The other day, while talking with family, someone mentioned a younger relative who plays the same game I do. The response was, well, at least your self-control is pretty good. Better than his.
That made me want to scratch my head.
People who know me only casually seem not to realize that my self-control is actually terrible. Part of that has to do with my mental state. Part of it is something I understood very early in life: I am, very, very easy to addict.
There are smokers in my family. I don’t even dislike the smell of cigarettes, but whenever someone lights up, I move away—not just for my lungs, but because I’m genuinely afraid that if I’m around secondhand smoke enough, I’ll start wanting to smoke too.
There’s a manga line I still remember: people say smoking makes you feel good, but really it doesn’t take you from 0 to +10. It takes you from -10 back to 0, and once you stop, you fall straight down again. After hearing that, there was a stretch during the first semester of my senior year when, every time my mind was idle, I would start wondering whether I should just buy a pack and try it. Maybe it would at least make me feel a little better.
Every day, every time I passed a checkout counter, the only things preventing me from starting were laziness and inertia.
Games are another obvious example. All through childhood and adolescence I liked to present myself as someone who didn’t play games. The truth was never that I didn’t play them. The truth was that I knew exactly what would happen if I did: once I started, I would keep going until I was sick of it.
That has happened many times. Factorio, Bridge Constructor, Principia—I could keep listing them all day. I’d download a new game, then play through the night until sunrise. But at that point, the tiny scrap of self-control I do possess could still make me uninstall it. Two or three days later, it would be out of my head, and I could go back to regular life.
After enough repetitions, this became a pattern: download a game, play it recklessly for three or four hours, and then, when it’s time to sleep, delete it on the spot.
If for any reason I don’t delete it—meaning, usually, that my sense of danger wasn’t strong enough—or if I remember it again a month or two later and reinstall it, then it’s over. For at least the next year, every bit of free time I have goes straight into that game.
That is exactly why I will never buy a game console. To me, that thing is a drug factory.
And speaking of drugs: I don’t know whether compulsory education still does anti-drug education these days. I remember those school screenings in the square, the whole grade watching anti-drug propaganda films together. What I felt wasn’t just fear. It was also: I need to remember never to touch this, because if I ever do, quitting will probably strip me of even more dignity than the people in these films.
That’s also why I can’t really watch scenes of substance abuse in film and television too closely. Something like the drug scenes in Sherlock gives me actual chills.
As a researcher, I think this tendency is interesting: being highly addiction-prone, knowing it, and deliberately avoiding possible triggers because of it. As a person living inside it, though, it’s disgusting.
After years of living alone away from home, if I’ve made any progress at all in the realm people call self-discipline, it’s this: I’ve discovered that comfort is almost never good for me.
A comfortable classroom makes me drowsy. A comfortable desk makes me want to slump over and slack off. A comfortable bed makes it nearly impossible to get up early. To put it crudely: the moment I get comfortable, I stop wanting to do anything.
Unfortunately, I’m also terrible at remembering schedules, and my luck is awful—if I’m on the road, there will be traffic; things like that. So if I don’t prepare ridiculously early, I’m probably going to be late. Somehow, half consciously and half not, I seem to have developed habits that keep me from feeling too comfortable.
They’re all small things. I almost never sit properly; I have to squat on the chair or sit cross-legged. I can go for hours without drinking water or using the bathroom. I drink coffee and tea with nothing added. I keep the room a bit cold when I sleep. I skip breakfast, and sometimes lunch too.
It probably sounds wrong. Maybe even a little self-punishing. But if I feel comfortable—really comfortable, satisfied, at ease—then I stop being able to do anything at all.
Today, for example, I barely ate. There wasn’t any particular reason. I just didn’t really feel like it.
This goes back a long way. I was a fat kid, and I don’t need to dwell on the standard bullying that comes with that. But in the first semester of eleventh grade, I basically stopped eating proper meals. By the end of it I had lost ten kilograms, and only then was I finally able to let go of all those nicknames from earlier years.
