In considering how desire does or does not come easily to us, I’ve suggested we can categorize our lives as:
- Things we have that we dislike
- Things we have that we like
- Things we don’t have that we want (desire)
Things can be tangible, of course (money, weight), but they are just as likely to be intangible (time, stress).
The category of things we have that we don’t like can really get under our skin. Things in this category make us feel bad. Since we tend to believe that it’s the amount of something we have that’s causing us to feel bad, we seek to address the feeling by getting more or less of whatever the thing is. For example:
- More time
- Less weight
- More productivity
- Less procrastination
- More money
- Less stress
- More happiness
- Less negative thinking
These and dozens more topics are widely addressed in books and workshops by various experts who offer tools and techniques to help us get the right amount of the thing we want more or less of.
I can’t speak to the soundness of any specific tools or techniques. But I can point out an elephant-sized problem in the room. No matter what we’re trying to get more or less of, what we’re really aiming for is to feel less bad. Feeling less bad might sound like a good or at least harmless objective to aim for, but that is far from the case, for two big reasons.
Psychological Tension
If we’re focused on getting more or less of what we have that we don’t like in order to feel less bad we are operating based on psychological tension. When it comes to relieving psychological tension it almost doesn’t matter what tool or technique we use, we are quite likely to make enough progress to get to the point where we do, in fact, feel less bad.
But given that wanting to feel less bad is what was motivating us, once we get there we no longer feel the push to keep taking the action that got us there. So we eventually end up back where we started with the erroneous impression (explanation) that the tool or technique doesn’t really work or stopped working or isn’t for us. In reality, it worked just fine to get us feeling less bad. At least temporarily.
The Path of Least Resistance
The other problem with aiming to feel less bad is that it sets us up to go for tools and techniques that appeal to us because they seem familiar or easy or understandable: variations of tools or techniques we’ve tried before or that don’t seem like much of a stretch. I call those false affordances because they appear to offer a means or method to create change, but in fact they are highly unlikely to have that effect.
If we want to feel less bad, we are not going to go for something that seems difficult, or tedious, or just “not us,” meaning not the kind of thing we find appealing to do or use because, hey, that will make us feel bad.
Changing the status quo is not easy or comfortable, however. Employing only the tools or techniques we find appealing results in choosing the path of least resistance, i.e. choosing the status quo.
In terms of behavior change, false affordances are the tools, techniques, methods, etc. that don’t challenge us but instead fit relatively seamlessly into what we’re already doing. They give us a false impression of proactively attempting to resolve a perceived problem. Instead of helping us change the status quo, false affordances actively help us maintain it.
A Non-Starter
Wanting to feel less bad is not an indicator of a desire to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change to begin with. And feeling less bad is actually fairly easy to achieve, although it is always temporary and rarely satisfying. But even worse, being driven by feeling less bad can decrease our ability to enjoy the things we have that we do like not to mention completely obliterate our ability to identify things we want.
To summarize: feeling less bad has absolutely nothing to do with juicy desired outcomes, aspirations, or creating transformational change. It doesn’t even have anything to do with feeling good. As a motivator, it’s strictly a dead-end path.
Fourth post in a series on affordances. The previous posts can be found here(1), here(2), and here(3).
