Summary

The article discusses the complexity of personal change, emphasizing that it is not driven by prescriptions or willpower but by a deep-seated desire that overrides other desires, and is often sparked by moments of profound truth.

Abstract

The author argues that change is possible, but not through conventional means such as prescriptions or willpower. Instead, true change occurs when a person's desire to change is stronger than any other desire, leading to an almost effortless transformation. This desire is not something that can be manufactured through rational decision-making or following self-help guides, but rather emerges from a place of authentic wanting. The article suggests that free will is an intellectual construct with little practical relevance, as human behavior is often driven by subconscious desires and external influences. It also critiques the notion of prescriptions, such as self-help books, which offer formulaic solutions to complex human problems. The author posits that personal growth is a result of an intense desire to know and understand, coupled with an acute awareness of the nuances of one's actions. True change is catalyzed by personal truths, which can reframe a person's understanding of themselves and their actions, leading to a genuine shift in behavior.

Opinions

The author believes that the desire for change must be stronger than any other desire for change to occur.
Free will is considered an intellectualization with no practical impact on human behavior.
Prescriptions, like self-help books or how-to guides, are seen as ineffective band-aids for deeper issues of self-worth and desire.
Successful people often attribute their achievements to intangible factors like context, timing, and instinct, rather than conscious decisions or prescriptions.
The article suggests that people do not regret their actions as much as they regret the consequences, implying that the desire for the action was present even if the outcome was undesirable.
The author introduces the concept of "Truth" as a catalyst for change, which is a personal realization or experience that cannot be disputed by rational argument.
Change is possible when one's awareness is clear of clouded thinking, and the truth about one's actions is fully realized.

Is It Possible To Change?

Why prescriptions don’t work, and what does.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word ‘no’ ” — Betteridge’s Law

I’ll tell you now that the answer to my headline is ‘yes’, but not in the conventional sense. They say a person has to want to change. They should have been more specific: a person’s desire to change has to be stronger than their other desires, and if it is, the desire itself produces the change without the person having to do anything.

You cannot do anything without wanting to do it. Even when you are using willpower and resisting a temptation, you are really satisfying a competing desire — to feel like you are making your future better.

If you were able to watch yourself go about your day you’d notice a force that was carrying you along, like a car that you could steer but couldn’t stop or start. You can try to make yourself the sole author of an action, say by thinking up something totally irrational and then doing it. But again, whether you decide to or not is outside your control.

“So you’re saying free will doesn’t exist?”

Free will is an intellectualization. The concept has no relevance to the life of a human. It causes arguments that reduce to quibbling over definitions of words.

Free Will

Humans are an inventive species. They imagined that they existed on the edge of nature, that their minds were autonomous factories of behavior, that their life was lived in conformity to the preferences of something they called the ‘Self’. If a suggested action entered their mind and it made sense, it seemed logical enough that they should go and do it.

But it was also clear that humans were prone to behaving in strange ways. Occasionally they would do something so contrary to their interests that people were forced to question this idea of personality as a set of preferences faithfully carried out.

People wanted to have discuss about this, so they established the term ‘free will’ to mean the state of full autonomy which was being contradicted when people lost control and acted self-destructively. In turn, people were confused by the implications of being subject to outside forces. Trying to fight chaos with order and understanding, they came up with the term ‘determinism’ as the counterpart of free will.

Both those who do and those who don’t believe in free will make a common error. They believe that you can improve behavior by appealing to thought; by presenting a good argument for a course of action, you will change the person’s conscious preferences and they will do what they should. But they are asking us to press the accelerator when all our conscious minds are able to do is adjust the steering wheel.

Prescriptions

Prescriptions are how-to’s. They are methods, hacks and techniques. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” which invite you to emulate the successful. A person will tend to look for prescriptions when they feel the need to change. They are a cosmetic patch when a person’s self-worth is wounded: “yes I did wrong, please just tell me what I need to do to be better.”

The truth is that society’s most successful people themselves don’t know what it was precisely that they did. They worked out, studied hard, cultivated a network, stuck to a mindfulness routine; but so did thousands of others who failed.

The secret to their becoming great really lay in millions of tiny details having to do with context, timing, small adjustments guided by the whisper of instinct. Those things are not transmissible. They aren’t really even consciously knowable. What we can say confidently enough, is that successful people had an intense desire to know, which heightened their attention to the finer nuances of their craft.

Importantly this doesn’t just apply to someone trying to become a famous sports star or billionaire entrepreneur. Any time you err and create trouble for yourself, the problem isn’t a lack of information which you can correct by reading a ‘how-to’ book. That information is way too heavy-footed.

The problem is that you desired to take the path which led to problems. Since it is impossible to act without a desire a desire to do so, there must have been something attractive to you in doing what you later regretted.

Very few people dislike being angry. Anger offers an ego boost — it asserts the person’s right to be angry. What people don’t like is the harm to their self-image which comes later: perhaps I’m not as nice as I thought I was; now people are angry at me.

No one is sorry for the behavior as much as for the consequences of it.

Truth

So we have dug a bit deeper on the statement, “the person has to want to change.”

The question naturally arises as to how one might cultivate the desire to change. The obvious trap is that you can easily start to look for prescriptions for ‘how to desire change’.

This is where we need the idea of Truth. Especially in its religious, almost cult-leader form of usage. Critical rationalists don’t like the word ‘truth’. They say there are better and worse forms of knowledge, all of them fallible and open to being overturned, but that nothing is ‘just true’. That’s all fine if you want to work with objective knowledge. But scientific standards are not a luxury a human can afford in the conduct of life.

There is a kind of realization that hits a person, usually when they are on their own. A typical pattern is that they had been living their life according to certain ideas and beliefs, when the bottom falls out. Perhaps they discover their spouse has been cheating on them, or they have a religious epiphany, a sense of the universe’s infinite beauty beyond their mechanical lifestyle. Or in their minds they had positioned themselves in righteous superiority to other humans only to be hit by the undeniable falsity of it. These are moments of truth.

The critical rationalist may say that each of these have an objective reality, and the person may be mistaken or even hallucinating. That is of no relevance to the individual — a truth was revealed, even if the words they attached to it were fallible.

To change, you have to see the unmistakable truth about your actions. When your mind can’t find an escape, your desires are forced to confront reality. It could be direct evidence of the pain you have caused someone, or being hospitalized for a smoking-related illness. Exposure to these truths will do more for you than a thousand prescriptions which the mind seeks for the short-circuit feeling of progress that they give.

Conclusion

Is it possible to change? It is possible for change to happen when awareness is unclouded by thought. When the truth arrives emphatically, you will have no choice but to change.