Now the weight has come back, but the aftereffects stayed. I can’t feel hunger, and I can’t feel fullness either.
It wasn’t until I started living alone in college that I realized hunger and fullness are, for me, almost pure concepts that exist only in the brain. If I don’t eat for a while, my stomach growls, and there’s a sort of numb sensation somewhere behind it, probably around the stomach area. But if my brain doesn’t say, ah, I want food, then eating becomes optional.
The opposite is true too. If I eat a lot, my stomach gets distended, and that numb feeling starts up again around the same area in my back. But my brain still doesn’t register fullness. It feels as if I’ve eaten and not eaten at the same time. It’s intensely unsatisfying, and part of me wants another round.
Back in middle school, Rao Xueman novels were popular, and I borrowed a few from classmates. In one of them, one of the female leads had an illness I dismissed at the time with contempt: alternating binge eating and anorexia. Looking back now—well. Fate does have a sense of humor.
I’m not as extreme as the character in that book. I do eat something every day. And if I overeat, then I overeat. At worst my blood sugar spikes, I sleep it off, and by the next day things are normal again.
I’m not claiming any of this is healthy. I’ve tried to fix it. It’s just a very long process.
For a while I kept a food diary every day. I ate regularly, at normal times, and I almost recovered the ability to feel hungry and full. But I could never settle into it. There was this persistent sensation that something was off, that wherever I was, I ought to be somewhere else doing something else, though I couldn’t have said what.
There was also a period when I couldn’t eat anything before dinner, because if I did, I would immediately start dozing off, and the day would be ruined.
At this point I’ve more or less given up trying to make it look nice. If being hungry makes me more efficient, then I stay hungry. If I’ve been hungry all day and want to eat something unhealthy, then I go eat it. I just let it happen.
Does it feel good? Of course not. It feels bad. But it works. And that, for me, is about the maximum extent of what self-discipline can look like.
To be honest, I got tired of this kind of life long ago—the kind where even basic survival requires constant attention. Apart from the mental problems, I’m actually pretty sloppy by nature, the kind of person who is casual about everything. So having a mind this fragile, along with a body that may not have many major illnesses but never seems to stop producing minor ones, is profoundly irritating.
Either upload all human consciousness into a virtual world, or let me replace my whole body with artificial prosthetics. Quickly, please.
I hate the word self-discipline.
There is so much smugness hidden inside it, so much flattening, dismissal, and stigma toward people whose circumstances are not standard. The word gets made to cover everything: willpower, attention, daily habits, consistency. But to become what people broadly recognize as a “disciplined person,” you very likely need a set of conditions already working in your favor.
You may need not to be neurodivergent. You may need not to be dealing with depression, anxiety, or other mental illnesses. You may need not to be living in the kind of high-pressure environment that helps produce those illnesses in the first place.
That doesn’t mean anyone with those traits or conditions is automatically undisciplined. It means that once even one of those factors is present, self-discipline becomes much harder than it is for the people casually treated as normal.
And then the word gets weaponized even further, especially in the kind of fitness-app slogan that says “self-discipline gives me freedom.” Regular exercise aimed at the result most users silently understand to be the point—not simply health, but an attractive body according to mainstream beauty standards—demands even more resources: time, energy, space, equipment, healthy and regular meals with all the expected requirements, enough sleep.
All of that rests on costs in time, money, and effort that are far from simple to meet. And many of these products were built in the first place on body anxiety produced by narrow and unhealthy aesthetic norms.
To smear all of those structural realities over with a single label—undisciplined—and point the finger only at the individual is just crude.
Reading a short piece that made this argument was what set all of these thoughts off for me.
Maybe that’s the closest I can get to discipline: not overcoming my tendencies, but arranging my life around the knowledge that if I relax too much, if I trust myself too much, I will lose the fight immediately.