The Shut-In Economy

After all, there are a lot of things your body is capable of doing, yet you aren't ever driven to do them. That's really at the heart of the shut-in symptoms.

What's helping me is the concept of precommitment.

I have a simple system. It started as a simple weekly wager with a coworker: Every Friday, have a plan for your weekend. Complete that plan during your weekend. Failure in either part costs you a coffee, failure in both costs you lunch.

Those plans can be whatever you want. Ranging from taking care of basic life chores, to working on projects, to getting exercise, and to whatever else might seem a priority.

This doesn't fix the lack of intrinsic motivation to get started per se, but does add another, extrinsic, motivation. More wanting to save face than worrying about the hit to our wallets - both of us willing to tease each other and ourselves for being too meek in our planning when we succeed, or for being too ambitious or lazy when we fail. (Edit: Also out of a sense of competition.)

I'm still searching for intrinsic motivation, but at least as a stopgap, extrinsic motivation through precommitment is doing wonders for my life. Given that it took me a decade or so to figure out this much, I'll more than happily take it.

Indeed, this is exactly what it meant to be a gentleman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentleman) in 15th-19th century English/American society -- you owned enough land to be able to live off rents, rather than having to dirty your hands working for a living. Gentlemen were part of the broader upper class called the gentry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentry), which also included titled aristocrats (barons, dukes, earls, etc.). Since making money and buying land were generally easier than convincing the King to give you a title, becoming a gentleman was a popular way for ambitious commoners to move up the social ladder. (The flip side of that ease, of course, being that it was easy to stop being a gentleman, too -- just lose your money and boom, your family is common again -- whereas a titled peer would always be a titled peer, even if he was penniless.)

> I imagine servants would have been more of a status symbol for them, whereas today's upper-middle-class strivers see them as more of a necessity "to dedicate more time to working."

Partly it was a status symbol for them, but status symbols were a bigger deal to them than they are to us because their societies were more rigidly hierarchical than ours are. So having ways to display your status was part of how you held on to that status -- gentlemen had servants, because if you couldn't afford servants that told everyone you really weren't a gentleman. It was self-reinforcing.

Uhh, you sure? Solution space is much bigger than you'd think.

Have you heard of Trigger-Action Planning (also known in the literature by the horrible name "Implementation Intentions")? It gets you around 0.6 standard deviations more "doing things you want to do but don't end up doing." The gist of it is fairly straightforward - take a concrete experience, and tie it to a specific action you want to do in that context. "When I walk through my bedroom door, do a pull-up on the pull-up bar" is a great TAP. "After dinner, study math" is a bad one. "When I open reddit, close reddit" is both hilarious and effective.

The best part is that doing Trigger-Action Planning badly is better than not trying it at all. It's why I'm sharing it, since it's generally safe. It's a learnable skill for programming your automatic and habitual actions. (Please don't use it to program experiencing negative emotions into yourself. Part of your problem is likely that you've programmed "feel guilty about being unworthy of San Francisco" as an automatic response to experiencing San Francisco's beauty. If this resonates with you, don't feel bad about it - this is a growth opportunity, which is not something you want to avoid in the future.)