When You Feel You Lack Self-Discipline — Reading What Has Been Swapped In

Introduction: When Work Goes Badly, You Reach the Same Conclusion

Work is not going well. Chased by deadlines, you lose your margin. At such times, many people arrive at the same conclusion: it is because my self-discipline is soft.

And they trim their pleasures. Scolding themselves — this is no time to be having fun — they take away enjoyment like a punishment, believing that if they discipline themselves more, things will turn around.

But between cutting off pleasure and the results of work there is no direct relation. Trim as they may, the situation does not change. Still they think not enough yet and tighten the screws further.

Techniques of self-discipline have been told at length. What this article places is the question one step before them: when the feeling I lack self-discipline arises, what is being swapped in there — its structure.

Let me give the conclusion first. A problem that lies on the side of structure is being reassigned to the problem of an individual’s strength of heart.

Praising “the Power to Endure” Is Excusing the Situation From Question

There is a word heard often in workplaces of late: resilience. It is used to mean the power to recover from hardship, the strength of heart to endure adversity. Training to get the mind in order is introduced; employees are supported in ordering their own hearts. At a glance this looks like an undertaking that cares for the well-being of the working person.

But we need to stop here a step and check the premise of this talk. Resilience is, in short, an individual’s capacity to endure a harsh situation. When it is praised, what is tacitly presumed is that the situation, for its part, stays harsh.

Long hours, heavy responsibility, ceaseless demands. Rather than changing these situations themselves, one urges the individual to raise their capacity to endure them. The location of the problem is moved from the structure of the workplace to the individual’s strength of heart.

What I want to draw on here is the idea of the reproduction of labour power, argued by the economist Kozo Uno [Uno, 1964]. For a person to work, their mind and body must be recovered day by day and returned to a state able to work again the next day. Rest, take nourishment, regain spirit. This undertaking of remaking the power to work, day by day, is called the reproduction of labour power.

The problem is who bears the cost and responsibility of this reproduction. By rights, if you have overworked a person to exhaustion, arranging the conditions for their recovery ought to be included in the responsibility of the side that puts them to work.

A Device to Seal Off Objection Is Built In From the Start

What makes this reassignment cunning is that it is fitted, from the start, even with an effect that seals off objection.

Appeal to the harshness of the situation and it may be seen as proof that your power to endure falls short. In a place where the power to endure is what is praised, to voice the unbearable becomes, in itself, a confession of weakness. So dissent against the structure is quietly reabsorbed into the individual’s problem of heart. A grievance that ought to be raised is swapped, before you know it, into a task of re-training yourself.

Let me make this clear. This is not a story of denouncing a particular company or individual. Nor do I mean to say the undertaking of ordering the heart has no value. What I am questioning is not individual goodwill but the function that talk performs. Even an undertaking introduced from goodwill, if it has the function of moving the cost of reproduction onto the individual, that function remains. The speaker’s motive and the function the talk performs are matters on different planes.

The Same Circuit Operates Even When You Are Not Employed

This structure is not only for the scene of employment. For someone running their own work, exactly the same circuit operates.

You seek the cause of things going badly not in the situation or the design but in a shortage of your own self-control. So, believing that disciplining yourself more will turn things around, you cut off enjoyment. But that is no solution. It is merely punishing yourself while mistaking the problem to be solved.

Why do people want to punish themselves? Because there is a strange comfort in punishment. While punishing yourself, you can at least feel you are doing something. Rather than sitting idle, hurting yourself feels, however slightly, like progress.

But that is an illusion. Punishment produces nothing. It merely distracts from anxiety for a while. And once the effect wears off, the next punishment is needed. You are only overwriting pain with pain.

▸ Where this circuit of self-punishment is cut is treated in habits are not something you run by will.

Conclusion: Return the Question From Strength of Heart to Design

When the feeling I lack self-discipline arises, a problem on the side of structure was being reassigned to the problem of an individual’s strength of heart. Praising the power to endure was, back to back, with excusing from question the situation that must be endured.

So what is needed is not to build self-control. It is to return the question from strength of heart to design. Is what I now feel I cannot manage truly a problem of management? Or is it a problem of the design of the load itself?

Before you discipline yourself, insert this one question. That alone stops the circuit of punishment once. The assumption that taking away enjoyment is the first step to recovery collapses there. The whole picture of this argument — attribution to the individual — is gathered in why trying to be stoic drives you further from freedom.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten
• Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish (1975)