Repetition is glorious

self-discipline without self-deception

This post is in three parts: (1) a tweet I recently encountered that dunks on spaced repetition, (2) a cheeky response I wrote to it, (3) how I think about self-discipline overall today.

1. thesis: spaced repetition is an ick

(tweet from someone else)

Spaced repetition gives me the ick

It’s like the Soylent of learning. It’s a scientist’s idealized form of learning, stripped of all the natural messiness that makes learning rich and beautiful

Picture a mom using spaced repetition flashcards on her baby

Now picture that mom speaking lovingly to her baby about whatever’s on her mind as they go about their day

Which world do you want to live in? Where do you think the baby is better off?

The humane way to learn something is to be immersed in an environment where learning happens naturally, automatically, as a consequence of natural motivation and play

Think about all your most positive learning experiences. Learning your native language. Learning to move your body at playgrounds as a child. Learning to play video games. Learning how to use a computer by messing about. All natural, without instructions, or idealized, measured doses of learning

Natural learning is a beautiful human process. Spaced repetition loses all of that. We should flip our focus from learning random facts as fast as possible to crafting ENVIRONMENTS where skills and learning happen naturally

2. antithesis: repetition is glorious

(my response)

Ah, my sweet child. You think order and structure are tyranny. You think repetition is an ignoble thing, when in fact the vast majority of your life is repetition. Sleeping eating drinking shitting. Do you not get bored of having to do such things every day, like clockwork? Do you not find it “oppressive” and “inhumane”?

Take the dumbbell bicep curl. Up, down, up, down. How BORING, you say. So you put down the dumbbell and walk away, seeking something that feels more “natural”. And yet here is your friend, who stayed, continuing to lift the dumbbell, not shying away from “the ick.” Up, down, up, down. A few months later, he has done a thousand reps, and he is twice as strong as you.

You keep invoking what is “natural”. But there is nothing “natural” in sitting at a computer, playing video games, or artificially constructed playgrounds. All of it is made, not naturally, not automatically, but by people who were willing to do the same mundane task over and over again, people who submitted to a greater purpose than “whatever you feel like in the moment.”

No man steps in the same river twice, for he is not the same man and it is not the same river. No man looks at the same flashcard twice, for he is not the same man, and it is not the same flashcard. What you think of as “boring”, as “monotonous”, is indeed a sacred act for someone else. Each repetition, if you pay careful attention, is bursting with subtlety; each repetition is an opportunity to see it all again with fresh eyes.

You think repetition is dull, you think structure is tyranny. But in fact they are the opposite. Structure is freedom, and repetition is glorious.

3. synthesis: self-discipline without self-deception

What is interesting to me about this debate is not the effectiveness of different learning strategies, but the tension between “doing what is prescribed to you based on a plan/routine/social norm” versus “doing whatever you feel like in the moment.”

Over the years, I have oscillated wildly between the two. Growing up I viewed self-discipline as the highest virtue, and imposed a lot of control over myself. For example, after I did poorly in math in tenth grade, I spent the entire summer break waking up early every day to read a calculus textbook, so I could ace my eleventh grade class. Any time I had a goal, I would be extremely systematic about taking steps daily towards achieving it. This rigidity worked well for me for a while, but eventually it led to burnout and depression.

The story of the last several years has been: how can I follow my feelings and intuition more, rather than doing what some schedule/program/person says I “should” do? This approach has its virtues: I have moved much closer to a life I love, and I’ve become more creative. But I have come to realize that just doing what you feel like (some people call this “non-coercion”) also has its drawbacks. Ironically enough, it can also lead to burnout and depression, because the total absence of structure and higher-level goals can lead to taking the “path of least resistance” in many moments (lying down, doomscrolling, etc), which then reduces your energy and sense of self-efficacy, which then leads to even more bad habits in a downward spiral.

So in the past few months I have entered an arc of valuing self-discipline again. In practice this looks like: getting back into weightlifting, meditating for longer stretches, and being more restrictive about phone use, among other things. But underneath the surface-level behavior changes are some shifts in attitude that I think are just as important.

The first shift has been to view self-discipline more as devotion to something greater than yourself, rather than just as an instrument for self-advancement. I take a lot of inspiration from the Zen tradition here, which, despite being a spiritual tradition, places a rather extreme emphasis on austerity. (In the West, “spirituality” and “discipline” are often viewed as being in opposition to each other.) Take this anecdote of a Zen priest who was dying of cancer:

The next day, Priest Ryoen got up out of bed. He sat in Zen meditation on a folding straw mat slightly elevated above the ground. He said, “We are not expected to die in bed but in zazen.” Finally he fell into a critical condition. His nurse and disciples suggested many ways to make him feel comfortable, but he would not hear of it. When morning came, he went up to the Main Hall to recite the sutra.

He crawled from his room to the Main Hall, a distance of about 25 yards. Frequently lying on the floor to take a rest, he finally reached the Main Hall, where he chanted the names of the ancestral Zen masters to whom we owe the transmission of the Illuminated Mind. Chanting each of their names, he bowed in reverent worship of each master. He took a rest after every three or four names. In this way, he repeated his chanting day after day, until the dawn of the eleventh of September when he simply could not go to the Main Hall. When he passed away later that day, however, he was found seated in zazen.¹

Imagine the kind of dedication it takes to be practicing until the literal moment you die.

The second shift that has made self-discipline more appealing to me recently is the attitude I tried to articulate in the essay above. There actually is a joy in doing the same thing over and over again. We live in a culture averse to repetition: we want to solve problems as quickly as possible by “one-shotting” them, and we are addicted to the endless novelty of social media feeds. We are impatient. But all of this is a kind of delusion because repetition is an inescapable fact of life. Or rather, what looks like repetition is inescapable – indeed, no two moments of experience are ever exactly the same, but they often appear to us as the same because we don’t care to really look at them. You become so much freer when you recognize that both novelty and sameness are essential to life, and “I’m back at the same place again” is neither fully true nor inherently bad.

We often resist discipline because we think of it as a kind of self-deception. We have an idea that there is a “true version” of ourself that we are shutting away, in order to do the “more disciplined” thing. Your inner child, say, or your soul. But the idea that there is one true being inside you, preformed and perfectly aware of exactly what it wants to do – that itself is a kind of delusion. You are and have always been an amalgamation of characters and tendencies inside you. And you have some conscious choice over which of those characters you feed, which of them you give more attention. Make that choice wisely.

1. From Omori Sogen’s Introduction to Zen Training. I can’t confirm the veracity of this particular anecdote, but the Zen tradition seems to have so many such cases that it gives you the right general vibe.