I've been going to the gym pretty consistently for a while now and surprisingly it's requiring me no effort, concentration, or great feats of high discipline. Why am I going? Sure, I need to be in better shape, I need to lose weight, these numbers, some of these numbers, they don't look so good, you need to make the numbers look better, yes, doctor, I'll make the numbers better. But deep down, am I there because I want to make the numbers better, or because I want to be in better shape?
No.
I'm there because I'm a pervert, nearly a sex addict, I'm always horny, I like fucking for hours and hours and hours, I like utterly and completely losing myself with someone, until they beg me to stop, yes, truly problematic. However, the stamina I had in my youth is fading, fading like the flame of Anor, turning into ash as the age of fire gives way to cold, hollow darkness... ah, I must rekindle it! Everything I do, I like doing well, and sex would be no different, and so I go to the gym, and it works, as I get better and better the more I exercise.
I am aligned:
Discipline is an outmoded patch for misalignment (incoherence) and alignment (coherence) renders it obsolete. Internal alignment renders discipline a functionless strategy. Discipline is an emergency strategy for dealing with internal misalignment when there is not time or capacity to achieve internal alignment.
Notice how you can do some things consistently and effortlessly without "discipline" and that's because there is internal alignment for those things. The feeling of needing discipline to do something is a compass that points to your misalignment. Resolve the misalignment and action will consistently and effortlessly flow with absolutely no need for discipline to maintain it.
The fact that going to the gym requires no effort whatsoever on my part is a result of me being aligned, the alignment being fucking, sex, cumming in warm hole. In Son of a Serpent I mentioned this tweet:
my contrarian opinion is that doing things you don't want to do is incredibly bad for you. all the advice that says to grind is bullshit
you just end up teaching yourself that you don't value your intrinsic motivations, and over time those vanish, leaving you empty
As well as nanawoakari's Declaration of Complete Resignation:
And I concluded that doing things you don't want to do, that you're not aligned to do, will damage you. I applied it only to creativity, but really, looking back at my whole life, I've been living by this principle all along, even more strongly the last two years.
It was near Christmas of 2024, when LocalThunk made the doompilled New Year's Eve post, that I got a pretty good game idea based on Balatro, and I worked on it during that week, and suddenly, from that idea, the entire project I'd had in my head since I released SNKRX finally clicked into place. I had it, and immediately I became aligned. Suddenly I knew, with utter certainty, that I had to spend the next 10 years of my life bringing this project to life.
And that was it. From there it all followed, it became clear I needed to learn to write, so I spent 2025 writing It Follows and finished it, now I need to ship a game or two, so I'm doing it, and none of it takes discipline, I never have to sit down and force myself to do it, just like I don't have to force myself to go to the gym, I just do it, because my whole mind, my whole body, my whole life is turned towards that future, so it all happens effortlessly.
In practice this means one should be aligned, but that's easier said than done. This 10 year project of mine that I believe in so strongly was literally downloaded into me as a fully formed vision, straight from God himself. It's just a thing that happened to me that I had no real control over, not really reproducible. But I think maybe some alignments are reproducible?
The gym one, I guess just be really really really horny all the time...? Maybe, although this one probably works more if you're an old man in his 30s like me, someone still in their 20s would likely see some benefits in sexual endurance from exercising but the delta wouldn't be as large, and thus this particular alignment wouldn't work as well. Hm, maybe another one: kids! I've heard it often said that men who have children report becoming more productive as a result, likely because having a child installs alignment forcefully. This is probably part of what people mean when they say that you can't really know what having a child is like until you have one.
So, yea, the goal is being aligned, and I think in cases where it can't really be found, at least one should not act in a way counter to one's instincts to avoid undue compass damage. In my case, I acted all my life in accordance to my instincts, and eventually I found it, so maybe an undamaged compass is necessary to find it. In summary: discipline brute forces the production of action, but alignment beats discipline because it produces action effortlessly.