clinomania (2016) de.artquid.com
Why we get up every morning |
| "And how did you find yourself
this morning?" - Well - I just rolled back the sheets, and there I
was." These thoughtful lines are taken from a late 60ies pop song a
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band signing responsible. Never heard about it? Your
fault. They have been damn good. |
| Just rolling back the sheets ... If it were always as simple as that. But sometimes in the morning, we ask ourselves: Why should we? Is there any attractive alternative waiting for us, more agreeable than lying warm and comfortable beneath these sheets? And if there isn't? Just stay there? For the whole day? |
| This morning, when I was exactly in this situation, I decided to write an essay on motivation. I meant to feel a program working in my head, screening the next hours, the next days, in a certain respect even the next years to come for possible successes and failures. Some internal calculation routine was collecting the plus and minus results, comparing the 2 possibilities with each other: staying in bed / getting out of it. |
| Since I'm sitting here now in front of my PC at the institute, where I'm supposed to sit during working hours on a regular day, the internal calculator must have told me, at the end of a long row of additions and subtraction: Get up. But still I wonder: Why? And: could it happen one day, that the result was: No, stay in bed, it's not worth while getting up today? What a frightening idea... |
| In principle, our whole life could be regarded as an endless chain of approach and consummation behaviors, governed by the concept of reward maximization. Bearing in mind only the next few moments, our decisions would differ dramatically from those we come to after considering the long-term results. In experiments with monkeys, reward consists in a drop of fruit juice obtained (or not obtained) within a few seconds (Schultz et al 1997). In the human situation, rewards are more variable, and the time scale is more extended. |
| Maybe I got up this morning, because I didn't want to lose my job. Maybe that's the motivation for most of us. But, on the other hand, if we would lose our jobs if we stayed in bed for just one day, most of us would be unemployed. I could have easily stayed in bed, without any risk for my job. Of course, my colleagues would have asked me the other day: Where have you been? What happened? Maybe our secretary would have even called me at home. And what should I have told her? The truth? That I just didn't feel motivated enough to get up? |
| When I was a child, I was expected to go to school, but once I stayed in bed claiming that I was sick. I wasn't sick at all, I just feared an announced history test. But I discovered that I suffered from this lie even more. For others, a lie may be a (transient) solution, but not for me. I'm someone who always has to tell the truth. And it was not because of my job or of my colleagues that I got out of bed this morning. It was because of the things I was planning to do. And also because of this essay I knew I could write. |
| 10/05 < MB (11/05) > 1/06 |
|
W.Schultz, P.Dayan, P.R.Montague (1997) A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science 275, 1593-1599. |
| More: Psychoanalysis |