Intrinsic Motivation

There is one way to make yourself unhappy, and that is to hold unrealistic expectations. When I left my job in June last year, I left because I felt cheated. Work, certainly the sort of work that I was doing, relatively challenging and well paid, was meant to the rewarding. Turns out no and that they call it compensation for a reason. Maybe it works for some. I was certainly naive for taking the corporate propaganda at face value, with their patter about meaning and creativity and impact, rather than anything so base as money, but surely this notion that work can be both gainful and fulfilling is not all a lie?

To a depressive, motivation exudes a certain fetishistic allure, like luscious long hair to a bold head. Andrew Solomon calls the opposite of depression "not happiness, but vitality". It's about that energy required to bother about the business of living. Most people most mornings don't need a good reason to get out of bed. It just sort of happens. But imagine one day waking to discover that the impulse is missing. Darkness. Anguish does not even begin to convey it. That "why" is like waking up from the Matrix inside a windowless coffin with tubes coming out of your chest. Motivation is the blue pill. You want it because you miss the illusion of agency, the smell of freshly baked pastry and your friends.

Motivation can be mined from the world or generated in the mind. External motivation is the stick-and-carrot kind most of us discover in childhood. If you are human and not psychopathic, you probably prefer praise, validation, respect and curiosity to being abandoned by the canapés after giving your job title or just saying something naff. Money, status, power and fame (or the social capital they purchase) are powerful motivators. They also, like all drugs, build tolerance. Intrinsic motivation is necessary at least some of the time. I define this as anything you can generate independent of other humans and on top of the default instinct of survival.

I decided to go back to the basics. I believe work is a real human impulse. We might be naturally given to laziness, but I am not convinced that left to our own devices and free from want, we would spend all our time napping, nuzzling each other, frolicking and eating ice-cream (though there would be a lot more of that). We like making things and figuring stuff out. So in my seven months of gainful unemployment, I made a list: what keeps me engaged and motivated when there are no external incentives (money, praise etc). There are five things, so far. Progress, order, the intuition of coherence, mastery and art.

One - progress. If I am palpably changing the/my world for the better, whether by reading a book or doing the washing up, if the goal is drawing decidedly nearer, I usually persist. I like to finish things, complete tasks, tick things off lists and in general have a sense that things are moving forward. I also like walking, driving, hiking and running, so perhaps there is something in that universal notion of motion or travel that I find particularly satisfying. Or the pleasure of agency - it's fun and gratifying to cause change in the world.

Two - order. Alain de Botton clarified this for me: that people have an impulse to "cultivate the garden". It is certainly very satisfying to be able to impose order in an otherwise crazy world. It has a very calming effect; even if it just means tidying your desktop or making a list. Writing is that sort of activity for me. I find being alive, even on a fairly average day, pretty confusing. At any moment there are goals, impressions, projects, wants, questions, ideas, longings, needs, hopes and general apprehension lying around my mind in a confused messy heap. Writing is building a lattice - neat with the shelves, drawers, folders, pots, cabinets and boxes of better understanding.

Three - the intuition of coherence. I used to call this understanding, but I'm reading about "the intuition of coherence" in Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman and I like it better. Without going into details, cognitive ease makes us happy. Spotting a pattern which connects otherwise disparate elements makes us happy. Making the world intelligible makes us happy. Learning is just that: a guided tour around interesting places in which someone shows you how things stand. Sometimes the tour is self-guided. No matter. Making sense is autotelic.

Four - mastery. This is where people like Dan Dannette talk about flow. Activities that are autotelic (which I'm going to use again because it is a great word). I think the underlying mechanic is skill. It is very satisfying to do something you can do very well, and the more sophisticated the task, the more satisfying. Though I wouldn't shy away from listing touch typing in this category. Or riding a bike. Muscle memory is immensely pleasurable. To use Daniel Kahneman's terminology, if it can be done mostly by System 1, then it needs no justification.

Five - art. Also here I include beauty and self-expression. Making pretty things, cool things, clever things, things that represent some key aspect of ourselves made solid. So we can sit back and point to it and say: that's a little like me.

Also, as I explain in the next post in this series, work is a way of participating in the human project.

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