You Won’t Remember This
Mid-learning, Midjourney
I've consumed hundreds of hours of self-improvement content, mostly on Youtube. Representative titles from my watch history include "Things I Wish I Knew in My 20's, "The procrastination cure you don't want to hear," and "Conquer bad habits in 16 seconds".
I have watched all these videos and hundreds more like them. Why have I done this? One reason, and a good guess for why anyone does anything, is that they're easy. I don’t seek them out; they come to me, highly recommended by an ever-learning algorithm that knows me (at least in some ways) better than I know myself. Besides being easy, they feel good. They feel like progress, that most addicting of orientations. I am being entertained in the moment, and I'm gaining the tools to improve myself today, tomorrow, and into the bright, indefinite future.
What have I learned? What are some of the things I should've known in my 20's or maybe a few of the tips for conquering procrastination?
I actually can't tell you. Because I don't remember any of it.
And obviously, I haven't done any of it.
As a child…
I was shocked and scandalized when I found out that some of my friends watched TV with their families while they ate dinner.
To my young mind, this represented a grave moral failing. Silently shoveling food into their mouths while their brains got sucked out through their eyeballs — how could it be allowed?
My parents had strict rules about screens. TV was a weekend-only privilege, and then only after dinner (an experiment allowing Sunday morning cartoons ended after loud sibling disagreements about which cartoons were the best). We were made to understand that screens and the easy entertainment they offered were treats that, like ice cream after dinner, we had to earn.
I would have 100% opted into TV dinners had that been an option; it just wasn't. In my world, screen entertainment was alluring and without intrinsic value. Particularly as children with limited pre-frontal cortex development, we were susceptible to its allure, so it was right to keep TV and video games separate from the important parts of life. Like the ice cream we could have only if we finished our dinner, too much of it would make us sick.
Today, society recognizes me as an adult, and among the myriad privileges conferred upon me, I can eat ice cream for breakfast. I was taught, at an age when I had less agency, that I shouldn't, and aside from a few experiments, that teaching has stuck. For the most part, I was given the tools to navigate the nutritional environment before I had to stare down a pint of mint chip, the best ice cream flavor, on my own.
As an “adult”…
As adults, we can choose to be entertained every waking moment of the day.
To accept or even consider this offer, we have to be able to tell ourselves that the entertainment is healthy, or at least, relatively harmless.
When I watch the 10-minute Youtube video called "The Life-Changing Advice I Wish I Knew in My 20's," it feels like I'm doing a good thing. Those 6 tips, I'm integrating them into my belief system. Those mistakes that the author made, I'll skip past those now. I’m eating a sandwich and checking my work email and my phone, but I’m learning.
It's so seductive, the idea you can become smarter and more interesting while you do the dishes or fold the laundry or take a shower.
The benefits are intuitive: the time passes more quickly and you get to feel good about yourself. Self-help content, and infotainment more broadly, seem to circumvent the mental gag reflex activated by excess entertainment for entertainment’s sake. When we watch the Avengers, we understand that Thor hitting someone in the face with a hammer and delivering an Asgaardian quip is fun, and we mentally account for it as such. But when we watch someone talk about how they conquered their crippling procrastination (and how you can too!!!), it feels like the real thing. That sense of real progress feels real good. It's reassuring, it’s inspiring, it’s… vicarious.
The psychological concept for why it feels good and real, but is actually bad, is called vicarious goal fulfillment. A research paper written by several people who did more school than I describes it thusly (emphasis mine):
A signature feature of self-regulation is that once a goal is satiated, it becomes deactivated, thereby allowing people to engage in new pursuits. The present experiments provide evidence for vicarious goal satiation, a novel phenomenon in which individuals experience “post-completion goal satiation” as a result of unwittingly taking on another person's goal pursuit and witnessing its completion.
General purpose infotainment permeates previously protected crevices of our lives by presenting itself as productive and inherently valuable ("I can learn from the greatest minds in entrepreneurship while I fold the laundry!") The entertainment gag reflex is neutralized, so you can consume lots of it. Personal development (or self-help) infotainment does all the above, and it deactivates goal pursuit through vicarious goal fulfillment.
It's intellectual pornography, a convenient means to a satisfying release that acutely and chronically dulls interest in the real thing. The content satiates your drive to learn and develop yourself, while reducing the probability that you’ll... actually learn and develop yourself. Because the actual doing is hard, and there’s an unlimited, free, easy alternative, and you're an adult who can eat ice cream for breakfast and access the relief of "post-completion goal satiation" without faffing around with the "completion" part, and you can do it literally whenever you want.
What I do remember
Self-help infotainment's implicit promise that, by watching this video or listening to this podcast, you'll be able to integrate the espoused knowledge or habits or advice into your life — that promise is broken over and over again simply because you won't remember it. Any memory researcher can tell you that passive information consumption is the least effective way to learn something, with retention rates between 0 and 10%, depending on which papers you read and the time lag between the consumption and the prompt to recall.
The concept of vicarious goal fulfillment helps us understand an effect more pernicious than the broken promise of easy self-improvement — the blunting of the drive to do the one thing that self-help is supposed to help you do: help yourself.
This is sad, but maybe intuitive. Infotainment and self-help content are immensely popular across long-form and short-form video channels. Easy self-actualization will always be a compelling offer. I really do want to believe that I'm one insightful video, one life hack away from figuring it all out.
What have I learned from those hundreds of hours? Were they all misspent? Some patterns emerge, as defenders of spaced repetition might be happy to hear. (To those defenders, I say, remember when you built a three-month streak on DuoLingo and became fluent in French? Yeah, I don't remember that either).
What I do remember is that I should drink less, I should sleep more, and I should become celibate to retain all my sperm in order to build up my power as man. Seriously, things escalate quickly on YouTube.
And I've learned that I probably won't learn the secrets of life from someone performing self-awareness on the internet, he wrote as he performed self-awareness on the internet.
Because the "secrets" aren't secrets. Most of us know what we should be doing. The knowing is easy, remembering in the right moment is harder, but it's the doing that's difficult. Which is why we should be especially wary when the first one masquerades as the latter two.
Works Cited:
Kathleen C. McCulloch, Gráinne M. Fitzsimons, Sook Ning Chua, Dolores Albarracín,
Vicarious goal satiation, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 47, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 685-688,
ISSN 0022-1031, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.12.019.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103110002878)
The Life-Changing Advice I Wish I Knew in My 20s - Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and trendsetter for putting (the implication of) the word “fuck” into self-help titles
Petros Christodoulou, Learning is Remembering, https://gizmo.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering