Why Do We Suck at Doing Even Easy Things? (And How To Get Better At Them) (Patreon)

For an adult who knew better, my track record on (for?) flossing and nighttime brushing was, for a long time, far weaker than it should have been. Like, what, I don’t have five minutes each evening* to take care of my teeth? Was I too much of a VIP for basic hygiene? Am I Jarod Lanier or 1970s Bill Gates? I mean, WTF, right?

Once I noticed myself trying to accumulate documentary evidence of scientific studies refuting the need for good brushing and flossing habits, I knew I was in trouble. Not because these studies are necessarily wrong, but because I was seeking excuses for a bad kind of laziness (there are good kinds of laziness, such as Gratzonian subtlety and Pareto optimization, but this isn’t one of them).

Maybe, assuming a tooth-friendly diet, we don’t need to brush and floss twice a day, but you know what? I want to.

So what gives? What caused such silly suckage? One answer that hit me as I was brushing and flossing the other night was space travel. Specifically, inertia. Specifically, escape velocity.

Another answer was sports. Specifically, ice hockey and ultimate frisbee, two sports I used to play almost every day before discretion became the better part of valor in terms of risking limb and life. In both cases, I noticed that the fastest-moving players did not have more raw speed than me (I had plenty), but they were awesome at pivoting. They were great accelerators; they could change direction and speed very rapidly.

Back to space travel. When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they travelled over 600,000km round-trip. But, and I can’t find the exact numbers on this, they used most of their fuel just getting off the ground and into orbit. Just leaving the Earth’s gravitational pull (apparently, in theory, you never fully leave it — all objects’ gravitational fields continue infinitely, but they do get small enough to ignore). Even regular aeroplanes use up a quarter of their entire fuel supply just taking off, just in those first ten kilometers of a ten-thousand kilometer trip.

This is why “Atomic Habits” work; it’s why something like Neutrino works. Because starting is always the hardest part. Not just a little harder. It’s like virtually all the hardness, in terms of energy requirements, is in the starting. Chemical reactions are similar; they require very high activation energies. If you just win that battle, you can cruise on good inertia. Until another roadblock comes up, at least.

So don’t beat yourself up. You’re not in rut, you’re just on a rogue planet you were exploring, and you need some big old booster rockets to reach escape velocity, to get you back into space and/or to the next planet. 

Yet another way of thinking of it is that you need a metaphorical enzyme that will lower the required activation energy (this is what environmental manipulation is) for the biochemical reaction you’re wanting to fire up. To the extent that all life is biochemistry, this is both literally and figuratively true. Personally, my skill at environmental manipulation, a catalyst that encourages good behavior without itself being consumed, has reached a level so high that I’ve sort of maxed it out in many situations, such that I do occasionally need to fall back onto using short, sharp bursts of force, in addition to the low-effort finesse I have grown to love.

You need booster rockets, but you don’t need or want then turned on for a long time; you don’t need to turn into a weary, Type A martinet with high blood pressure. Be selective, not exhaustive, in your use of energy. Get a toothbrush into your mouth and call it a win.

*In re-engineering my brushing habits, if I can give so grand a name to so small a task, I discovered that I had been trying too hard to brush right before bed. But I am way too tired by then; I might as well be drunk (I’ve never tried alcohol, but I feel like being drunk must be like being really sleepy: motor and cognitive functions collapse; memory gets hazy; poor decisions are made). The secret for me was to brush a few hours before my actual sleep time, while my brain and body we’re still fully functional, and then spend the night reading until the Sandman comes, as is my wont.