what the hell happened to my willpower?

all these years, willpower has been the one thing that i've relied on. i am not the smartest, the brightest, the strongest, the whatever-est, but somehow through brute force i have managed to just get through. the gym was always something i looked back with some (probably misguided) pride. i was the scrawniest kid ever when i first stepped in. three years later, by senior year, i was putting up over 200lbs on the bench press. i could do pull-ups with a fifty pound weight added on. i seemed to have proved to myself that if i just worked damn hard, i could become reasonably good at something.

anyway, forward twenty odd years. i make promises to myself, important promises, that i could again do through sheer brute force. like practice hanuman, meditate every day. finish my damn book. teach yoga. somehow, i have been just talking all these years, and things remain where they are. i somehow end up reading the thousands of articles on my rss, sitting on the couch, or just doing nothing.

even the most "useful" of these activities, devouring info, am i now more informed? sure. am i more knowledgeable? maybe. am i wiser? if i were to believe myself, only knowledge applied, personalized, internalized, and finally realized, becomes wisdom. essentially, knowledge can be forgotten. wisdom, has been learned the very hard way, and simply cannot be forgotten.

so anyway, back to willpower, which has somehow deserted me. because i'm older? (and not wiser?) because i got married? because i'm stuck in a job that is neither good nor bad, just, well, a job? all of the above?

so these books tell me, to make it a habit, so i don't have to exert willpower. or, it's just a muscle, that we need to train, and keep training, then we can use it whenever we want in whichever situations. i haven't figured it out.

maybe it's simple - the rewards, at this stage of my life, are just no longer evident. not that i should have cared so much about them. in fact, it may just be a good illustration of that. the rewards (get big muscles, get girls, though that never worked out; do well on exams, get good gpa, good job, well, my thoughts can't think that far ahead), once someone pulls it away, or those rewards lose their meaning/relevance somehow, suddenly, i'm left with... nothing.

so, do i create some arbitrary rewards for myself? or even better, realize i really should not give a damn about rewards, and enjoy whatever it is i have at the moment? i think one of the difficulties of our generation is we have been totally conditioned under the work and reward system, from our earliest memories and experiences. do A, get B. why do A if not very useful and does not get you anywhere?

so i have to work around this. kickstart myself with imaginary rewards. put a big "X" on my calendar every time i fail myself. haul myself back up from the slippery slope of laziness and excuses. and think about how my own 14-year old-self used to motivate the hell out of my friends. let him loose again.