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by Broken_Hippo 2429 days ago
On the other hand, IIRC not many folks are willing to be come Amish when they had a "modern" upbringing.

And their children aren't choosing to stay with a modern bag of tools either: Their children stop being educated after around 8th grade. If I remember, this has something to do with pride. Someone that doesn't go along and stay Amish has a very real disadvantage to make it in the modern world.

They do things, in part, with pressuring a young and not fully educated person with no real experience of other things. Sure, once you are there you hav some community and stuff as long as you follow the ways.

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You don't need to become Amish to learn from this approach though.

All you need to do to benefit from it without the downsides is to use the opportunity when you decide on a goal, whatever it is, to think through which things makes it hard to stick to, and find ways of creating barriers that makes it harder to deviate from your desired behavior than sticking to it.

E.g. there's the old trick to managing your credit card debts of freezing it in a block of ice in the freezer - lets you keep the card for emergencies, but forces you to wait and gives you plenty of opportunities to change your opinion before you actually use it.

Or smaller things, like being aware and picking routes of your commute that avoids temptations when you're on a diet.

Just acknowledging that relying on willpower alone is error prone, and plan accordingly, really.