Created: February 20, 2021
Modified: June 07, 2021
Modified: June 07, 2021
change-signaling event
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Say you want to make a big personal change: to stop smoking, or to stop eating meat, or to meditate every day, or introduce yourself to a stranger every day, or so on.
- It may seem pointless to start a practice if you're not confident that your future self will keep it up. If you have the willpower not to smoke today, but you're sure that eventually you'll relapse, then why not just do it today?
- If you can credibly commit your future self to continuing the practice, it becomes easier to do it today.
- In order to believe in your future self, you need an answer as to why your future self will behave differently from your past self. What's changed?
- A change-signaling event answers this question. It can be a breakup, a move, a near-death experience, a psychedelic trip, having a child, or anything that substantially resets your life rhythms or thought processes. It creates a breakpoint in your identity, so that your models of your future self (in particular, negative models like "I will never succeed" or "I will never be able to keep this up") are less confident.
- If you're having trouble making a big change in your life, you shouldn't conclude that you're incapable of changing. You may just need the right change-signaling event.
- Change-signaling events are necessarily significant experiences that have a first-order effect on your identity (otherwise they wouldn't be able to function as change signaling events). The signaling is a second-order phenomenon: the fact of the identity shift allows you to replace an old detrimental feedback loop with a new helpful one.
- For example, the first-order effect of becoming a parent is that you can now identify as being a parent. A second-order consequence of this change is that it opens up the ability to replace an old feedback loop (there's no point in quitting smoking, because I'll never keep it up) with a new helpful one (I'm a new person now and this person will keep it up, for the child).