What's the opposite of better-motivated? Lazy, of course.

I'm not sure I'm convinced by this line. If your'e right, and the implication is that the inner-city neighbhorhood patients are generally lazy, then your analysis and critique fully holds and I applaud you for it. But that's not how I would have read it. Motivation, to me anyway, does not exist on the exact same dimension as laziness/diligence or more neutrally, more or less effort. Rather, it has to do with a state of mind--it's as much a measure of hopefulness and focus as willingness to expend effort. With that connotation of hope and focus, it's also a more targetted adjective. Better-motivated about what? About fixing their health. Given the severe disadvantage that poor urban minorities have in healthcare, I wouldn't be surprised if they are generally less motivated. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if motivation to fix one's health tracks much more proportionately with health than most things. We no longer use the phrase, "the best food money can buy," b/c there's a point at which money can't really buy you better food in our society, just fancier food. The benefits of being wealthy on food-consumption level off quickly with income, and on the whole, a bigger portion of the population has access to adaquate nutrition than, say, 100 years ago. (Whether they use that access is another matter.) We still do use the phrase, "the best healtchare money can buy." There's a strong understanding at all levels of society that "if I had more money, I could probably be healthier." Health-care is one of the great symptoms of inequality, more so than even education and housing, as you all are well aware. We are all profoundly aware of this, even if we can't articulate it. Such awareness has to impact some people's motivation. I think in Noonday Demon Andrew Solomon talks about the profound extent to which depression plagues the poor--invisibly--and the greater extent to which it is likely to ruin their health.

Your general point is totally on spot, of course. Language is dreadfully important, and it has a huge impact on psychology, and in turn, on motivation. Influential people need to recognize the responsibility they have for precise phrasing.

# posted by  Saheli : 11/25/2005 2:56 PM  

i totally agree with both of you... and you bring up such an important point about motivation. we have a tendency in this world to think of motivation in a very capitalist economic theory kind of way: you either choose to work or not to work (labor and leisure) and this decides supply and demand... so you either choose to be motivated or lazy. like it just happens in a vacuum, cause people don't want to believe that their successes has anything to do with things outside of themselves. and like people don't want to be motivated: whenever i've had this discussion (why does it always seem like it's with significant others?) i always ask- do you think people don't want to be healthy and successful and happy? or are you just happy to think that other people are too ignorant to know/ want something different? and this seems to drive a lot of development-type stuff: just use condoms, exercise more, stop smoking, but we're not going to deal with you being a single mom with an abusive boyfriend because if you don't want to get out of that situation then what can we do? (sorry y'all, had a rough day at clinic... so deep, so priviledged to have these points driven home to me on the regular) but point being, this notion of where motivation comes from is so key- and it is possible to harness that energy within people's oppressive social situations, which of course people do on their own all the time. true development and change in general then comes from two sources i think: both from changing the socio-econo-political context that people live in, and by using creative means of enabling the inherent motivation that we all have.
happy new year ;)

# posted by  Anonymous : 12/31/2005 11:34 AM