one theory is that the self likes things it can catalyze. if something is completely foreign to us, we don't especially like it because there's nothing we can do with it. like random noise. but if something is overly familiar/repetitive, we don't like it either - again because there's nothing more we can do with it, we're already predicting it fully.

what we like is the in-between part where we can grapple with the thing and assimilate it. this is the most fundamental way of looking at "making progress toward one's goals". before we start assimilating something, the parts that we don't understand represent "not-self", but after we've finished assimilating it, it's "self". moving along this gradient is what life constantly tries to do. suffering/frustration/confusion is what we feel like when we're not moving along this gradient.

as long as we feel like we're moving along this gradient, we're not too motivated to make big changes, because things are basically working out. if things are not working out, one response is to change "who we are" - i.e., find a different approach that might be able to make progress.

but one interesting thing that buddhism says is that we can get *stuck* in a situation where we're continually *not* feeling like we're making progress, and yet we *keep* persisting with the approach (i.e. goals, beliefs, self-concept) that isn't working. [attachment, perseveration, addiction, being stuck in a too-deep basin with not enough metastability, etc]

the solution that buddhism suggests is then to just *look* at the approach itself (i.e., look at the self), because looking at it inherently makes it less deep/stuck, because "looking" literally means to allow dynamical contact or information exchange between that approach and something outside it. the more information exchange there is, the less that approach can be stuck in its own dynamics -- they're partly washed out by the other dynamics.