you are addicted to potential

and yet you won't let yourself fulfil it

there is a specific feeling of being on the verge.

a feeling of having decided that tomorrow, or monday, or the new term, or after this one last thing, you are going to become a different kind of person.

you are going to become more disciplined. more focused. more consistent.

you can feel that person. they exist, vividly, just ahead of you. and in the moments when you’re imagining them most clearly (like in making the plan, setting up the systems, watching the video about the morning routine, buying the notebook) there is something that feels almost like satisfaction. it feels like some part of you has already crossed a threshold.

and then you don’t cross it. not quite. you negotiate with your plan. your system lasts four days. your notebook stays mostly blank.

rather than sitting with what happened, you find yourself, almost without noticing, back at the beginning of the loop: planning again, imagining again, feeling, again, the comfort of being about to become someone better.

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the possible self and what happens when you live inside it

in 1986, psychologists hazel markus and paula nurius introduced the concept of possible selves: the representations we hold of who we might become, both aspirational and feared. this includes the ideal selves we hope to realise, as well as the selves we’re anxious about becoming, and the selves we believe we could be if circumstances were different or effort were sustained. possible selves, markus and nurius argued, are not idle fantasy; instead, they are cognitively active, motivationally significant structures that shape how we interpret our current behaviour and what directions of change feel available to us.

this is the constructive function of the possible self: it gives you something to move toward. the student who can vividly imagine themselves as competent and engaged has a cognitive scaffold that organises effort in ways that the student with no such image doesn’t.

but there is a shadow function that the research opened up: when the possible self becomes load-bearing in your identity (i.e. when “i could be disciplined”, “i could succeed”, “i could be the person who shows up consistently” becomes not a direction of travel but a description of who you currently are) something structurally dangerous happens. the possible self stops being a goal and starts being a possession. the issues lies in the fact possessions, unlike goals, have to be protected.

action threatens the possible self. specifically: the action of actually testing whether you are, in fact, the person you believe you could be is threatening because the test might return a negative result. and if it does, you lose not just the attempt but the identity that was resting on the belief in the attempt’s potential success.

so the psychological architecture whose primary function is maintaining a coherent and positive sense of self does what it always does when the self is threatened: it avoids. it finds reasons to delay and it produces an endless succession of preliminary conditions that need to be met before the real work can begin, because the preliminary conditions are safe and the real work is not.

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why imagining it feels almost as good as doing it

kent berridge, a neuroscientist at the university of michigan, spent decades untangling what had been assumed to be a single thing and turned out to be two completely different systems.

the assumption was that dopamine, the neurotransmitter most associated with reward and pleasure, was primarily responsible for the experience of enjoyment. the loop was thought to be: you do something pleasurable → dopamine releases → you feel good → you’re motivated to repeat it.

berridge found that this was wrong. dopamine is not primarily a pleasure neurotransmitter. it is a wanting neurotransmitter: dopamine is the neurochemical of the motivated pursuit of a reward that has not yet arrived. the system that produces the feeling of enjoyment (what berridge called the “liking” system) runs on different substrates entirely: opioid and endocannabinoid mechanisms, not dopamine.

wanting and liking are separable. you can want something intensely without liking it much when you get it. you can like something without particularly wanting it. the wanting system (the dopaminergic seeking circuit) fires not in response to the reward itself but in response to stimuli that predict the reward.

this means that imagining yourself as the disciplined, successful person you could be fires the seeking system in ways that are neurologically similar to, and sometimes stronger than, actually being that person.

the wanting is activated by the vision.

the liking, when and if the work is done, is less immediate than the wanting was.

this is why the planning high is real. it is also why the visualisation session produces something that feels like progress, and why watching a video about productivity generates a motivational feeling that is genuine and neurologically grounded and still leaves you no closer to doing the thing. the dopaminergic reward is delivered by the anticipation of the identity, not by the work required to earn it.

a brain that is receiving the reward without the effort has, from a purely motivational standpoint, limited reason to undergo the effort.

