The Seeing Sequence Meets the Conundrum of Getting Boring Things Done

Updated April 10-14, 2024, January 27, 2025, October 2025, January 31, 2026

(Short version far below )

The Problem

I have to clean. It’s the last thing I want to do. Have to, want to. Enemies. The opposite ends of my conundrum. A conundrum is: a decision made difficult by opposite and equal choices; a dilemma.

Back story: I’m in the middle of a want-to activity, and the pleasure of momentum it creates. Then I remember I have to clean. Momentum lost. Ouch! I immediately check to see if I feel like doing the clean. Nope. Okay, I begin to search for something that creates that want-to/feel-like urge I just lost. This immediately makes me uptight; because  I’m now being pulled back and forth in my head, between two opposing fears. On one side, fear of losing a want-to, say, any pleasure, by doing a have-to, clean. On the other side, fear of losing a have-to, clean, by doing a want-to, say, eat. I’m trying to have it both ways: feeling like doing something that can’t create feeling like doing something. The pull from each side creates wicked tension. I need to stop it. I need to get relief.

My mind searches for something to give me relief by making me feel like doing the clean.

• Eating.  Couldn’t stop until I was stuffed.
• Organize things around me. I end up going from one thing to another, finishing nothing. Discouraged.
• Watch something. I end up staring into space and watching the crap running through my head.
• Lying down to rest. More crap running through my head. I got tired. That worked great.
• Aaagh! Get angry at myself. I’m pumped for a few seconds, then it fizzles.
• It fizzles into feeling sorry for myself. Numb time.

Finally, I’m saved. I remember. People are coming over soon. If they see I haven’t cleaned, I know they’ll disapprove, even as they try to hide it, and I’ll be embarrassed. I picture myself doing the clean to avoid disapproval. I’m now what I would call “motivated”. What a relief!

But I pay a price for that relief. It’s small, but ultimately a threat to my ability to function in my life, and therefore to my peace of mind. That price is my independence, my self-agency.

How is motivation a threat?

Well, what caused me to do the clean? It wasn’t me deciding to do it, me being in a true response. I was in a problem solving response. I was solving the problem of not feeling like cleaning. My solution was to  imagine the problem of disapproval. The pain from that would be more than the pain of having lost my momentum and the pain of the boredom that cleaning would bring. I didn’t see that I was depending on getting relief from pain caused by imaginary disapproval to make me feel like doing the clean. That’s not independence. Independence is doing without depending on relief right in front of me, that relief having been created by dodging disapproval, to trigger feeling-like doing the clean.

But I like relief.  What’s the problem with depending on it?

The problem with dependence on relief:

• I hate planning, or looking ahead; what I call “low-return work”. When I’m forced to, I predict some form of failure, such as it will be too hard and long. This causes me to be afraid. I solve the fear by avoiding; what I call “high-return work”.  Or I solve it by being optimistic. Optimism makes me 1. skip steps, and when they appear and add more work, feel sorry for myself and get frustrated; or 2. makes me fantasize doing more than I can do, and giving up part way through. Ugh!
• I put things off. “Later, baby. That’s my motto.” Often I fail to even recognize when I’m putting things off because I’m so used to it. Then it’s too late. Boring cleanup multiplies. Plus, I’ve added another track of avoidance to memory.  Avoidance becomes even more automatic.
• I defend my avoiding of have-to, low-return stuff by saying I’m “spontaneous”. Ya, spontaneously lazy.
• Worst of all and hardest to see: I can’t do anything from inside. I can’t initiate anything. Like the bone in William Steig’s “The Amazing Bone”, or the frog prince, or the beast in “Beauty and the Beast”, I wait to be freed from the prison inside my head, by something that makes me move. It never comes.

Now, there is a way out of my prison of fear, of not feeling-like doing boring stuff/low-return work. It’s the Seeing Sequence. But I cant even do that, because, unlike the bone, the frog, and the beast, there is nobody coming to set me free into feeling like doing the Seeing Sequence. I often wondered why I don’t do what’s good for me even when I know how and am able to. This is it.

I can only do the Seeing Sequence when I have to put out fires; when all the unfinished things in my life cause me so much pain that I need to seek relief by doing right now what hurts most. In fact, I live by looking to do things without having to make the effort of suffering through the boredom – the low return – of doing things like the clean. So top of my to-do list are things are high-return work. They give me a high return for low effort. Think any pleasure-seeking or approval seeking that has a guaranteed success.

