Thread: Doing things you don't feel like

You're confusing it as being one. It's two: the journey and the destination.

Let's think of laundry.

I don't know about you, but I don't enjoy doing laundry. There's no reason why I don't enjoy it,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbLq...e_gdata_player
(1:56) 48,467 views

Hey Original Poster

The same Karen24alloy (from above post) gives this answer to your question OP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ofI...e_gdata_player
(2:21) 235,665 views

She don't do what she don't feel like doing (hahahahaha)

she does a good "drink my breast milk" clip too.

I found her by putting "happy doing laundry" into Youtube search bar hoping to find an answer to your OP question.

We are almost always doing things that we want to do.

I am here because I want entertainment.
I do the dishes because I want to eat on clean dishes.
I work because I want money. I do the laundry because I want to wear clean clothes.

But I don't want to do dishes, I just want to eat on clean dishes. I don't enjoy the act of doing dishes, nor laundry. More importantly, there is basic resistance against doing chores.

So you sort of dodged my question. My question is why can't you have fun all the time? If you believe doing laundry is fun, that's good for you. I don't find it fun, I do it because I want clean clothes. But that doesn't mean I want to do laundry.

I guess I did doge your question. I dunno. It doesn't computer for me, I always think its just how our world works.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

But I don't want to do dishes, I just want to eat on clean dishes. I don't enjoy the act of doing dishes, nor laundry. More importantly, there is basic resistance against doing chores.

So you sort of dodged my question. My question is why can't you have fun all the time? If you believe doing laundry is fun, that's good for you. I don't find it fun, I do it because I want clean clothes. But that doesn't mean I want to do laundry.

The answer is I willingly obey the law of inertia (AKA the law of Lazyness).

The law of "inertia"

Inertia*is the [b|resistance[/b] of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles of*classical physics which are used to describe the motion of*matter and how it is affected by applied*forces.

Inertia comes from the Latin word,*iners, meaning idle, or lazy.

Isaac Newton defined inertia as his first law in his*Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which states:[1] (...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zsE...e_gdata_player

If all you ever had was "fun"..

How would you know it was "fun"?

hit the "go advanced" button before you hit "post" and you, hopfully won't double post. That used to work for me befor all the changes. Now I can just hit post without getting a double post. But Noe if I hit Go Advanced I can't post at all.

Originally Posted by NonDualistic

If all you ever had was "fun"..

How would you know it was "fun"?

I just hit "reply with quote" now I will hit "go advanced" and then post to see if I can, yet.

Wow It is fixt. now I will talk about Mary Poppins way of assisting us to always have FUN even when we we thing FUN is impossible, under the present circumstanses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrno...e_gdata_player

Lets see if it works..
Computer bit the dust a year ago and am using a PS3 system. Not the most convenient thing, but its whats here...

I just think a certain group of people prevent me from having fun. Them stating I should do this and that, and that this is wrong and this is right, it's only because they're alive that I constrain myself of doing anything rebellious...at least until they pass away.

Most of my actions are stemmed from literally giving some of my "freedom" based on what these people believe, because I used to think of them as important. But now, because I know most aren't going to live very long, it's only a matter of time before the seal comes off and all of the responsibility will come showering down to me.

Of course, I don't go around trying to smell horrible or have bad hygiene, it's just that there's a lot of things that everyone wants someone to manage and moderate where it's not even necessary when I realize doing all of it is just a waste of time in the first place.

In short, when they're gone, holding on to their beliefs is pretty much pointless when I can just focus on developing my own (this is implying things beyond just cleaning lol)

I just think a certain group of people prevent me from having fun. Them stating I should do this and that, and that this is wrong and this is right, it's only because they're alive that I constrain myself of doing anything rebellious...at least until they pass away.

Most of my actions are stemmed from literally giving some of my "freedom" based on what these people believe, because I used to think of them as important. But now, because I know most aren't going to live very long, it's only a matter of time before the seal comes off and all of the responsibility will come showering down to me.

Of course, I don't go around trying to smell horrible or have bad hygiene, it's just that there's a lot of things that everyone wants someone to manage and moderate where it's not even necessary when I realize doing all of it is just a waste of time in the first place.

