#2 - Seeking pleasure

Understanding adult self-scrutiny

Our four-year-old daughter Mayu has this habit of asking me to check her biceps right after she takes a bite of a boiled egg. It’s those muscles she wants. I don’t disabuse her of the notion. I reassure her by giving her arms a light press. She takes another bite. It’s been like this for months now. She hasn’t yet wondered where all those bundles of new fibrous tissue have vanished.

The term autotelic comes from Greek: auto meaning self and telos meaning goal. An autotelic activity is something that we do for itself, not in expectation of anything else. An autotelic person is someone who does things for the love of them. The joy is in the doing, free of ulterior motives.

Most things we do are neither completely autotelic or exotelic (= done in expectation of a reward). Something that we may start off against our will — swimming, for instance, for Mayu — may over time transform into a self-contained activity that is meaningful by itself (now, more often than not, she’s the one asking us to take her to the pool). The reverse is possible too, as many of us who with age have fallen out of love with a childhood passion would vouch for. My favorite story on this alloy-like quality of the human experience is about Leon Marchand, the French swimmer who won four individual Golds at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Between the ages of seven and nine, Marchand fell out of love with swimming because the pool was too cold.

I used to think that the separation between autotelic and exotelic was the separation between intrinsic and extrinsic. My conception was incomplete. It was missing something important. There’s another separation: time.

Driven by extrinsic factors, the benefits come to us in the future. I check myself at the dessert table in expectation of future benefits. It’s our ability to defer gratification that defines our decision to have something that will pay us back at a later point in time. We exercise willpower when following extraneous rewards because in the moment, doing what we do, the experience of living is underwhelming.

Funnily, those intrinsically motivated — the autotelic people — are shouting to anyone willing to listen that they don’t have willpower to spare. They want to feel fully alive now. They cannot wait for a nebulous time in the future when the cycle of effort and reward is complete. Seen this way, the autotelic lack self-control. They say, “I cannot wait for a better future. I want to feel good now.” When I first came to this, it felt very counterintuitive. How can these people, I wondered, have their cake and eat it too? It seemed unfair.

Yet, having their cake and eating it too is obvious in children.

The things Mayu does for the first time, she seems to get an instant hit (or not). If whatever she’s doing grabs her, she instinctively looks for the signs of what she likes. This feedback is in itself beside the point. But it has information about her preferences. With this information, she now wants a bit more of that specific experience. She sets herself some sort of a goal. All of this is under the surface of consciousness.

The other day she decided to hang from the monkey bars in the park. At first, she was nervous being a few feet off the ground. Then I started giving her a count. She went to ten the first time — or rather, the inflection of my voice made it seem to her that ten was a good score. The next time, when it was her turn, she said she wanted to go for twenty counts. (She fell short, recalibrated to fifteen and worked on from there.) These goals were not always above her level of awareness; they emerged with each iteration. She ended the evening at twenty-one.

It helps to think of experience as a gushing river instead of as a reservoir. Flow, not stock. The experience of keeping our balance and making effortful progress against the flow of this stream is more enjoyable and invigorating than just wading through a body of water that is stock-still, as long as the goal has meaning for you. As long as, depending on your inclinations and preferences, you have chosen where you’re pushing toward. It’s a worthy goal if it has meaning for you. Overcoming the hurdles along the way adds to the richness of the experience in pursuit of a meaningful goal. Striving for something strengthens the self. But when the goal is not meaningful, not springing from within us but imposed on us from without, we brace ourselves for struggle along the way. The experience of living leaves something to be desired.

My protest is that we have come to accept this struggle as the default setting of living.

Why do we seek out struggle when seeking pleasure is a reflex response built into our code? It is not something we choose for our own personal gain, though it may appear so. It is what has allowed us humans to survive and propagate. Yet, common advice tends to suggest to us that the most valuable goal is hidden somewhere at the end of the path of most resistance. This extends to: ignore your natural inclinations, pick a goal most universally coveted.

Agreed that this is not always catastrophic. Sometimes it can result in something productive for children. Like I said, most things we do aren’t a hundred percent autotelic or exotelic. Children find it easier to start something because a parent or a teacher asked them to or they saw a friend do it, and then they fall in love with it and let their own experience guide them.

At one level, it is an age problem. They have lived less, so have less memory input of life, to use a phrase from Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi.

When our mind is free of the memory input of life, it is left free to focus itself fully on the task at hand. Adults tend to have a continuous feed of bothersome input. Every thought that enters an adult mind in the middle of a task — from “The last time I did this I failed” to “Am I looking funny? Why’s everyone snickering?” — is like a wrinkle on the fabric of the mind. It demands effort, the press of attention, to smooth it out. This attention comes from the same processor. Now there’s less to spare for the task at hand because the adult mind needs much assuaging.

But this is not the only cause, or else we would find only bitter adults. And the older we got, the more pathetic our lives would become. Only that is not true. We all know those few whom circumstances cannot ruffle, who seem to be too lost expressing themselves through what they do to worry about the world.

So then there’s a second problem. It is an inability among some adults to derive joy from living. They find it hard to not be self-conscious—they are anxious or they are bored. They would give themselves a better chance if they did more things that excited them at the core, so that their minds wouldn’t drift as much. But then they instead conclude that human beings are designed and destined to struggle.

While these (more) exotelic people sit stewing, the (more) autotelic live life greedy and joyous.

Richard Feynman, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize, had famously said, “I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out. The kick in the discovery.”

For Feynman, nothing that would have happened in the presence of the Swedish king at Stockholm Concert Hall could have validated his life’s work. In the traditional sense of the word work, it is not a stretch to say that Feynman never had to work a day in his life. (He did still attend the ceremony because he believed that refusing the award would bring him more hassle than just going through the motions. For once, he left his autotelic self in the shadows.)

Children can carry on their merry ways because they lack the sense of worry we adults have about not appearing to be in control. I remember one of the first times Mayu felt abashed to sing in the presence of others. It was a day I saw the effects of her preoccupation with herself. I felt the loss of that innocence. The self-consciousness that besets many of us adults. This form of self-scrutiny holds us back from simply doing things that bring us enjoyment. Our mind, instead of being fully focused on the task, wonders about whether our performance passes muster to others and that diversion in turn reduces the integrity of our expression. We lose the ability to lose ourselves.

It should not be like this. It should not be such a struggle to simply stand up and say, “This is who I am. This is what I want. And this is what I will choose to do.”

To drop our adult self-scrutiny and go for what gives us joy is an important step. Once you do that, there are other challenges, namely one of how to structure goal pursuit. Normally, historically, you go to school, you learn subjects, you get grades, you go to college, you find a job, you encounter problems you want to solve or things you want to create and so on. There’s a certain default structure that you have the luxury to work with from a very early stage. This scaffolding is very much missing for adult learners. You don’t know what ten looks like, no one is counting. I’m not quite at the stage where I’ve figured it out. I don’t think there will ever come such a time. But I’m learning to not let this deter me in my pursuit to be a better coach, writer, and parent.

The Starry Night, Van Gogh, 1989: Supposedly, the view, just before sunrise, from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. I would like to imagine doing this piece brought him a lot of pleasure.