The Friction to be Resolved:

“I'd say the main one right now is social port for me. I keep meaning to spend more time with family, but I always justify that I'll do it "soon" and just never doing it. On the plus side, I'm getting better with my maintenance scripts! I've finally gotten into the habit of brushing my teeth regularly and I'm keeping up with household tasks”

Solution-Matrix Table of Contents:

  1. Potential Friction Block #1: The Guilt of Absence

  2. Precision Solution #1: Framework Switching

  3. Potential Friction Block #2: The Inertia Factor

  4. Precision Solution #2: The 10-Minute Sync

  5. Potential Friction Block #3: Hyperbolic Discounting

  6. Precision Solution #3: Multi-Stage Rewarding Protocol

  7. Potential Friction Block #4: Effort, Benefit, and CPU-Availability Calculating

  8. Precision Solution #4 (A&B): Effort Minimizing and Benefit Maximizing

  9. Potential Friction Block #5: Temporary-Solution Feedback Loop (“Soon”)

  10. Precision Solution #5: Now or Never

Imagine this sequence of events:

  • Your brain has added the “should” tag to “spend time with my family.”

  • The part of your subconscious brain that monitors for things you “should” do (we’ll call it “The Should Scanner”) scans your recent memory and finds your “spend time with my family” task: overdue.

  • Because the Should Scanner has calculated the “should” task as “overdue,” it issues a ping to your conscious mind, reminding you that this needs to be done.

  • Your conscious brain receives the ping. But, maybe you’re out of CPU right now. Or, maybe your schedule this week is already packed. Or… any number of other reasons why that first ping can’t be satisfied.

  • You say, “later.”

  • The Should Scanner is satisfied for the moment, but because it’s the “Should” Scanner, it also attaches a debt to the task: -1 should.

  • Now, imagine this scenario repeating itself: the Should Scanner reminds you to spend time with your family, you say “soon,” and the Should Scanner shuts up for a little while, but not before attaching one more debt… one more -1 should.

  • Eventually, those -1 shoulds start adding up.

  • Let’s say that at this moment in time, you’re up to -100 should.

  • Your brain registers this as a massive should-debt.

  • Now, the situation is different than it was at the beginning.

  • Now, when you think about spending time with your family, the Should Scanner reminds you of the score: -100 should owed to your family.

  • Your brain is telling you that, when you see your family, you need to settle that debt.

  • You cannot repay that much should.

  • Since you don’t have the debt-repayment to bring with you (because it’s now unreasonably large) when you spend time with your family, you put the task off until an imaginary future time when you will have that debt-repayment to bring with you.

  • Hint: you will never have the full repayment. If this is your friction block, you need to zero-out that debt through a different means.

[In this section, I will try to convince them to abandon virtue ethics and deontology completely, and focus entirely on consequentialism.

Virtue ethics is about the quality of your character. If the Should Scanner is registering a -100 should debt, virtue ethics will drag your sense of character-worth down. This is not going to get you to the “spending time with your family.”

Deontology is about which actions should be done. The Should Scanner reporting a -100 should debt is going to report that you are too far behind. You will never catch up on the should (deontology) measurement. No matter how much effort your put into it, you’ll still be behind. Why bother?

Consequentialism is about doing the-next-good-thing. It carries no debt. It does not care about the past. It only cares about what you do next.

By consciously switching to a consequentialist view, you automatically zero-out that -100 should debt with one single action.

Now, your brain is no longer telling you that you have to answer for the past, you just have to do one good thing right now.]