In short, when they're gone, holding on to their beliefs is pretty much pointless when I can just focus on developing my own (this is implying things beyond just cleaning lol)

Having to do things you don't like is not assumed, it's just the way society wants you to live and we have this subconscious belief that if everybody is doing it, it must be right, that's how moral rights and wrongs come about.

If you don't enjoy starting it, it's clear that you don't like doing it. My guess is you feel good after laundry is done because you have remove a load from your burdens and you don't have to do it again till x days later. It's just the after effect of doing something that you don't like and it's like you had completed a challenge. If you really don't like doing laundry, find alternatives, send it to a laundry shop, get someone to wash it for you.

Life is too short to do things you don't like.

Well the stuff that makes you like doing something (dopamine, serotonin, and others I guess) and the things that trigger their release have their constraints, so I guess you do have to not like doing things sometimes, especially with so many everyday things that could easily be seen as mundane. Any moment could be seen as a chance to progress and enjoy yourself, though, so it really depends on how you define that.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

Why is it assumed you have to do things in life you don't want to do or don't feel like doing?

Or to take it a step deeper, perhaps there are things we want to have done but do not enjoy the process of doing them, or simply face resistance when it comes to getting started. Why is this? Why must we ever live a moment without joy? I'm looking for more interesting answers than "You can't have fun all the time." My response to that is why? Why can't you have fun all the time?

Let's think of laundry. I don't know about you, but I don't enjoy doing laundry. There's no reason why I don't enjoy it, I'd just rather do something else instead. And it's silly because having laundry finished actually relieves stress and makes me enjoy life more, with a weight removed from my shoulders. But before the activity is started, it almost feels like extra weight. It does not feel like play. What is wrong with my attitude? Do I have to resign myself to not always having fun? Or do I need some sort of attitude adjustment in order to enjoy the act of doing laundry?

I,m just bumping this thread cos I think this Youtube is fun and true. pluss

I want advice on how to get motivated and do stuff I really want to do but the law of lazyness stops me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJno...e_gdata_player

I'm not naturally social, but I don't want to be some fucked up, socially isolated guy, who masturbates in his basement all day, lost in some deep rationalization, as to why my life sucks so much. So, I force myself to socialize whenever I get the chance. Once I make that initial push, I enjoy talking to people. I just have to encounter that initial resistance.

I think you're over thinking this. Everything we do, we do to gain pleasure, or avoid pain. You don't like doing the dishes, but it would be even more painful for you to eat on dirty dishes, so you do them. You don't like going to work, but it would be more painful to become homeless and live on the street, so you go to work.

Myself, it would be more painful for me to become socially weird, so I socialize regardless of the fact that I'm introverted. It would be too painful for me to become unhealthy, so I exercise and watch what I eat.

We also do things that give us pleasure. For example, reading a book, watching TV, playing a Video Game, etc.

Basically, you will pick the least painful outcome. If someone who is obese, see's dieting as more painful than being obese, then they will continue to be obese.

This isn't some complicated philosophical topic. Everything you do, you do to avoid pain or gain pleasure. Hell, your avoidance of pain could just be the fear of disapproval from others. Other people think you shouldn't just "have fun", so you don't "just" have fun.

Read Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. It will give you a lot of insight into this topic.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

Let's think of laundry. I don't know about you, but I don't enjoy doing laundry.

if you don't enjoy doing the basic things to take care of yourself it's because you aren't being mindful of them and what they provide. Try to look at the activity as nurturing and healing yourself rather than a chore that you have to do.

There's no reason why I don't enjoy it,

but there is, you say it right below

I'd just rather do something else instead

having many ambitions does not generally lead to peace of mind. If you want to enjoy doing the laundry stop fetishizing the things you consider fun. You are not going in to this with a beginners mind(if this concept is new to you google it). You have an idea of what should be(whatever it is that you would rather be doing) and since that isn't whats happening you create suffering for yourself by thinking about how things should be different instead of seeing that laundry with a radiant mind. See the joy in the cleansing process. Or take it a step further and see the joy in just being.

Well lets look at it this way. Everyone likes clean clothes, but no one likes doing laundry.

Your question is why can't we have fun doing the things we don't like, or in this case, doing the laundry. If we did like doing the laundry, we would not pay people to do it for us. You work to make money, and the reason you make money is because people pay you for a product or service that they use money instead of doing the actual work.

