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Humans seem to have a mental module that’s always on guard against being manipulated by others which we might call “the coercion detector”. It can certainly serve us in rare Machiavellian situations, but most often for me it gets in the way like so:
- I decide that I want to do something fun! But it’ll take a bit of up-front work…
- So I put it on a to-do list, like “[ ] Plan a camping trip with the kids”
- I immediately feel averse to doing it: “Ugh, another task I have to do?! Who decided to make me do this?! Don’t they know I don’t have time for this!”
The concept of “non-self-coercive productivity” seeks to understand, and work around, such aversion. The aversion can arise from a a scarcity mindset (the often mistaken belief that one doesn’t have enough time or energy), or emotional baggage around the task at hand. Such baggage arises from coercive productivity, or the habit/history of using shame on ourselves (or others doing so) to force us to do a task. For example, I’ve always loved to read, but went through a period where I resisted reading anything because I didn’t enjoy the books I was reading, but shamed myself for abandoning a book unfinished, leading me to avoid reading entirely.