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We humans have trouble connecting our daily actions to long-term goals
What we actually do as individual people depends on a priority queue (our “to-do list”) that we maintain and update in our brains. The next action we take is the one at the front of the queue.
We add new items to the queue all the time. Some are derived from our long-term plans, but many are derived from immediate external stimuli or short-term plans and go right to the front of the queue.
Our priorities — where we put things in our to-do list — are ultimately a personal matter, but they can be driven by promises of reward or threats of punishment from other people. Freedom is the ability of set our own priorities; its absence is felt when other people deny us that ability. Self-discipline is the ability to manage our priority queues wisely, having our immediate actions address our long-term goals as well as short-term goals.
Most of us have difficulty achieving sufficient self-discipline to manage our priority queues wisely entirely on our own. It’s too easy to let our actions today be essentially the same as those of yesterday, driven by short-term goals. We need external stimuli, whether from other people or from events, to remind us of our long-term goals. Traditionally, long-term cycles of events, from seasonal changes in weather, to weekly, monthly…