This high-return-seeking state of mind is not the same as having the memory centre to get stuff done by decision. It’s the opposite. It only gives me the positive feeling of relief from the fear of having to do stuff from zero momentum. The fear is the real prison. What fear again? The fear, on one side of my conundrum, of doing a lot of work that returns low satisfaction; low-return work, like cleaning. Low-return work cannot, ever, trigger any feeling-like urges in me.

So how can I live happily without feeling like doing things? I’ll just be miserable getting stuff done all the time and have no time for pleasure from high-return work. No way. Too scary. I circle away toward relief from the fear of the misery of doing low-return work without feeling like it. That circle turns, and turns, in a downward spiral into a very limited existence. Home bound, killing time.

But who cares. There’s nothing I can do about it. At least I can get relief from my favourite sources, like approval from people who see my cleaning done. Or can I? For a while my sources work. Then my brain gets used to the same relief. Boring! And it gets sick of the guilt of not getting things done and of how defensive it makes me. My exaggeration, of the pain caused by have-to work, returns with a vengeance, because I’ve delayed again the practice of not solving it (commonly known as “suffering”) and therefore I haven’t grown used to it.

So what to do? I hear the hint come to me. Why bother with trying to do the have-to side? If that end of the conundrum is gone, there’s no tension caused by it pulling me away from want-to. If there’s no tension there’s no need to get relief from it by seeking high-return, want-to stuff. But that’s the same as saying there’s no want-to there, in my mind. That’s right it doesn’t appear. Without having to do the clean, which has always triggered fear of misery caused by doing it without wanting to, my brain doesn’t search for want-to stuff to get relief from the fear, and thus my brain doesn’t produce tension. By not making myself do low-return work, urges to do high return work diminish. By the simple act of not trying, of going with not feeling like doing, tension doesn’t appear.

So what’s left? Nothing, except the thought “Start the clean”. It occurs to me try to keep the lack of tension going . How? My brain shows me the smallest step that only triggers boredom for a few seconds. The boredom ends with the small momentum of having that step behind me. That momentum fades nearly instantly and I’m back to nothing. I try to repeat focusing on the one thing I can get done right now. I move toward the clean mechanically. I do first parts of the clean mechanically. I’m dead inside. But no tension either. No want-to. Once I get the cleaning started, I get more momentum, that pleasurable feeling of being in automatic movement toward completion. I want more of it. I do more of the clean to keep the momentum going. I’m invested in it. Sunk costs that I don’t want to lose. Then I see the clean getting behind me into the record of my life, my identity. My momentum strengthens. Time passes without me noticing because I’m completely absorbed, in the zone, not selfconscious. I finish the clean. It’s off the list, all of it behind me. It’s in the books of my life memory as an independent stand alone being.

But the best part came from having no feeling at all at that moment, just before I started, when I thought of doing the clean. I wasn’t waiting or looking to have to do it or to want to do it, There was no tension.

That’s not the end of the story. Two forever problems remain. First. Me going with the want-to side only reduces tension in that instant. I had a lot of time in my days to experiment with stringing together these instances of doing avoidance of have-to, and then to turn the painful experience of that wasted time into the idea of going with the waste  in order to stop the tension. Most of the time, I don’t have that opportunity because the other things I have to do in my life can’t wait. If I also make them wait while I avoid on purpose, I’m back to having to do them because I’m in pain from putting them off.

The second problem is the lengthy low-return work called “practice”. The thought of getting rid of the conundrum of getting things done by not going with the have-to side, and instead by choosing to avoid it, doesn’t stick in my mind after I first see it. It’s in memory, but the memory is small. As a result, when I need it, which is at the time the next have-to appears, my focus is not drawn to the memory of going with not feeling like it. Even if I turn it into a rule. Instead, my focus is pulled into the huge memory centre I’ve built since I was a toddler: “seek here the positive feeling of relief”. These two problems make getting beyond my beginner’s luck look hopeless.

But it isn’t. To find hope,I need to look for why nature’s conundrum is so intense and see that the cause is solvable by me.

The Cause

Not upbringing, not experiences. Instead, psr’s. Psr = inappropriate or imaginary problem solving response. It’s not real solving of real stuff. Ipsr is too long and doesn’t roll off the tongue well, so … psr – problem solving response.

The Solution, The Change

Bitch and complain the psr’s. (synonyms are “flow” or “flow-with” or “deconstruct”, but not “complaining” because it’s not distinct from every complaining). I often have to do it many times (instructions are in the examples below). But this is not a flaw. The repetitions build a memory centre that pulls my focus into it. While there, I don’t oppose myself by finding fault with every thought that forms my true response/my decision, leaving it internalized.  Instead, I simply externalize my true response. I move it from inside my mind to outside. into my muscles. I turn the thought into action.

