Struggling in Dance Class

I recently started going to a walk-in Beginner House Dance class on Monday nights. It’s been a struggle!

The first thing to know about walk-in beginner classes is that the other attendees are never actually beginners. The average student in the class, learning the choreography for the first time, looks substantially better than the second-best dancer on a club dance floor. The first walk-in I ever attended was a beginner hip-hop class with my friend Cyndie, who swore up and down that she’d never taken one before. It turned out that she had instead choreographed one in college.

As for myself, I’m not a great dancer but I like to try. I once got a high-five from a group of cool-looking black teens while dancing at Gov Ball, probably more for enthusiasm than technique. I have a basic two-step and I’m comfortable dancing while sober, which I think puts me above average in the general pop and firmly at the bottom of every walk-in class I’ve been to.

The bottom of a class is an uncomfortable place to be, especially in a setting where the other students can watch your every misstep. During each class our teacher tries to run us through a couple of basic moves, then adds on variations. She shows one move slowly and repeats it four times, asking us to follow. By the third repetition I can just about make out what her feet are doing. By the fourth I start to reason about which leg goes where and which foot supports my weight, while the other students are doing pretty close copies. Then: double-time! I have no chance, of course. Four more reps and it’s on to double-time, and also turn in circles!

I’ve always been a good student in school so it’s a novel feeling to see the pure confusion in our teacher’s eyes as she observes me. For the fourth time, it’s left-left-right! Is he spacing out or slightly brain-damaged? I imagine the other students side-eyeing my clumsy steps, wondering why the class can’t collectively move on from this basic routine yet. I think of each class as a battle between my frustration and competence levels. When the competence meter fills, I learn a move that’s eluded me before and gain confidence to continue. When frustration overflows, I shut down, make more mistakes, and struggle to take on feedback.

At the lowest points I start to worry that this will hinder the enjoyment and fluency of dancing for me outside of class too. This seems to be a general pattern with consciously practicing to improve tacit skills. There’s a period of time where I regress in performance because I’m consciously directing a behavior which is normally managed subconsciously. Then this degrades self-confidence, which further reduces performance.

So why haven’t I quit yet?

First, I’ve been trying to get more comfortable doing things that I’m bad at. Being bad at something is the first step to getting good at it. Plus, I’ll miss out on a lot of fun things in life if I only do things that I’m innately good at. Growing up I avoided most sports and I never put much effort into music because it didn’t feel like I was good at those things. But my friends who put in the time and struggled through being bad now have more hobbies that they can enjoy.

Second, I enjoy dancing and I go to a number of events where that’s the thing to do: weddings, concerts, raves, clubs, etc. I get bored of doing things unless I see some path to getting better, and I didn’t feel like I was really improving as a dancer despite the hours that I’ve spent dancing. The timing on these classes is a little unfortunate, since I expect that the majority of my dancing is behind me – economically speaking, it would have been better to invest into the skills earlier so that they would have more time to pay off later. But even though the area under the curve will be small, I still hope to enjoy the process of improving.

Against the Pressure Theory of Motivation

When we were growing up, one of my dad’s favorite phrases was: “if they’re hungry enough, they will eat.” This was meant literally, meaning that my mom needn’t worry so much about making every meal delicious – we might refuse to eat it at first, but as long as we didn’t eat anything else, eventually we would be forced by our hunger to eat. My mom never listened to this advice, and I grew up eating delicious, fussed-over food.

He had a similar theory of motivation, roughly “if you aren’t acting towards X, it’s because you don’t want it enough.”

I think of this as a pressure differential theory of motivation. Imagine two rooms A and B separated by a barrier, where room A is initially filled with a colored gas and B is not. If the barrier is very leaky, gas will naturally diffuse from A to B. If the barrier is sturdier, the gas might stay contained in room A. However, if you continually pump A full of more and more gas, eventually it will leak into B somehow, either by forcing itself through small leaks, or eventually by blowing out the wall between them.

