Meditation class or book: “Ok, here’s how to practice while sitting on a cushion. But since you’re not a monk, really the goal here is to bring this into your everyday life. All you’ve got to do is remember how to be mindful, like you are on the cushion, but 24/7. Ok, go!”

Alexander Technique online course I recently took: “Here’s how you expand your awareness. Now, you can be in this expanded state more often, basically 24/7. It’s not like you need to practice it 30 min a day and then get to that state; just remember to expand your awareness whenever.”

Lucid Dreaming book: “One good method to lucid dream more is to frequently do ‘wake checks’. Like every time you go through a doorway, ask ‘am I awake?’ Eventually you’ll do it while dreaming and the answer will be ‘no’ and then you’ll realize you’re lucid dreaming. Just build in the routine of doing wake checks all the time.”

Any one of millions of “healthy eating” scolds: “just never eat sugar. Just, anytime you could have a thing with added sugar, remember not to eat it.”

Physical Therapist: “Your posture is bad. You should try to sit like this, not like that; just remember to do that while you’re sitting all day.”

All of these claims are:

• correct
• life changing
• impossible

and they should come with a disclaimer, something like “this is basically the hardest thing in the world.” Why don’t they? One idea: a fallacy of time-invariance. If doing X is 1/10 difficulty, then we say “well, doing X a lot should be maybe 3 or 4.” It’s not! It’s probably like 11/10 difficulty!

(at least to me. I wonder if other people have an easier time remembering to do a thing 24/7.)