Author Archives: Michael Griffiths

Good writing is difficult.

There are techniques, conventions, and styles to make most writing a “fill in the blanks” exercise. Most writing today is of this form – business writing being the most egregious example. Jargon is a result of the urge to make writing “easier” and “faster.” Certainly, jargon has distinct advantages – within a discipline, it communicates a great deal of information in a short space, once properly established.

But formulaic templates and jargon-istic writing makes for neither interesting nor particularly insightful writing. The business world is littered with examples of specious memos made possible by an overuse of the word “synergy,” just to name one. Academic writing, particularly at the undergraduate level, is similarly butchered in the name on convenience; students pen papers the night before, relying on the quintessential 5-paragraph essay template and a “fill in the blanks” mentality to flesh out their work.

This obviates the need determine the best way to present the information in an essay or document. Instead of examining the content one begins with and figuring out the form which most clearly, concisely, and elegantly conveys one’s conclusions, one can simply grab a popular template and shove information into it – throwing out the findings that aren’t accommodated by the template.

This is nothing more than a lack of creativity; a willful abdication of the responsibility to clearly convey one’s point in the name of convenience and speed.

I am, of course, guilty of this.

Ultimately, everything comes down to emotions. All motivation for action, and all action itself, is driven by emotion. I accumulate goals – things I want to achieve or obtain – and I can’t think of a single one that wasn’t driven by desire.

Humans are not automatons, blindly following a script (e.g. have sex, raise kids, die). It’s a bit more complicated than that; largely because our environment is more complicated. We need the ability to adapt, in the short term, to new stimuli and situations.

Emotions provide the “algorithm” to select goals, and work to achieve them. There is a near-infinite number of things an individual can do: whittling that down to a set of actionable items isn’t an easy task. Emotions provide that filter; people “want” status, companionship, love, power, etc. And people would like to avoid fear, pain, guilt, shame, and so on.

Overall, emotions are a pretty good method for navigating life.

However, I’ve found that difficulty arises when one’s goals are contradictory. For example: I want to learn about psychology, but I also want – in a much more immediate way – to sleep in, and languidly greet the day. I suddenly have a decision to make. A blind decision based on immediate emotions – e.g. which desire is “greater” at the time – is one way to “solve” the dilemma of what to do. It’s one that works pretty well, generally: typically, I get up in the morning.

One obvious problem to relying on emotion is that if you base your decisions on your emotions, you implicitly assume that your emotions are correct. However, emotions can (1) appear when confronted with incomplete, or misleading information, (2) be stunted, twisted, or damaged in the course of one’s life, rendering decisions made with those emotions rather poor indeed, and (3) be a tremendous source of internal strife when several emotions conflict.

Thus, you will inevitably run into situations where (1) you are forced to bear a great deal of stress, and (2) make poor decisions. People have “tools” to deal with this – cognitive dissonance reduction, for example, acts to reduce conflicting emotions by changing the underlying values that led to the emotions. And “rose-colored glasses ” will tend to make every decision seem good, or at least understandable, when viewed through hindsight.

The other problem – and the one I’m dealing with at the moment – is when you want to change your value system.

In these types of cases, you can run into situations where your existing value system is at odds with your “new” one. This is difficult to deal with, because the resulting emotions strongly discourage action to promote the new value system, leaving the status quo in place.

Given that “force of will” comes from your underlying value system, this makes attempting to modify it (or just outright replace it) somewhat… complicated.

I am beginning to believe that I will need to leverage some outside source of additional motivation (e.g. stimulate an emotion) to change my behavior. I am not sure what that is… religion is possible, but presents the same problems (having to accept a new value system). I suppose a rewards/punishment program would be most effective, given learning theory….