Good to know:

1. While my mind can go blank more than a few times in a day, most of the time my mind produces a constant stream of thoughts and feelings. This stream causes many distractions, all day every day. In order to survive, (that means not die), I need to be good at ignoring them. The most important distraction is what happens at the end of thought or feeling: loss of momentum. Momentum is that automatic progression of thought towards a goal, whether the goal is good or bad. Momentum feels good. It’s painful to lose.
2. All loss, no matter how small, causes pain. That pain is the feeling I call grief. Thus, loss causes grief.
3. Failure causes loss of my goal, in other words, loss of what I was trying to achieve, The loss caused by failure causes grief. The most important failure in daily life is the failure to ignore the most important distraction – loss of momentum. The most important loss of momentum is at the end of my thought that forms my true response, my decision.  Failing to ignore this loss of momentum causes a grief that affects every part of my existence. I call the grief triggered by my failing to ignore the distraction that is the loss of momentum, “the pain of failing to ignore”.
4. Everyone is born with a different intensity of the pain of failing to ignore.
5. If my pain of failing to ignore is strong, I am naturally afraid of it. The appearance in my mind of a decision triggers the need to ignore distractions, most importantly loss of the momentum of thought I was in while I was forming my decision, my true response. Failing to ignore this loss of momentum triggers my high pain of failing to ignore, which triggers my fear of that pain. As a result, I’m afraid of making the decisions I create all day. When my fear of making a decision appears, I’m compelled to solve that fear. So, I search for its cause. The only cause I can find is a problems – a fault –  with the decision. I solve that fault. Often I find multiple faults and solve them. Solving it or them gets me the positive feeling of relief. Relief replaces my fear of my decision and fools me into thinking that I’ve gotten rid of the pain of failing to ignore. The result: I’m always editing -looking for and solving flaws,  problem-solving the thought that forms my decision/my true response. To sum up: I edit my decisions in order to get relief from my normal fear of this abnormally high pain.
6. One of these edits/problem-solving responses (psr’s) to a decision is the fantasy that the feeling of relief will make me feel like acting, feel motivated to act, on my decision. (Here lies the source of the world’s fruitless search for motivation.) But it doesn’t work. As soon as I solve one problem, a new one appears. In fact, solving signals my brain that I want to do more solving, so I can get more relief. So, it brings me more problems. Quickly, the problem solving gains momentum, and grows out of my control until it becomes frightening and snaps me out of it. I call this constant line of psr’s “fear driven seeking of relief” or “second guessing to panic” or “obsessing” or “bad momentum” about my decision. It’s the outcome of trying to feel-like acting on my decision.
7. If my pain of failing to ignore is weak, I’m not afraid of it. Therefore, when I’m forming a true response/decision, my brain doesn’t produce anxiety – an abnormal fear of a normal situation, and other psr’s that mess around with my decision. I’m free to focus on externalizing it by matching my actions to the image of me acting -my action image.
8. All emotions, including the grief caused by loss of anything, big or small, will keep coming back if I oppose them. To solve grief, including by avoiding grief, is to oppose it. As a result, solving grief causes it to come back.
9. All my problems are caused by me trying to solve/oppose the grief I call the pain of failing to ignore. Culture says I should fix this pain. My brain says I should feel it, that is, let it run, and see how it won’t harm me if I do. This will make me ignore it by moving my focus onward to seeing and externalizing my true response/my decision. I externalize by matching my actions to the action image of my decision.

The Seeing Sequence is the sequence of  bitching and complaining /flow/deconstructing, psr’s in order to see my true response. It gets me to stop believing my psr’s which gets me to stop trying to solve the pain of failing to ignore. As a result, the pain, like all emotion, runs out by itself, most often in bits, not all at once.  A good and almost must-read:  Why the Seeing Sequence works.

(NB (nota bene, Latin for note well): words below, that are in brackets or separated by forward slashes, mean I can choose from several wordings, or the words are instructions, or blanks to fill in that fit my own experience.)

How to Bitch and Complain/Flow with Psr’s using the following Example List

Example 1 of 1. I’m avoiding doing a clean.