Many people can develop a routine and very select few enjoy working, but the majority of us would rather be on vacation. The purpose of not enjoying everything is that if you did enjoy everything we would all be dead much sooner.

If you enjoy cutting your legs off you're not going to live very long
If you enjoy getting sunburnt or being raped by a homeless person you're not going to live very long

These are extreme cases but you can see the point I am making, If you like doing other peoples laundry for free its going to take more energy from you and you wont have the time or energy to enjoy doing fun things, like playing video games or going jet skiing

It's through these basic chemical reactions, all stemmed from pain and pleasure. All your actions move away from pain and towards pleasure, and sometimes going through a certain amount of pain is worth it for the pleasure you are rewarded with. This is why we do things that we do not like

Double Posted ~~~ But read what I said below, you may find it of practical value.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

But I don't want to do dishes, I just want to eat on clean dishes. I don't enjoy the act of doing dishes, nor laundry. More importantly, there is basic resistance against doing chores.

So you sort of dodged my question. My question is why can't you have fun all the time? If you believe doing laundry is fun, that's good for you. I don't find it fun, I do it because I want clean clothes. But that doesn't mean I want to do laundry.

The answer is that you can have fun, or be without "dharma" as the indians would call suffering/doubt/angst, all the time and at every single moment.

It takes the intelligence to understand that life is what you make it at every given second (in terms of a psychological response like fear dread love hate joy pain etc) and with
this understanding you realize that nothing objectively "is" on a psychological level, it is completely relative - subjective if you will - to your expectations and assessment of how
or what you need to do in accordance to hierarchical interests and comprehensive self identified system.

When you are able to resolve a passion to identify and pursue in life, its especially easy. Failure to have confidence and responsibility in who you are and how you perceive yourself to be typically is the source for all frustration, suffering, or annoyance. Reciprocal to this reality, Success in feeling unwavering confident and responsible in actualization of your true nature and self identity is the recipe for virtually perpetual euphoria.

Yes - we are going to have to do things like take care of our hygiene, clean up after ourselves, and attend to other mandates of survival. However, there is nothing in nature that says while you are washing the dishes you can't perceive joy - nor that washing dishes warrants a specific objective psychological response. Once you accept, embrace, and take responsibility of every moment of every task you have to do, you won't be dreading it, you will do it and feel happy doing it.

Take for example exercising. Many frequent runners love running, while many other people can't stand it. Most will focus on the mild physical stymies like cramps and pangs that everyone feels, except that those who enjoy it are able to ignore this stimuli and focus on all relevance and excitement the activity has to their interests, like getting in better shape, feeling more alert, the rush, whatever.

In the same light - doing laundry. If while you were doing laundry you were able to exercise all of the relevant qualities it has contained within it to your interests and focus solely on those, for example, cleaner and better smelling clothes. I know it sounds silly but no matter the scope of impact, so long as you feel as though every choice is your choice, that you are entirely behind and deliberately decide to commit to doing the laundry, your mind and body start focusing on all of the interesting relevance to your primary underlying goal and start ignoring the time commitment or any negative extrapolations.

I think the term is "flow". Basically, you are trying to sustain and achieve the greatest capacity of "flow" - that being, to be fully in the moment, focusing with great intensity on doing
every aspect of the task as best as you can possible do it, while tuning out completely any doubt or reservations about doing what you are doing.

Neuroplasicity doesn't happen over night, its an ongoing process of pruning and rewiring your circuitry to experience/perceive/interpret stimuli in a new way.

Focusing on living taking responsibility of everything you do, always acting deliberately, will give your psyche the confidence to disregard any reservations of doubt or angst
in doing that task at hand. Therefore, following this, if you live your life always focusing on the task at hand and passionately embracing it, it would be theoretically - very
difficult to experience the feelings responsible for dharma - essentially, wishing that what you were doing was something else, or that you could be doing something else.

I gave you a fairly radical answer, but I found that the radical nature of the question warranted such a response ~~

Well, the reptilian portion of your brain regulates how you feel, given certain situation, with various chemicals (dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, cortisol, adrenaline, etc.)

Some make you feel good, and some make you feel bad. These have evolved as guides for primitive life forms. Found some berries? Bam, dopamine for your trouble! Socially dominant? Wham, have some serotonin! You in danger and are clearly outclassed? Uh-oh, better punish you with some Cortisol.

