Consensus-ism (part 1)

The opposite of living self-coercively. Is it just me or is this like a huge deal??

If you’re reading this, I’d really appreciate knowing if any of the below is legible, if anything resonates with you, or if I need to clarify the hell out of some stuff, or if this stuff hasn’t been a problem for you etc. Please add a comment or DM me on Twitter or something!!

From the age of 18 to 26 I had a pretty high amount of anxiety about how to live “correctly” or “normally” or “optimally”. I had a strong sense that I was deficient in a bunch of ways and constantly bounced around trying different techniques, trying to improve various traits, and each time I’d start something new I’d be certain that this thing was the answer, the thing that would make everything fall into place, that I’d finally found the missing piece.

In retrospect, though all these things fell through, I don’t see them as failures — I was genuinely enjoying the journey, and excited by the different techniques.

What I do regret is that when things didn’t feel right, instead of listening to my bodily sense and stopping straight away, or at least pausing to reassess/investigate, I’d power through, using willpower to keep going, which was draining and created a lot of internal conflict. I wouldn’t reassess for long periods, as I hadn’t really learned how to — I’d eventually stop doing something like my morning routine out of sheer burnout, rather than because I had soberly decided “ok this clearly isn’t providing value and I’m happy to stop”.

Then in late 2022 I was very lucky to meet some people who nudged me in the direction of what I’m now labelling “consensus-ism”, which I’ve found to be incredibly powerful, a totally new paradigm, and also very challenging to fully shift into, due to needing to throw out a bunch of old ways of being, anxieties, etc.

It's kind of embarrassingly simple when explained, & I think most people reading this will already be following their consensus a fair bit more than I did for those years.

But I still think having the clear label of “consensus-ism” is very helpful for anyone who wants to change the framing of their day-to-day, hour-by-hour existence and experience:

• Less procrastination

• Less guilt over what you “should” be doing

• Less internal conflict & therefore much more ease

• Days built around what you genuinely value

• Less time spent on things that you realise later you weren’t genuinely motivated to do

At least for me, this represents an incredibly profound new paradigm for following my true interests, hugely reducing internal conflict, and having a more easeful life.

A typical day (for old me)

Summary:

1. Making myself do things (self-coercion)

2. Not in touch with what I really wanted to do → trying out a bunch of things discovered from outside world in hopes that I’d find the thing (“The Genie Problem”)

Here’s what a typical day used to look like for me, and I presume this generalises fairly well to most readers.

I’d start the day with a list of things I needed to do, non-negotiables like work & walking the dog etc.

There’d also be some chores, some things that weren’t entirely fun but fairly easy to get started on after some mustering of energy.

There’d also be my ever-growing list of potential projects, ideas, things that I hadn’t started yet but would like to do at some point, things that I felt could be very growthful and fruitful if I got started with them and stuck them out for long enough to reap the rewards, so each day there’d be the feeling of “can I muster the energy to start doing xyz today?”.

There’d be a fair amount of procrastination, of scrolling social media and watching youtube whilst I mustered the energy to do the things that I didn’t quite want to do.

There’d also be things that I was currently making myself do regularly, like a morning routine, going to the gym, etc. They didn’t feel fully alive for me, they didn’t come from a place of genuine excitement, but I felt like they’d be good for me so I should stick to them.

A typical day (for new me, following consensus-ism)

I’ll explain what has changed below, but just as a quick lay-of-the-land:

1. Way less self-coercion

2. Choosing actions based on internal consensus

3. Re-evaluating what I’m doing regularly/spotting when I lose consensus much more quickly

4. Turning non-consensus things into consensus-things and then doing them

5. Turning non-consensus things into “oh right I definitely don’t want to do this” things and then dropping them entirely

What I was doing wrong - discounting the body!!

What I didn’t realise back then, because I didn’t realise there was a better way to live, was that the reason each day was full of things that were effortful and ugh-y to make myself do, and the reason I felt so drained and overwhelmed and behind, was because part of me both didn’t want to do them and viscerally knew this, but I was ignoring this part and forcing myself to do them anyway.

And the reason I didn’t fully realise that part of me didn’t want to do these things was because I was totally discounting my body and only listening my brain.

Turns out (and this is probably obvious to most people!) — your body is just as important for your brain when making decisions and deciding on next actions. Whilst your brain is great for thinking, your body is what feels and, crucially, what knows¹.

The useful label for this knowing is the “felt sense” (from Gendlin’s “Focusing”²). This is the physical feeling around a problem or thought. It might be that you have something on your to do list, but your body is clearly telling you that it feels aversive. The felt sense is negative. It might be that you have a vaguely positive bodily inclination to do something, but it's not a consensus, it's not clearly the correct next step for right now.

And because of my particular flavour of cerebral nerdiness + “I have so much to do I can’t slow down” + no experience with embodiment practices like breathwork & Gendlin’s Focusing & etc, I never paid attention to the felt sense in my body — it would have been there in the background, but I would have been in full drill sergeant mode and powered through and continued doing the thing, thinking that the internal conflict was just a normal background hum.

This led to a lot of daily internal conflict, as one part of me felt viscerally that the thing was not important or providing value, and another part of me (the drill sergeant) was deciding that we’d power through anyway in order to get some value in the future.

