NO USE RUNNING, BETTER START EARLY!
RIEN NE SERT DE COURIR, IL FAUT PARTIOR À POINT
An interesting approach of motivation in five cases of people who do not seem to be able to be motivated on what they have to do though they are absolutely and compulsively and obsessively motivated to do something that is failing their own interest. The five cases are
1- A procrastinator who always waits for the last minute to write his (it is a boy) papers and fulfill his assignments.
2- A gym-goer who wants to keep in shape but after a while, she (it is a girl) stops doing it and becomes demotivated.
3- A smoker who is not understood as being a man or a woman and who wants to stop smoking, plus vaporizing as an option or an alternative.
4- A video gamer who is living through on OCD addiction to videogames. He seems to be a boy
5- The sleeper, once again a boy, who just oversleeps all the time.
It is a practical book that may help some people who just want practical recipes to achieve a goal in these five situations. I have no authority to discuss these practical recipes or suggestions. But I will make a couple of remarks on the wider question of motivation. The word “conative,” which means “a wish, intention or effort to do something” is for me too weak. We are speaking of motivation which is based on the need to do something to achieve a goal; the mostly socialized obligation to do something in order to satisfy demands from the society around you; and the satisfaction you may experience when your task is completed. Then and only then there might be some pleasure, though I would prefer 1,000% the term satisfaction. By satisfying your duty, obligation, task and by satisfying social demands for you to do this or that, you experience personal satisfaction in proportion to the satisfaction you bring to other people.
For me, an educator, this is the central concept and frankly, pleasure is not the main motivating element. The concept of “pleasure unconscious” is nothing but a desexualized libido because Freud and other psychoanalysts have oversexualized this concept of libido. At the same time, the concept of the unconscious is itself oversexualized by Freud and other psychoanalysts. So, it does not solve the problem and the insistence in several chapters on onanism as a distraction from real pleasure only governed and commanded by the pleasure unconscious of the onanist is for me beyond reasonable understanding. Pleasure is not the proper term because pleasure can be disruptive as the author shows. The proper term is satisfaction. When you are hungry you satisfy that hunger by eating just what you need. Beyond you eat for no reason at all except an OCD drive that does not even bring pleasure really, only some morbid – I insist morbid – over-eating. The worst case is, of course, the case of an addiction, like tobacco or it could be sweet candy or alcohol. And there in this approach, I am afraid the objective is not to free the individual of the addiction itself, but only to bring him to some kind of socially acceptable control of his addiction.
The patches are not supposed to be a substitute for cigarettes, but unluckily they are for many people and thus fail or relapse is common after a while. The vaporizer is even worse since it normally weans the subject from nicotine, but it just keeps him addicted to the gesture and this gesture which is body language for oneself and for the people around is an addiction too. The smoker is not free to do what he wants. He is addicted to a periodical and regular compulsory obsessive gesture that may last as long as he wants. In the same way, an alcoholic is trained by some doctors and even hospitals into shifting from alcohol to some other beverage like water, coffee, tea, coca cola, any soft drink, or energy drinks, or whatever that is drunk. And once again the real addiction attached to the gesture of drinking is kept just as obsessive and compulsive as it was when the alcoholic was an alcoholic. In those two cases, it explains how easily relapse is.
The gymgoer is a different case because if this physical activity to remain fit is shared with someone the satisfaction is multiplied since it is pleasurable to do something with someone else, it is satisfying to do something for oneself, to help someone else to do something for themselves and to be helped by someone else to do something for oneself. It is typically socially-shared satisfaction, and satisfaction, first of all, that may bring some pleasure.
The cases the author takes about pleasure become absurd if you look at them in terms of satisfaction. If you find pleasure in any form of shared or onanistic pleasure-seeking activity – which is quite natural since this activity is pleasure-seeking – you are not going to say afterward to your partner: “Well, I have satisfied my matrimonial duties, and now I can go back to serious activities.” And it is always true. An alcoholic is not going to say after drinking a whole bottle of Bourbon (he could not even be able to think anyway): “Now I have satisfied this drinking of one full bottle of Bourbon, I can go back to something more constructive.” It would ignore the very principle of addiction: it fulfills a certain behavior, gesture, and action, and it brings no real pleasure because that pleasure is an illusion, an artificial paradise: it is mental onanism. I am afraid the author is aware of this and tries to tell people there are easy solutions, though he knows there is none. Like for the sleeper at the very end: he might be someone who has to sleep more than the norm, so “Coffee might help!” The man is addicted to sleeping, physiologically and mentally addicted to sleeping and the author only suggests another addiction to coffee which could become very fast very dangerous (ulcers, heart problems, and social behavior).
That’s the elements that really bother me. The problems are not solved in any way they are displaced, in fact, transferred from one unacceptable attitude or action or addiction to another acceptable attitude or action or addiction. From my own experience with learners of all types, such problems as those examined here are the result of a social shortcoming in the education of people, when they are young as much as when they are older. It never is considered as being self-learning. Everything is a set of objectives given to the individual with the order to perform them in due time. But the objectives are not those set by the learners themselves according to what they like doing and with a certain guidance from other people, a group of peers or a “guide/counselor” who just follows the learners from afar and yet from close enough to make sure the motivation does not go down, which it should not do if the objectives are those set by the learners themselves from what they like. Michel de Montaigne in the Renaissance explained that mathematics is essential in the education of a person who will be a trader, a merchant, a shopkeeper, etc., but learning mathematics can come from playing cards as well as from managing a herd of sheep. And if the learners are concentrating on what they like and what they consider as their own objectives, the objectives deep in themselves they have come to believe they are their own and that dictate their behavior and actions, there should be no motivation problem, hence no procrastination and no addiction
That’s what I am missing in this book.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU