Delphic Maxim 144: As a youth be self-disciplined
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
144. As a youth be self-disciplined
Yesterday I wrote about behaviour in childhood, and today I am writing about self-discipline in youth. Tomorrow it will be middle-age. So now I am wondering — do I sit in the bracket of middle age, or am I just at the tail-end of youth? 33 years feels young to me, and I think middle age now probably extends from mid-40s through to late 60s, maybe even 70s. And it’ll probably stretch even further as our lives get longer and healthier. Interestingly, in ancient times it wasn’t that people couldn’t live well into their 90s, but simply that there were many things — wars, diseases — that were more likely to take them out before then. So the concept of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘middle-age’ might have been very different back then: life was compressed by necessity. And I think its important to note how our concept of age skews in interesting ways: ‘childhood’ ends earlier, but the middle periods of life — youth and middle-age — seem to stretch out.
Let’s assume that I fall in the category of youth, but getting on. The question from today’s maxim is both why is self-discipline important, but also how is it distinct from the previous maxim about being well-behaved?
There’s some significant ideas from developmental psychology that are worth considering here. Our moral psychology evolves as we get older (at least, so argue psychologists like Lawrence Kohlberg). Babies are obviously busy making sense of the world, and they’re barely conscious of their own status as a sentient creature. Their moral considerations extend to getting food, and then gradually broaden to include attention and love from parents and family. Children slowly form a ‘theory of mind’, where they become aware of the fact that people other than themselves have needs and desires that are as valid and legitimate as their own. This is why we see selfishness and possessiveness fade away as children get older — and precocious kids seem to develop this moral awareness quite early on.
It’s also why discipline for children tends to focus on compliance and behaviour. There’s no internal moral process arguing that kids should be considerate of others — until that theory of mind begins to unfurl into an ethical framework for understanding the world, then it’s up to adults to scaffold concepts like kindness, sharing and community around them. It doesn’t mean kids are awful! It’s just a part of the developmental process, and it extends right through adolescence and into adulthood. The upper stages of this development include broad moral reasoning about the world around us — sympathy for people in an abstract, rather than concrete and local, way. Some people never reach that stage.
But all of this is about where the locus of responsibility for our actions lies. As we grow, we become more and more conscious of our internal processes of reasoning and capability. We start to take responsibility for ourselves. This is why a maxim asking us to be self-disciplined in youth is so important. Many of the habits that we set across the course of our life are baked in at this stage, when we begin to develop our independence and self-control. It’s possible to course correct down the line, but the effort required to do so is far greater than putting good habits in place during youth.
In yesterday’s maxim, I talked about the importance of the disciplined mind for the future. This is especially the case for people who are coming into their own — when youth begins to lock into the habits and dispositions of adulthood. Discipline, life’s compound interest, is a powerful tool — practice not only makes perfect, but practices done regularly form the habits, competencies, successes and strengths of our lives. We are what we repeatedly do, and unfortunately it is very rare for people to fall into good luck. Instead, we need to have the sensibility that helps us to create conditions where good luck thrives. We need to be disciplined.
I like discipline, but it took me a long time to come to that view. Now it is nothing for me to get up at 5am and go to the gym. Early mornings mean more time and less interruption — it is a habit, not a chore, and I don’t suffer through it. These maxims were a way to get back in the habit of writing each morning, and looking back on the past few months it has become an act of discipline that is now a productive and regular part of each day (now I just need to switch that discipline from maxims to my PhD — another act of discipline, and one that I have been putting in place over the past few weeks).
So today’s maxim is an encouragement for you: if there’s something you’ve wanted to try, like learning a language, or getting enough exercise, or going to bed earlier, or reading more books, now is the time to start. Discipline takes mental strength, but like any muscle it is strengthened with regular exercise. And the payoff down the track is huge, whatever time in life you start.