Therefore, if you want to move the gas into room B, it’s not necessary to understand the strength or build of the wall between them. All you need to do is increase the pressure enough.

(For this metaphor, the containing walls around the system are infinitely strong – although you could come up with allegorical extensions for ‘blowing out the outside wall’ etc.)

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I have not found this advice to be very practical in my life. The most common cause of distraction seems to be some low-level anxiety. One common thing that will happen is that I’ll find myself looping between Reddit, Discord, Twitter, checking each website three times in five minutes. Obviously I know that not enough time has passed for anything to have changed. What’s really happening is that I have a bit of anxiety about the actual task at hand, so I try to self-soothe by procrastinating. But procrastinating is actually making the anxiety worse, so I then try to self-soothe with something slightly different, and so on.

The pressure theory of motivation does not provide any solutions for this loop. It’s tempting sometimes to up the pressure with negative self-talk. Stuff like “you’ll never succeed if you keep on like this”, “this is why you never get anywhere”, etc. But I am already too anxious, so more pressure only amps up the anxiety, encourages more maladaptive procrastination, and deepens the loop.

If we want to extend the pressure metaphor, we can think of a special valve that only operates within a certain range of pressure difference – too high and it shuts itself off, like a Chinese finger trap snapping shut when you pull your fingers apart too fast.

There’s a different failure mode of genuinely low motivation that probably can be fixed with some self-applied pressure, but that hasn’t usually been my problem. If anything, just trying to avoid boredom is enough to kick me out of that mode.

The point is, you can’t just blindly increase the pressure to get more progress. The pressure has to be in just the right zone, not too high and not too low.

It could be that this problem specific to negative self-talk. There are other ways to ramp up pressure that may be more adaptive. For example, you could make an agreement with a friend that if you don’t accomplish a goal by a certain time, you must donate $100 to a charity, perhaps even one that is run by people who you don’t like very much. I haven’t explored these avenues very much though, because I expect them to have similar problems.

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The final problem with the pressure model of motivation is that it doesn’t distinguish between short-term motivation and long-term goals. Personally I’ve found that long-term goals have relatively little immediate effect on getting me to do something in the present. (Yeah, I do want to have a popular blog, but I also want to hit the snooze button. Which one do you think wins?)

Focusing purely on short-term motivation, I’ve found that there are three components that almost always play a major role. Actual aversion to the task, the displeasure of starting costs, and the pleasure of flow state. Each of these has an associated trick.

To get over actual aversion to the task, I try to generate a sense of compassion towards my future self. This task will be done eventually, and I might as well eat the disutility with my present self, instead of inflicting it on a future self who might be less able to afford it.

To get over the displeasure of starting costs, I just try doing the task for five minutes. This might ease me into the flow state. Once I get into a flow state, it becomes naturally pleasurable to continue working on the task.

To remain in flow for as long as possible, I separate out the brainstorming, planning, and execution. Each of these has their own distinct flow, and moving from one to another breaks flow.

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Overall, I’ve found it more helpful to focus at a detailed level on how to get things flowing on a moment-by-moment level. This is more difficult because each task has a slightly different shape in my mind and requires different tactics to get myself moving on it.

In contrast, the pressure theory of motivation is one-size-fits-all – if you aren’t working hard enough, just yell at yourself more! But the more detailed and flow-based way of getting things done is the way that usually works for me.

Review of 'Tribe' by Sebastian Junger

I recently read the book “Tribe” by Sebastian Junger. Here’s the blurb:

We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding – “tribes.” This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival.

Readers will probably be familiar with the overarching narrative – modern society is too atomized, individuals don’t have a shared sense of meaning or reciprocal bonds of dependency. Junger’s main contribution is to look at some societies that seem to provide more of these tribal bonds, especially with regards to their war veterans.

Junger opens the book with an interesting claim: in the colonial era, European settlers often ran away to join Native American tribes, but the reverse almost never happened. This happened often enough that people like Ben Franklin wrote worried letters about it. Why?

