helping neighbors and donating to charity in the hope of reward. We’re one windfall away from being FIRE Guy.
Do you believe that about yourself?
I’ve sometimes been corrupted away from my values by incentives. I know I’m fallible. But I’ve struggled against these incentives enough to know I have principles I can hew to. They’re real. I am not merely a puppet dancing on incentive strings, but a sovereign being possessed of reason and morality.
The real question: what can we do to make our values — our own incentives — the most compelling ones. How do we transform extrinsic incentives from an addictive drug to a vaguely enticing melody in the distance?
Because consider the alternative. Do you want to spend life lunging after dangling carrots and fleeing sticks? Is that what you are, a slave?
On a societal level, maybe we can rationalize bad behavior instead of persecuting it. We give criminals a whitewash because “inventives made them do it.” They stole something? Well, they had a hard childhood. They accepted a bribe to look the other way? Well, capitalism doesn’t compensate them fairly, so what can we expect? Vice, sin, evil — whatever you want to call it — can always be explained away when we worship at the altar of incentives.
But whenever I try this game with myself I’m a little sickened. “I’m just a little helpless incentive slave,” is not what you want to tell yourself. It will destroy everything good in you. You will shrink from your potential and your happiness.
Luckily, I find I can do more than sprint after carrots and flee sticks — here is my evolving theory based on my experiments and neurobiology.
The first step in muffling extrinsic rewards is dragging more of what we do for utility into the sphere of actions taken for our own purposes. Stealing from negotium and giving to otium, like an incentive Robinhood that no Nottingham employer or crack-dealing tech sheriff can head off. I’ve detailed my approach to this. You might also find death a helpful ally in maintaining perspective when the carrots look extra tasty.
But on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour level, this means something specific: attaching the feeling of struggle and effort to an internally-generated reward system.
We’ve known for decades that intrinsic motivation predicts enhanced learning, better performance, creativity, optimal development, and psychological wellness. So how do we ignite this sort of motivation?
Only recently have we learned that intrinsically motivated exploration and mastery are ancient tendencies underwritten by dopaminergic systems and reward circuits in large-scale neural networks underpining salience detection, attentional control, and self-referential cognition.
I will vastly oversimplify our complex neurobiology — which is still in the infancy of being understood by science — to make this digestible: You need to stop prepping with cookies and rewarding yourself with cake.
If you do a hard thing in line with your values — perhaps instead of easy things that seem more entertaining or lucrative — do not promise yourself a treat. Not a vacation. Not a literal cookie. Not a quick Instagram scroll or a shopping binge. Give yourself no reward other than the action, not even the outcome of the action (which is outside our control anyway). As you’re doing it, praise yourself and tell yourself that the effort itself is goof and valuable.
Similarly, don’t psych yourself up for the hard thing by blasting the Rocky theme or whatever stirring music gets your pulse pounding. Don’t check your email (just to clear the deck!). Don’t do a prepetory scan of YouTube or Instagram. Don’t publicly announce the great thing you’re about to do. Mild stimulants like coffee or tea might be ok, but I’m uncertain.
Why are we doing this? Let’s not embrace the modern fallacy of “everything is dopamine,” but instead simply say we’re avoiding spiking reward circuits before and after the work we want to drag into the intrinsically motivating otium camp.
These extrinsic carrots and sticks sabotage the good life by draining what we once loved for its own sake of intrinsic worth.
Instead of revving ourselves up and promising pleasures to come, take a few breaths, perhaps do a focus ritual where you clean your workspace or organize your gear. Briefly meditate if that’s your thing. Consider exactly what you’re going to do, for how long, and why you’re doing it.
And then?
Talk to yourself and begin.
We have a robust body of evidence that telling yourself the effortful struggle is “the good part” changes our perception of tasks so they become self-rewarding and self-reinforcing.
When you’re losing focus and external rewards call you like sirens on the rocks, this self-talk can shift the tide, particularly over the course of a few weeks.
Researchers have concluded that:
“Self-talk is “a psychological skill that, over time, develops into an intentional self-regulation mechanism – for example, self-talk that serves as ‘self-monitoring’ or ‘internal rehearsal’ of an anticipated conversation…Goal-directed self-talk is not part of the task, it is part of the person who completes a task…goal-directed self-talk is a controlled process that is aimed at self-regulation.”
Endurance athletes using positive self-talk reduce their perceived effort and increase their performance. Competitive riffle shooters using positive self-talk increase motivation and perceptions of fun, interest, and competence.
This comes down to telling yourself, “this effort is great”:’ when things are challenging and you want to bail. We’re linking reward to process instead of outcome. Tell yourself you’re doing this by choice because it’s the most valuable thing in the world.
When tempted to bail, write the temptation down on a prepositioned piece of paper so we see how we’re about to undermine our ideals. Make the willful degradation of your standards unignorable. If the desire is persistent, journal on it like a philosopher.
This technique, along with the others I’ve described here, helps me live the life I find most worthwhile and happy — one aligned with virtue and my ideals.
Look, we’re all archers to some extent. We have to draw the bow and let fly. But it’s one thing to practice diligently, get into the right headspace, and aim well. It’s another to think where the arrow lands matters, or that the roar of the mob is worth a damn.
This, I think, is what freedom is. Not the absence of loud incentives, but being unerringly tuned into the subtle rhythm we’ve created ourselves so the roar can be tuned out.
So draw, release, and smile — because if you dial this in, where the arrow lands and who applauds doesn’t really matter.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
If you liked this article, please like and share it, which helps more readers find my work.
