Meta-Accountability

Hello friend—you’re receiving this email as a part of morning reading, a daily reflection on the parts of life worth living for that you signed up for sometime last year. I've got a laundry list of additions, designs updates, and website pieces I want to make, but ultimately, I just wanted to bring this back. Thank you for reading, and a very happy New Year. 

Meta-AccountabilityJanuary 27th

Good morning, friend.Look, we all want accountability to something. Very possibly multiple somethings. Going to the gym, sticking to your budget, not texting that one ex, they’re all borderline difficult tasks that we—rightly—try to strategize around, including creating systems of positive and negative reinforcement. Accountability.But accountability itself asks an obvious question, actually two questions: accountable to whom for what. How many of us can really take a trip down accountability memory lane and, looking into our past, not cringe in embarrassment at some of the things we would have wanted accountability for in our own pasts? How many times did we sit down and tell ourselves that tomorrow, we’d get up at 5am, and every day after that? Or stop spending money outright and save all our pennies for mutual funds and other equally boring, adult things that seem like good ideas at the time? Fully believing that if we just had the magic power of ‘accountability’… And then, in the recesses of our minds, who is it that was holding us to task for our own ridiculous goals? When the whole system seems to almost instantly devolve into an ever-lengthening list of broken promises we once made to ourselves. We end up drawing one of two conclusions:Conclusion A: you’re a weakling, and the reason you failed is you didn’t try hard enoughConclusion B: you need someone else to hold you accountable (which is another way of saying you’re a weakling because clearly there is someone else who would do a better job of being you). So if there is a part of our brains so deeply invested in being a drill sergeant, and clearly so ineffective at it, what if we promoted it to being a drill lieutenant? Instead of being in charge of our goals, what if we made the part of brain obsessed with accountability in charge of accountability itself? Taking apart every goal we create for ourselves with brutal honesty, piece by piece, and instead of cracking the whip, asking “is this reasonable”? “Is this what I would recommend someone else do in my place?”“Would any normal human actually change this way? Would I even like who I was if this plan worked out?”Not accountability. Meta-accountability. Journal Prompt: What's a goal your meta-accountable self needs to let go of?