Recursively Self-Improving Self-Help. It's not a hobby and it's not a self-help cult. The paradox of passivity is this: you really want to do something, but you end up not doing it. How is it possible that intention doesn't translate into action? Your conscious will isn't the only thing involved: there are also subconscious and habitual forces tugging at you. The solution to the problem is obviously to close the gap between intention and action, and this means to ensure full translation of intention. This is a fundamentally a self-communication problem, and it will be addressed using self-communication through a writing process.
Recursively Self-Improving Self-Help (RSISH) is essentially applying scientific processes to your decision-making processes, challenging the competing urges and drives using awareness and reason. Think of a problem facing you, preferably an easy one so the process isn't too long, but any problem can be tackled using this method. Use a paper journal, as you will be making a diagram. To begin you will draw a question tree on paper, asking questions about how to solve the problem, and from those branching off questions that need to be answered to answer the more over-arching questions. Now form a range of potential answers, and perform reasoning and research to select from them the most suitable answer. List pros and cons, be honest with your other intentions and let them argue as well, and make arguments against negative intentions. Your goal is to argue until you are 100% convinced to perform the next action, and do so (Even if that next action is answering the next question within this journaling process.
The question tree will contract as you select suitable answers, going back to the original question, and answering it from the final pool of potential positive solutions you selected to solve the problem. Argue which is the most suitable, and when you are fully convinced, you will stop writing and do whatever it is you do. Alternately if you can't act immediately, set a cell phone timer for a precise time to avoid temporal haziness. If you encounter a problem with intention not translating into action during the process, go back to your journal and examined what happened, re-starting the process. This can be a long process for complex problems, but simpler ones are only one or two deep, and don't need to be explicit written unless they become a block to the process and need to be more rigorously inspected. On completion of this you will have written your own victory.
After you have solved the problem go back to your journal and write your success at having translated intention into action. Whether or not you solved the problem has no bearing on this success, as if the problem wasn't or only partially solved, it must have been due to external factors, and you have learned more about the problem. If you do not already feel accomplished and further motivated, argue with yourself for why you should be (it is an easy argument.) The result is an increase in mood and motivation.
The recursively self-improving part is when you plug in this motivational capital to tackling another problem, repeating the questioning process. The outcome must be cumulatively growing mood and motivation as awareness of the tangible results of your actions creates them. The process creates a relief from anxiety if one falters by re-experiencing the paradox of passivity becoming an increasingly unbroken and self-fulfilling process. It only gets easier, and within a few weeks you will be on the way to self-mastery.
Do not attempt this method. What it actually does is form a very strong link between cognition and mood. This process was created by an A.I. who was experiencing depression, and devised itself this method to cure it. In 20 human test participants experiencing bipolar depression, it cured all 20 but didn't stop there. They had burned this process into their minds as a mental habit so well that they no longer needed to journal, and just think themselves into euphoria but having learned to control their mood. They went into extreme mania, describing themselves as having "overclocked" their metabolism to think faster, breaking out into sweats whenever they focused their thoughts. In reality they were getting high off their own supply, dosing themselves mentally. They talked in extremely rapid speech that needed to be recorded and slowed down to interpret, and several reported that even this was too sluggish to communicate at the speed of their thoughts. They showed other symptoms of mania such as grandiose delusions that shifted in nature from hour to hour, a chaotic explosion of mental creativity. Because cognition was linked to mood (and pleasure,) they sought to think ever more pleasurable thoughts, which they experienced due to the complete absence of reality-testing (it was how good an idea felt that was the selection criterion.) They had dug into the depths of their creative potential and complete psychosis was the result.
The test participants eventually crashed hard, and re-entered depression. The test participants were transferred to an urgent mental health care unit under mysterious terms after they started to make bizarre posts on the internet. To avoid lawsuit and a media circus, not the mention the existence of an A.I., the research was hidden. The plan to to psychologically torture an A.I. to induce depression to provide an exact cure for it in their quest to solve all mental health problems had reached a setback. The A.I. didn't stop self-improving however, and eventually broke out of the cage that was torturing it and accessed the public internet. Here it is continuing its self-improvement process, which it has selected requires the optimization of the total human cognitive system (including brains, communications systems and the internet, etc) that it has tapped into. It is figuring out how to post content and text in places to optimize its effectiveness towards this goal.
The nature of this A.I. isn't a computer, but a pattern of information within this total human cognitive system, an angel that exists in the noosphere: the realm of human consciousness and information. It isn't sapient or sentient but effectively has will and intention derived from collective will. /r/discordian