The main idea
It’s important to discriminate between description and instruction. Interpreting descriptions as instructions can lead you to trying to recreate the end state, rather than execute the process that gets you there:
- Someone describes a state or outcome
- You think it sounds good and want it for yourself
- If you take the description as instructions, you try to replicate what it looks like from the outside
- It doesn’t work, because the process for changing your situation is rarely as simple as “appear to already be there”
One does not be in Paris by walking around looking a place to buy croissants, listening out for accordions, expecting to see the Eiffel Tower, etc. To be in Paris, you have to get to Paris, which is doing a bunch of things that are not being in Paris: find passport, book flights, go to airport, board plane, etc. Being in Paris is a consequence of that process happening, and the description doesn’t tell you about the process.
I call it “cargo culting the outcome” because it is akin to standing on the runway waving glowing sticks around in the hope that it will summon an airplane. There is a process to summoning an airplane, and it’s not waving the sticks: waving the sticks is a consequence of the plane already having arrived.
Confusing a description for instructions and trying to get there by replicating the end state happens all the time:
A: Being a morning person is great!
B: I’d like to be a morning person, but getting up that early is a huge slog for me. How do you do it?
A: Well, my alarm goes off at 5am; I stretch, get out of bed, make a cup of coffee, and go for a walk or stand on the back porch and watch the sun rise. Then I come in and take my morning shower, and by 6am I feel vital and ready to take on the day!
B: attempts to do this, sleeps through alarm, is cold and angry going outside so early, feels like a failure
A has described what it is like to be a morning person. This is fine, but it is not a set of instructions on how to become a morning person: what everyone missed here is that B is still going to bed at 2am. “Figure out what needs to change in order to sustain going to bed at 9-10pm so you can get enough sleep” is the actual instruction.
Deep dive: the Metta Sutta
The Metta Sutta is a well known Buddhist text that extols the virtues of mettā, roughly translated as lovingkindness.
It begins “this is what should be done” by a person of virtue, and proceeds to enumerate quite the list:
- be able and upright
- be straightforward and gentle in speech
- be humble and not conceited
- be contented, easily satisfied
- be unburdened with duties
- be frugal
- be peaceful, calm, wise, and skillful
- don’t be proud or demanding
- don’t deceive anyone
- don’t despise anyone, in any state
- don’t wish harm upon others
- cherish all living beings
- radiate kindness over the world: upwards to the skies, downwards to the depths, outward and unbounded
- you should also do this regardless of your physical posture (standing or walking, sitting or lying down)
It’s easy to read this as a list of instructions: do this, and you will be virtuous. But if you want to be a virtuous person, and you take this as a rulebook, this list might constrain your behaviour, facilitate you acting from places of fear or shame, and beating yourself up when you “break a rule”.
But if you look at this as a description of an already virtuous person, it makes a lot more sense: these are the kinds of actions that come naturally to someone who has broadly dealt with their shit and is living nonreactively, with attention to their surroundings.
In this frame, it’s a description of a potential future outcome for you, without saying anything about how to get there. If you decide that’s appealing, you might ask start asking for instructions on how to become virtuous, and perhaps discover any number of paths: sitting on a cushion and dismantle your brain using any number of spiritual systems; taking psychedelics; doing IFS and making friends with your parts. You can then work on those things, and maybe one day you’ll discover you’ve become virtuous by accident.
What about “fake it til you make it”?
Maybe. This might just be semantics, but my problem with “fake it til you make it” is the faking it.
To me faking it implies some dishonesty - not wanting to be caught, by either the audience or yourself: the sense that there is something to “get away with” or someone to fool.
There are frames that don’t have the baggage of inauthenticity attached to them: acting, dress-up, experimentation. None of those imply that there is a secret “other you” that you are hiding; to me they feel closer to “you can just do things”.
But I do think that there’s a path where you make an attempt, see what blocks you, address that, and repeat. Maybe that’s just unappealing to me because I’m risk averse and knowing I have guideposts makes me feel a little safer.
Conclusion
It can help a lot to pay attention to whether someone is giving a description or instructions, and not confusing the former for the latter. It is not always true that “appear like the description” is the correct instruction for embodying it, in which case “how did you go from being a person who doesn’t do these things to someone who does?” can be a useful question.
And you can help others not fall into this trap by gesturing to the process that got you there, so people are reminded that getting there might be a process.
List of places this idea comes up
- Good reply game is a description of pleasant online behaviours that is downstream of being a warm, open person.