Practicing Harmonism is like gardening—cultivating a collection of entities towards a more bountiful whole. And sometimes the best way towards that whole is weeding. To that end, we begin this series about the most obvious sources of disharmony among our desires: self-defeating wants.
Let’s kick things off by looking at the first of many ways that wants defeat themselves: bad timing.
Often I have laid in bed as if to sleep—sleep mask on, white noise blaring. But rather than sleep, I try desperately to solve some vexing problem. Like, “What is the difference between wanting something and actually being motivated to take action for it?” Or, “How can I program my webpage so that those damn rectangles line up right?”
Though at times my sleepy stupors have produced solutions, the light of day invariably reveals them to be half-baked garbage. Bedtime is a bad time for wants like those, insidiously leading me to lose restorative sleep, the very resource I need in order to fulfill them.
So what can we do about these self-defeating wants?
First, identify them. Be self-inquisitive: Is thinking so frequently about that person I went on a date with causing me to be clingy and scare them off? Is worrying so often about my money in the stock market causing me to make decisions that lose more of it?
In other words, ask yourself: Is this want causing me to sacrifice resources that I could otherwise use to more effectively fulfill the want later?
Once you expose a want as being the self-defeating scoundrel that it is, you’ve already taken a powerful first step. You can now use the want’s own motivational energy against it. The reasons behind your want become the same reasons for its destruction, or at least its postponement.
Next, use that motivation to reschedule the want. You might do so just vaguely, reminding yourself that you’ll be able to revisit it in the morning, or whenever. Or you might be more precise and set an alarm, put it on your calendar, stick it on a list. The point is, give yourself confidence that you will revisit the want when the time is right.
Finally, with that confidence in hand, let go. Let the want go.
Your attention must go somewhere, though, so redirect it to something useful. These days as I get ready for bed I listen to a podcast, the History of Byzantium. Once I’ve laid down, if I catch myself thinking about philosophy or lining up rectangles, I guide my attention back to the distant events of the long-felled Byzantine Empire. That may sound boring to some. As a sedative, it works.