Step 1

Pick the thought or feeling I think is a psr.  Optional: A useful guide: The Database of Psr’s

I’m avoiding

Classify my emotional response to the psr using three simple classes:

“good me” for feelings that are positive (pleasure) or for feelings that I imagine will solve things fast and result in a positive feeling. For example: anger always comes with the fantasy that I can shake up the environment or shake up even my own mind into changing from not going my way to going my way. Thus, the feeling this fantasy triggers is good. Thus, “good me, I’m angry”.

“bad me” for hurting or judging myself, by predicting failure or by presenting a problem to spoil my happiness. For example, finding fault with myself when I’m given a compliment.

“poor me”  for fear and for feeling sorry for myself.

(NB. I decide on how many psr’s I want to b and c. It could be just one, or I could do all of them until they stop coming. The more I practice, the closer I get to one, then a ghost of one, then none. The number of practices is like learning to walk, or to play a musical instrument, or to play a sport well or to cook food well, or do anything well. It’s a large number. )

Like this:

poor me, I have to do a boring clean.

good me, I’m looking to see if I feel like doing it.

poor me, I don’t.

good me, I’ll avoid by seeking the pleasure of eating, watching video, whatever if takes that’s easy,  to make me feel like doing it.

poor me, it doesn’t work and now I’m farther behind schedule.

good me, I’ll search for some motivational saying to make me feel like doing it.

doesn’t work, poor me.

bad me, judge myself with a fantasized standard that says I’m inferior for not feeling like it, to scare me into doing it.

bad me, anger at myself in order to use the pain caused by disapproval,

to scare myself into doing it, good me.

good me, people are coming. Now I feel like doing it, because I can see the positive feeling of relief from avoiding their disapproval.

Step 2

The reversal: (find the cause of the psr’s, not by asking why, but by imagining what I would see if I didn’t do psr’s to myself.)

Because poor me if I didn’t _____,( avoid )

I’m afraid I’ll see I’m in the pain of failing to ignore distractions, (which occur at the end of my thought that forms my true response; that wording is coming below)

namely, the delay in the pleasure of getting over the grief from the loss

of momentum caused by the end of what I was just doing:

(which was) _______

(

I fill this in using one of five possible “endings”. If I don’t know which one to choose, I can guess.

Endings

1) “the end of what I was just doing, (which was): imagining my action image if I see all the parts of it, or previewing my action image if I see a quick glimpse before I work out the parts”.

Examples:

All parts – doing something I’ve practised many times.

Quick glimpse: I see myself putting down a chopping knife just before I come to the end of using it, but my work surface is crowded and I haven’t yet looked for a place to put it.

2) “the end of what I was just doing (which was): trying and failing to match my action to my action image“.

Example: My failing to look at an object all the way to my reaching for it and grasping it.

3) “the end of what I was just doing (which was): feeling my happiness/satisfaction about my success (at forming and externalizing my true response, in other words, “at matching my action to my action image)”

Example: I look where I’m reaching for an object that’s not easy to hold onto, like a bunch of twigs to start a cooking fire.

Or “feeling happy/satisfied/content about what just came into my mind without me trying”. (This happiness is more passive than me matching my true response. It’s just experiencing, that is, enjoying, receiving, observing-not-solving, not editing, not perfecting, not putting my mark on, what the environment  or my mind gives me that fits me and therefore triggers pleasure.)

Example 1: something beautiful coming into my view. For this the wording is “the end of what I was just doing: enjoying seeing beauty, or feeling lucky (seeing beauty)”.

Example 2: While observing a situation, usually a real problem, I get a bright idea about how to understand it or how to solve it, or both.  I use wording something like: “the end of what I was just doing: feeling happy that a bright idea popped into my mind.”

4) “the end of what I was just doing (which was): experiencing or observing a problem (or something that is different from what fits me), that I can’t solve now or have no business solving even if I could, or both.”

(Four Examples from an endless list:)

a) observing your lazy consideration (about what you know I need you to consider). (Example: your anger at me for being independent of you.)

b) observing your disapproval. Example: your disapproval of my shun of your lazy consideration.

c) observing your fear of making the transition on your own from awake to falling asleep; and your attempts to get me to fix that fear for you.

d) experiencing a coincidence that doesn’t fit me (bad luck, such as an accident, or anything I have no interest in, like most distractions. This ending is similar to 2) above in that the end is a failure. But the difference is that it’s a failure of the environment to go my way, while 2) is my failure to make myself go my way.

5)  “the end of what I was just doing (which was): being in a blank, (a state of no thought or feeling).”