These mechanisms tend to follow a "greedy algorithm" (i.e. short-term thinking with respect to which decision gives you the best reward). So of course, when you have to decide to between eating healthy, and eating a tub of ice cream, your brain chemistry says, "go for the ice cream!" This may seem stupid for us humans, but when you think about it, it's absolutely critical for surviving in the wild, as a more primitive animal.

But you're not a reptile, right? You're a more highly developed mammal, so you have a fancy schmancy cortex laid over your reptilian brain. That thing allows you to think, and most importantly, to adapt. Reptiles that don't have that come pre-loaded with just the chemical aspect. They're great at surviving in their specific habitat, and have nothing but their instincts to thanks for that. Bigger-brained mammals are less hard-wired, but more adaptable to change. This is why you need nurture early on in life. Reptile gets out of its egg, it's good to go. Humans, not so much!

Anyway, evolution itself kind of behaves in a greedy way. As a software engineer, I totally understand this. If I am maintaining a piece of software in the long run, if we just let it evolve without stepping in and refactoring the design, it will just look like a layer of crap over some other layer of crap, with a hacky interface between the two. Well, it turns out that's exactly how evolution works. There's no design, it's just a series of software hacks.

What I'm getting at is, your cortex isn't really all that compatible with your "lower" brain... You think these thoughts, like "oh, I really should exercise and think in the long term" but your reptilian brain doesn't give a shit.

But, like I said, the cortex is adaptable, and so your best bet is to build neural pathways that allow just the right combination of trusting the instincts of your lower brain (hey, it did get you this far), while keeping it in check in the situations where you know it's wrong for the long term.

As for the whole "you can't have fun all the time" thing... that's physiologically true as well. Nerves get saturated and dull. If something touches you, you feel it. But if it stays there for a long time, you don't feel it anymore until it moves around. Same with sight. Your eyes have to constantly move around, because your optic nerve gets saturated. Just try blankly staring at one dot for a bit, and you'll see things going hazy from saturation. Hearing, same thing. Ever sat in a room with a loud air conditioner you didn't notice after a while, and then it turns off, and you're like... "hey, that was actually really loud and I didn't even notice it!" Same principle at work.

And alas, the same is true for your various brain chemicals. If you're constantly on an endorphin rush, your receptors will tire out and you won't feel it anymore until it goes away for a while. Ever had a day at the amusement park where you kept going on roller coasters? That "rush" disappears after a while, and you don't feel anything going down the big steep hill anymore. You have to go home, wait a while, and then do it again. So you have to change things up. If you have a favourite food, don't eat it every day. Come up with different favourite foods and switch it up all the time. While you're still enjoying your current favourite song, always expose yourself to new music as well, and by the time the old favourite comes out of favour, you'll have developed new favourites. Keep variety flowing into your life.

So, that's the recipe:
1) Build up good interaction with your reptilian side, allowing you to stay focused on long term goals.
2) Be aware of habituation, and change things up!

Have fun!

I like doing laundry because the machine does the cleaning for me, if only i didn't have to go to the laundry mat :\ and have one in my apartment.
Mind you, there used to be no laundry machines back then and had to do it by hand, i sometimes wash socks and undies by hand because it's only small items.
If only i had a dishwasher :\ i hate washing it myself, but got to do it.

Originally Posted by hathor28

I hate washing it myself, but got to do it.

To expand further on this: although some tasks may seem very monotonous, as intelligent and independent thinkers, we are able to consider the pros and cons of doing such an action (I'd like to say this is the same for everybody, but some people are too focused on living in the now to make something of themselves). We understand that an action, if it is something we do not want to do, can have other gains despite it taking a lot of effort to do it. For example, as Hathor said here, she hates washing the dishes herself but she realises that she has to do it. This is because she knows that from washing the dishes, she will be able to eat food off of a nice, bacteria free (almost) dish so she will not get infected by anything in the long run. She also knows that if she does not do the dishes, she will have other negative effects which far out-way the positives: pots piling up and becoming unsightly and socially unacceptable, could possibly attract vermin etc. All actions have some kind of motivation to them and it is that ability to judge the pros and cons of doing an action that allow us to do tasks that we don't necessarily want to do, such as staying in school and studying hard.