No pain, no gain? This is about gratifications and pleasures earned in the completion of things one has the impulse to avoid which require possibly unpleasant exertion, effort or discipline in contrast to easy, unearned gratifications.
The capacity to delay gratification is considered a measure of maturity and life-competence, but we all struggle with something ever day. The enemies are "I don't feel like it" or "I feel like it." In other words, self-indulgence. The enemy is us.
The earned gratifications of accomplishment tend to feel better afterwards; unearned gratifications (eg food, booze and drugs, shopping, trips and vacations, watching TV, romantic affairs, surfing the web, etc, etc.) tend to feel good while doing but often worse after because they are easy pleasures or cheap thrills which have costs which are often out of proportion to meaningful gains.
I'll confess some of my personal routine challenges, some trivial and some not:
- Getting to church - hate to dress and drag us there on Sunday morning, but always glad we went
- The gym and/or painful ("Feel the burn") exercising. No pain, no gain.
- house cleaning (I don't mind doing laundry though - thank God for electricity)
- Paperwork, paying bills, and tax prep
- Facing/doing scary or confrontational things - eg "difficult conversations"
- Dieting
- Calling Mom when I have nothing to talk about
- throwing a dinner party or cocktail party
- Studying things you need to know but aren't interested in
- giving up wine for Lent
- going to the doctor or dentist
- boat cleaning
- social events where you don't know anybody - but then you meet interesting people
- meeting with estate planners, revising the will
- getting a kid through college
- attending professional meetings
- weddings (boring except for the families) and wakes/funerals (difficult to face, for me)
What's on your list of things you feel like avoiding, but feel good after you do them?