This is where all the procrastination and dragging of feet and mustering of energy was coming from.

Discounting negative felt sense leads to self-coercion

Not being in touch with what you don’t want to do, so just doing it anyway

My rough definition of self-coercion is “when you do something despite having a negative felt sense about it”.

As discussed above, this is bad because doing the thing involves lots of internal conflict, takes lots of energy & willpower to get started, etc etc.

Not looking for positive felt sense leads to “The Genie Problem”

Not being in touch with what you do want to do, so looking to the outside world to try and find what you do want to do, rather than pausing and looking inside

The flip-side of acting despite having a negative felt sense is not slowing down and looking for your positive felt sense, for your consensus.

If you’re not in touch with what you genuinely want to do in the moment, you’re kind of by definition doing the wrong thing.

And if you haven’t learned that you can look within to find the next best action, you’ll instead look outside, collating a big-ass to-do list of potential things that could be “the thing” that gives your life meaning/fixes you/etc.

And you might find some really awesome things! But because the motivation to do them doesn’t come from inside, after a little bit of time you lose the initial excitement and the thing falls away.

One of my friends put it as:

“It’s called the genie problem because people tend to find a technique that’s so incredibly good it’s like magic, try it three times, and then it goes back in the metaphorical lamp to never be interacted with again.”

(Relevant substack post: “That tweet won’t save you, and neither will this blog post: the perils of excessive self-help consumption”)

Consensus-ism to the rescue!!!

SO! That was a lot of (necessary, I think) preamble.

So what’s consensus-ism?

As the name suggests, it’s about doing what you have internal consensus to do. Listening to your body, and noticing what current feels totally correct to do.

I used to call this whole thing 10/10ism, but that felt wrong, as it implied that you only do things that you feel totally thrilled about. I prefer consensus-ism because say it’s the final day to file your taxes. You’re not looking forward to it, but you have a clear internal consensus that it’s the correct thing to do right now, so you do it.

One of the skills & exciting improvements over my old way of living is checking in regularly, and listening to the body way more. For example, in the past I might have decided that I’d write this blog post in one day no matter what, and would set myself up in a cafe and try to get it all done. Whereas now I’ve been working on it whenever I have consensus, and as soon as I lose it (e.g. because I’m feeling achey from sitting in a chair for so long), I’m happy to trust my intuition and follow whatever I now have consensus to do.

This is getting long, so part 2 will cover:

1. The different actions that you can take whilst living by consensus-ism

   1. If you have consensus, do!

   2. If you don’t have consensus, investigate!

   3. Forcing yourself to do anyway (self-coercion)

   4. When facing the negative felt-sense becomes too scary so you don’t even notice that you’re being self coercive (ugh fields & “the bravery line”)

2. The benefits of living this way

3. The struggles of living this way

Also, below is a silly graph I made to try and conceptualise this more clearly. It might not fully make sense until post 2 (or I might totally scrap/revise it). Note that the dotted line is what I’m calling “the bravery line”.

Appendix - other things I’ve seen online that consensus-ism rhymes with

In Sasha Chapin’s “How I Attained Persistent Self-Love, or, I Demand Deep Okayness For Everyone”:

“Easier time reaching deep meditative states, due to massive decrease in inner conflict”

Sasha Chapin’s “What maximum productivity looks like for me (some anti-advice)”:

“Maximally productive Sasha looks like this:

I have no routine. The closest thing I have to a daily structure is that I usually “meditate,” which is, for me, just sitting mostly still allowing myself to feel whatever it is I feel, either while drinking coffee, or right after it. Sometimes I skip this, when I’m really excited to work on something immediately.”

“If this desire is here, how come I’m not doing it” → because (IMO) you have a positive inclination but not consensus!

When Sasha Chapin talks about “grinding” when writing in this video, he’s talking about forcing yourself to keep writing when you’ve hit the point in your writing day when it becomes a real struggle. That is, when your consensus to write has gone away!!

1. Think about it — you’ve never had a thought in your body, you’ve never had a feeling in your brain. Your body is what feels (and therefore what provides the visceral feeling of knowing something to be true or false), and your brain is what thinks (and therefore can be used to reason). So if you only listen to your brain, you’re totally out of touch with what feels right, wrong, correct, unpleasant, easeful, etc. You’re only listening to the drill sergeant who has intellectualised “do this because it will provide value at some point”, not the body that is saying “but I really don’t have an interest in doing it, it doesn’t feel good right now”.

2. Something that makes me less viscerally embarrassed that I wasn’t in touch with my body & felt sense for so long is the fact that Focusing & the felt sense are so profoundly obvious and intuitive once you get the hang of them, but they need an official website & movement & etc. “Focusing” is basically noticing the felt sense you have around something (like “huh, when I think about [task], I have this feeling in my body…”), leaning into that feeling, and sort of talking to it until you find something that resonates (like “why do I feel this anxious feeling in my stomach when I think about [task] - is it because I’m nervous about [thing]? Oh, that’s it!"). At this point you’ve updated your understanding of your feelings towards the problem and might be able to move on, or go deeper, or etc. It’s a process of taking a vague feeling of uncertainty and increasing your understanding of what’s really going on so you can find resolution. https://focusing.org/sixsteps