Junger claims that Native American society was more attractive because it has a more egalitarian setup. The higher-status members of the tribe only consumed slightly more resources than lower-status members. Most primates have much more egalitarian societies than we do, which suggests we are not evolved to thrive with modern levels of inequality. There was less top-down authority and more self-determination. Coming-of-age initiation rites were common for all males and provided a shared sense of meaning.

Some other interesting, not-super-relevant nuggets: infant care was a shared responsibility in Native American tribal society. There was almost always an adult at hand to pick up and soothe a crying baby. War leaders were chosen separately than peacetime leaders, and it was the peacetime leaders that had the responsibility of negotiating terms of victory or surrender.

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So Native American tribes provided more of a sense of belonging. What about modern society? Can we ever replicate that sense of tribal community?

Good news: yes, we can. Bad news: we only seem to be capable of doing that in response to a crisis.

Junger describes a few examples including London during the Blitz and Bosnia during the Bosnian War. During the Blitz, Britain had prepared for a big surge in people seeking psychological help and for unrest in the bomb shelters. But they found the opposite – suicides and reported psychiatric disorders actually decreased! People cooperated in maintaining order in the shelters and stepped forward to share their resources. Inequality tends to decrease during times of crisis, and the crisis creates a shared “us vs. them” narrative for the community.

Similar effects were reported in German civilians during the Allied firebombing campaign, and during civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. The cities with the highest morale were the ones that experienced the most of the fighting; the untouched ones seemed to suffer from a sense of helplessness.

In fact, this effect is so strong that people report missing the crisis after it’s over. “It was better when it was really bad,” reads one piece of graffiti in Bosnia.

A third part of the book talks about the effects of PTSD, differentiating an acute trauma response from a chronic response. Junger claims that some rate of acute trauma response is expected and constant across societies, but our atomized, less tribal modern societies show much higher long-term PTSD rates when compared to others. I was less personally interested in this portion, so I won’t go further into it.

Actually, quite a lot of the book was focused on the experience of being a soldier in a war, both the positives and the negatives. I only noticed afterwards that the word “Tribe” on the cover has a camouflage background. Someone with more military connection might get more out of it.

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Overall I was a bit disappointed with this book. I’ve been floundering about for awhile trying to figure out what exactly it is that I want from a community and how to build it, and by first appearances I had been hoping that this book would provide more of that.

The book implies two paths for proactively building a tighter-knit community, although it doesn’t explore either of them. These are egalitarianism and shared crisis. All of the crises brought up in the book are wars or large-scale natural disasters; only a true psychopath would consider triggering something like that to build a sense of tribal community, and anyways, the community in that case only seems to last slightly longer than the crisis.

Egalitarianism as an ideal may be more achievable, although Junger doesn’t talk much about modern attempts to replicate it. It’s important to note that here he means equality not just of resources but also of power. What separates the colonists from the Native Americans was not so much the distribution of wealth but rather the structure of society. One white woman who joined a native tribe is quoted as saying “Here, I have no master, I am the equal of all the women in the tribe. I do what I please without anyone’s saying anything about it.”

There’s an interesting tension here between this and the idea that armies in war also form tribal bonds. Isn’t an army about the most hierarchical structure you could imagine? Unfortunately this isn’t explored at all in the book.

Another tension that occurs to me now: one problem that communitarian societies face is the existence of freeloaders. It becomes important to police the boundaries of your community, since you don’t want outside freeloaders to approach in times of need and then walk out. But a structure to enforce this kind of boundary seems like it could become hierarchical in itself.

Anyways, Tribe was an interesting read, just not what I had hoped for. I suspect it also suffers from the standard pop-sociology flaw of cherry-picked data, but I don’t know the field well enough to point to the omissions. It is very short though, at just 192 pages, and I read it in just two sittings. I’m very interested in books in this vein, so I’m happy to have read this one, and eagerly look forward to any related recommendations any of you might have.