Why would you want to do something without any purpose?
Touch a chair in your home for five seconds then walk away. No, you're not crazy
The organism you call does not only react to survival threats like hunger or danger. It also reacts to control over behavior. That is the key structural point. Many systems in the brain are organized to conserve energy and maintain habitual patterns. When you introduce a rule that has nopurpose, no reward, no clear benefit, and no emotional payoff, you are interfering with the normal reward–prediction loop that drives behavior.
This kind of exercise comes from traditions influenced by people such as G. I. Gurdjieff, who were trying to expose something very specific, that most human actions are guided by reward signals. Even small actions are usually linked to gratification, avoidance of discomfort, social meaning, or identity reinforcement. When you deliberately create a rule that produces none of those things, the system interprets it as wasted effort. And wasted effort is exactly what the organism is designed to resist.
From a biological perspective, behavior is normally governed by prediction of value. The brain continuously asks a crude question “Why spend energy on this?” If the answer is unclear, the system pushes back with boredom, irritation, distraction, or resistance. That resistance is not moral, psychological, or mystical. It is a control signal telling you that the action does not fit the usual optimization logic.
Humans already perform many things that are “anti-survival” in a strict sense scrolling endlessly, procrastinating, pointless conversations. But those activities still deliver micro-rewards of stimulation, novelty, emotional regulation, or social signaling. They are not truly reward-free. Do an exercise that tries to remove exactly that fuel.
Habits are automated control loops. When you impose an arbitrary law like press a switch daily, wash an already clean cup you are inserting top-down control over an automated system without giving it a functional reason. That friction reveals how little voluntary control people actually have over their own behavior. The resistance is not proof of weakness; it is evidence of how the system is built.
In other words, the purposeless exercise is not about survival threats. It is about exposing that most actions are governed by reward, habit, and identity maintenance. When those are removed, the organism hesitates because it cannot categorize the behavior.
There is also a practical misunderstanding that many people have when they read exercises like this. They assume the goal is discipline or moral purification. Structurally, that is incorrect. The real purpose is diagnostic to observe how quickly motivation mechanisms try to hijack even a trivial rule. If satisfaction appears, the reward system has already captured the exercise again. The resistance you expect to see is not the organism protecting survival. It is the control architecture defending its existing loops.
A clearer way to think about it is this. The organism is optimized for three priorities which are conserve energy, follow established patterns, and pursue reward signals. A meaningless rule violates all three at once. That is why even a tiny action can provoke disproportionate resistance.
And here is the profound conclusion many people miss. If a system cannot execute a trivial action daily without reward, then most of what we call “will” is largely a story layered over automated behavior. Clarity tends to begin exactly at that point.