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Notes -
I have no idea why ideas like "Life is about doing 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do." became so popular in the culture. Of course people don't always follow the advice but people most do accept that success is largely about enduring hardship. You even see it in creative stuff done for fun. Its considered very important to actively seek out criticism and take it well. There is a logic to all of this but other points of view used to be more common.
In Rock Climbing you still see people talking about the importance of "being psyched". Being excited and energized, having fun. Its a lot easier to put in the time if you don't actually need to expend much effort. No one thinks it wont hurt sometimes. You are gonna fall and your fingers will bleed. But its jsut a completely different way of relating to your goals. The most important thing is to stay psyched.
I agree that if you're pursuing some activity for your own amusement, it can sap the fun out of it to be constantly trying to "optimise" it and so on. But outside of that narrow sphere, people do need to do things they don't necessarily want to do. If everyone just did what they felt like all the time, society would collapse.
How do you tell if the thing you don't want to do is a thing you nevertheless should be doing or just a pointless small source of misery though? If you can trust society to tell you, great, but this whole current gestures at the Motte project and adjacent stuff thing is that society isn't exactly enjoying that level of trust anymore. And if you feel like you've been left out to figure things out on your own, whether you actually intrinsically want to do the thing suddenly feels a lot more important for judging it.
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