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the productivity content trap

i want to apply this specifically to something that i think is one of the more insidious features of the current information environment (and that I, admittedly, can be part of).

the internet has produced an ecosystem of content whose explicit purpose is to help you become more productive and more disciplined. it is, individually, often genuinely useful - I always try to ground my content in real research and produce real insight, for example.

the issue lies in what consuming it does, at a neurological level, when consumed as a substitute for the behaviour it describes rather than as a supplement to it.

watching a video about discipline is a performance of the identity of someone who takes self-improvement seriously. it activates the possible self: the version of you that has the morning routine and the consistent study habit and the organised system. and it delivers a dopaminergic signal that is the neurological signature of progress.

it does this without requiring any of the things the actual behaviour requires.

the consumption of productivity content at scale trains the brain to associate the idea of self-improvement with reward. the actual self-improvement, which involves difficulty and failure and imperfect execution, produces a much weaker and more delayed signal. the content is a shortcut that bypasses the effort while delivering the feeling of progress, and a brain offered a shortcut to reward will, with impressive consistency, take it.

if you have spent significant time consuming content about how to be more productive and disciplined and focused, and you have not become noticeably more productive and disciplined and focused, this is not because the content was bad or because you are irremediably lazy; it is because the content was doing something to your brain’s reward architecture that made the actual change less neurologically necessary.

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the ego protection mechanism

claude steele’s research on self-affirmation established that when the self-image is threatened by failure, by evidence of inadequacy, or by the possibility of either, the brain mobilises resources to restore its integrity. it does this not primarily through addressing the source of the threat and instead looks to affirm the self in other domains.

in other words: the ego is not especially interested in accuracy. it is interested in coherence and positivity, and it will go to significant lengths (including elaborate self-deception about why now is not the right time to begin) to maintain a self-image that the test of action might complicate.

the person who believes that they could be disciplined if they really committed (i.e. the person believing that they have the prerequisite potential, intelligence, and capacity) is holding a self-concept that action would risk. this is not because action would necessarily disprove it, thought that may be the case, rather because action introduces uncertainty, and uncertainty means the verdict is no longer in your control. Losing control of the verdict is, to the ego’s accounting, worse than not seeking a verdict at all.

the potential self is, in this sense, an extraordinarily well-defended position. it is unfalsifiable as long as it remains untested. and the ego, which is in the business of maintaining positive self-regard, has every incentive to keep it that way.

what this produces, at the behavioural level, is a sustained high opinion of one’s own potential alongside a persistent gap between that potential and what’s actually being produced.

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what actually breaks the loop

the wrong answer is more motivation. motivation, as i’ve written before, follows action rather than preceding it.

the wrong answer is also better planning, for the obvious reason that planning is the drug. more elaborate planning produces more of the dopaminergic anticipation signal and less of the actual behaviour change.

what actually works, according to the implementation intentions research by the same peter gollwitzer whose symbolic self-completion work is elsewhere in my essays, is the specific removal of the decision point. gollwitzer’s implementation intentions are if-then structures: “if it is tuesday at 3pm and i have finished lunch, then i will open my notes before i open anything else.” the if-then formulation bypasses the moment of choice (which is the moment in which the ego can produce reasons to delay) by making the behaviour automatic rather than deliberate.

the cognitive mechanism is the transfer of initiation from the effortful, ego-involved intentional system to the relatively automatic if-then system. the starting was decided in advance, in a moment of lower emotional investment, and then the trigger just fires.

the second thing that works is a specific reframe of the identity question. james clear, drawing on a body of research on identity-based change, argues that the most durable behaviour change doesn’t come from goal-setting (things like “i want to become disciplined”) but from identity claims grounded in evidence: “i am someone who did this thing today.”

this means you aren’t constantly defining only the possible self. you are, instead, defining the self who acted, however imperfectly, and can therefore make a specific evidenced claim about who they are.

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the potential self is not real

the fully-realised version of yourself that the potential self promises does not exist and cannot be interacted with, protected, or inhabited.

the only self that exists is the one performing actions in the present tense, and the only evidence about who you are comes from those actions accumulated over time.

the addiction to potential is an addiction to a feeling that substitutes for the messier, less neurologically spectacular, more durable experience of actually moving. it is a comfortable place to live. it is also, structurally, a place from which nothing gets made and nothing about the actual self changes.

you are allowed to have potential. you are not allowed to mistake it for an achievement.

erin x