A blank occurs when:

a) I don’t know or can’t remember what to think when I need to find an answer. This could be before I’ve tried to figure it out or after I’ve run out of ideas. Example: a math equation.

b) I finish a feeling, say happiness, that isn’t a psr. Or I finish matching my action to my action image, and I haven’t decided what to do next.

Example: A common sequence in me: end of solving, say an easy addition of a list of numbers; end of happiness at my success; a blank; then the psr “predicting failure” predicts the blank will fail to be brief; that causes fear, which is another psr;  then a third psr: fix the fear in the quickest way I can think of – repeat what I just finished thinking or saying or feeling or doing. Thus, I often repeat myself to fill in blanks at the end of thinking or feeling or speaking or doing.

)

(End of endings, now continuing with bnc)

(I choose: ____________) imagining my action image to start the clean.

At the end of my thought that forms my true response:

I’m already dead inside about this act of ignoring. (Dead inside means I don’t at all feel like ignoring)

But I have to ignore anyway (if I want to get this clean out there).

So start ignoring the delay by focusing on

(ignoring is done by focusing on something other than the thing I want to ignore)(I want to ignore the delay in getting over grief, so I focus on something – matching the action image of my decision with action  – other than the delay in getting over grief)

mechanically (which means without feeling like it/without motivation)

externalizing my true response/decision (by matching my external action to the action image of my decision/true response)

______.”(I describe the action image of my true response)

start the clean

Step 3

Wait to see what comes into my mind next.

If another psr, repeat Steps 1 and 2 until: psr’s stop, or I decide to stop, or I run out of time and have to do something else.

If my true response, I naturally (which means in first-party observing self/unselfconsciously/without stepping outside myself/without thinking) get up, got that part done, move toward my tools, got that done, take them to do the clean, start on the first part. Momentum coming in as smooth as caramel.

______ (describe my true response)

I start the clean

Short version:

psrs: avoiding, good me.

distraction: (delay in the pleasure of getting over) grief from loss of momentum (caused by)

end of what I was just doing: Imagining my action image

true response/decision:  focus on _______ (each sub-step of starting the clean)

Repeat all until I do it.

Postscript

Reminder 1 to self:

To b and c or not to b and c. That is the question. To b and c is to suffer the frustration of missing the starting signal – a psr, an astonishingly large number of times. To not b and c is to suffer repeating anxiety and the exhausting work of trying to solve it. Thus, both ways are difficult. And that sucks. But only I can decide which way I want my existence to suck in any moment, when I do catch the signal, the psr.

Reminder 2 to self:

I need to memorize these sentences or I’ll never do them. And even when I do memorize them, it will take more suffering my anxiety before I remember to do them, and even more suffering before I even decide to do them after I remember. Even then, I’ll need more practice to do it live, in the moment. That’s the easiest way? Yup.

Reminder 3 to self:

The above two reminders are about what causes change in my brain: persistent practice that builds alternate memory centres. Change doesn’t come from  judgment or punishment or encouragement or copying rules or help from another. So I’m free not to use them, and I’m especially free from needing to judge myself for not using them.

To repeat in another way: the only thing that changes my brain is seeing through the tricks my anxiety plays on me to solve itself, and disbelieving them by b and c, over and over again. Only then will I have built a new memory centre, a new planet, of bitching and complaining/deconstructing that redirects my focus onto my true response.

Reminder 4 to self:

Question

Why don’t I just say what the distraction is? It’s grief. The grief from the loss of momentum caused by the end of whatever I was just doing,

Answer

Because grief would not be a distraction if it went away instantly. While grief is brief, like all emotion, it keeps coming back in waves. While I’m feeling the grief, I’m distracted into checking how long it’s lasting. As a result, the distraction is not the grief. It’s the delay in the pleasure, the relief,  of getting it over with.  That delay in getting over grief from loss of momentum occurs in the instant I have to transition, that is, change, my focus, from the high return work of forming my true response to the low return work of  externalizing it. In other words, to go from fun to boredom without complaint.

Reminder Summary

To take this answer back to where I started seeing. Me being distracted means I have failed to ignore when I most need to ignore. My high pain of failing to ignore is triggered by this failure. Because the pain is intense, it frightens me. To solve the fear, my brain is compelled to use psr’s to fix, not the fear, but its cause, the pain.

But, if I want to avoid disappointing myself by failing to externalize my true response, followed by my scrambling to adapt to the consequences, I must not give in to the fixing of the pain of failing to ignore. Through more repetitions than I ever feared, and in every part of my life, I must train myself to b and c until I can  mechanically, like a reflex, focus on externalizing my true response.