0 Urgency

_28.6.2021_ For so long time I think that I'm lazy. I think that most people are lazy. Poor people are lazy. C students are lazy. Fat people are lazy. This world is full of lazy people. When I woke up this morning I found myself that I need to go to toilet to poop. I was not lazy at all. It urges me to do it no matter what. Nothing and no one can stop me. It turned out that someone else was in the toilet. I felt restless and used all that I had to hold it for a while. To that point I thought that I was not lazy at all nor easily gave up. I was persistent and focus. And to tell the truth, I never fail even once to go to toilet when I need to poop. I am succeed 100% of the time. It's urgent and demanding. My brain just shut down everything else and focus in this assignment to be finished successfully. No drama, not excuses, nothing but "just do it". Marcel Proust said "to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey." It's so true in my case. If I don't do it or ignore it, my body feels pain. To avoid the pain, I do it voluntarily with great priority. In Javanese it's called "rawe-rawe rantas, malang-malang putung", it means nothing can stop me to do it, no matter what. This warrior mentality, everyone has and practice it every day. So the motivation is to avoid pain. Pain is the key and the best effective way to accomplish any task. It's negative motivation. People go to doctor because they are afraid of death and sickness. People work hard every day because they do not want to live in poverty and suffer from hunger. All activities are basically to get pleasure and avoid pain. Today people try to use pleasure to seduce people to do what they want. It's positive motivation to get pleasure. When the motivation is to get pleasure, the activity and the result are often negative. People are addicted to social media, junk foods, online games, porn, and drugs. The motivation is to get pleasure. When the motivation is to avoid pain, the activity and the result are often positive. People eat healthy foods, read books, exercise, do meditation. People are often confused by positive and negative. Is it right to force people to do good? It's right to force ourselves to do good, to eat healthy, read books, exercise, meditate. If ignorance people should choose by themselves, they would choose self-sabotage, they would destroy themselves and others through pleasures. But it's their choice as long as it doesn't violate any legal law. Good action is often involve immediate pain and delayed pleasure. In contrary, bad action is often involve immediate pleasure and delayed pain. One must be careful to immediate pleasure. It's often false promise. To be able to see it clearly, one must seek knowledge and understanding first as the priority. Understanding is true power. "Ignorance is the only evil there is", Socrates said, and "knowledge is the only good." If negative motivation is very effective and actually bring positive results, then how to apply this to our life? Negative motivation has its consequences as well. For example, if a student study hard because someone will punish him otherwise, he will stop studying if the punisher is not exist anymore. So, negative motivation can only be positive and last long only when it comes from self-understanding, not from external force. When people do good because they are afraid of police, if the police is not there or when no one notice, he will stop doing good. So negative motivation must be applied out of self-awareness, just like what Ulysses did to listen the siren song without being killed. To the same understanding, today we can apply Ulysses pact or Ulysses contract. This contract will tie us to the consequences that we'll get if we fail to do the assignment. For example I want to be a painter and I promise to paint a painting every single day. I ask my friend to keep my money, and if I fail even once to paint every day, the money will be his as my punishment. The sum of the money must be big enough that I don't want to lose it no matter what. It works. If a man is serious enough to do something, he would be willing to make the contract. People are not really lazy. They don't see the far future consequences clearly. They think they know but they don't. It's easy to make assumption that we know the consequences. People often overestimate their knowledge about what they do not know. They are too confidence and then they make bad decision every day. People always do what they thing as their best option at the moment. They are always choosing but they often choose out of ignorance. They can only see what is there and ignorance to what will be there. They do not see the urgency of studying, exercising, or working hard like when they need to poop. Without urgency and direct consequences, the most logical decision is to choose what is pleasurable at the moment. This is the basic instinct of human to survive. They eat as many as possible when they see foods because they do not know when they will see foods again. That's the urgency, to survive. Psychologists had done the famous marshmallow test to kids. The result was clear that the kids who were able to delay the gratification would be more successful in the future. Those kids who were impulsive in their actions and failed to the test, they would be less successful. In the past I made so many terrible decisions that I thought they were amazing at that time. I bought too much stuffs I didn't need and I didn't save money at all. I spent my time on social media and was addicted. I can't believe I did that. It is a long process to realize how hard to make the right decision in life. Now, what will I do with my time and my life? More I know, more I realize that I have very little self-control. I need to apply Ulysses pact in my life to achieve what I want to achieve. I do not and can't trust my own promise. I break my promise all the time because it has no consequences. I can only trust my habit and build it bit by bit, it will be easier with the help of Ulysses contract.