Let’s take a step back. Why is discipline such a difficult thing to have?
Two parts to my theory: first, if you’re reading this, the worst thing that might ever happen to you–and this is still unlikely at best–is that you’ll get into trouble with the law, or you’ll have some sort of accident. But you’re probably educated, you’ve probably got some kind of support system, and if you fall off the horse, you’re going to be able to get back on.
In other words, there are no landmines in your backyard. There is no chance you will starve to death. You might lose your house someday, but you’ll never end up living on the street.
Success of some sort is the default condition, and you have to go out of your way to screw that up.
The other part is that the amazing, incredible technology we have today makes it very very difficult to see past the immediate. You watch TV on-demand. A phone call brings food in 45 minutes or less. You don’t even have to go to the library to find the answer to a centuries-old scientific conundrum; it’s on the Internet.
Cause and effect is radically skewed towards the immediate.
So if everything is available right now, it becomes harder and harder to imagine those things that take a week, a month, a year. And we compensate for that far-off by establishing ritual to give us structure. Four years of college classes are unimaginable, so we break it down: year by year, semester by semester, with milestones along the way. We create a structure that allows us to measure progress.
How do you do that for something more amorphous? For “being a writer”? For “getting in shape”?
And if the penalty for laziness is a status quo that’s really quite comfortable, is the diminishing reward for greater risk worth the effort?