TJL #9: Akrasia
Akrasia is just a fancy word for "Not doing what we want to do"
Hi friends,
Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #9. In this newsletter I share a new lesson every day, so stay tuned for today’s lesson. Today’s lesson is about why we don’t follow through on our intentions. Today’s lesson is about Akrasia.
I want to do a lot of things. For example, I would like to write every day and publish every day. The problem is that many of us have trouble following through on our intentions. Following through is a lot more difficult than we think.
Akrasia
The problem of not doing the things we actually want to do is very old. Philosophers back in the day like Plato and Aristoteles came up with a fancy word for this: Akrasia.
Akrasia: Not doing what you genuinely want to do.
Akrasia is broad umbrella term. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow through, and addiction.
Online grocery shopping
If you are a rationalist like me and you’ve taken some economics courses you might think this is weird, people not doing what they want to do. This is not in line with what we’ve been taught. Even though you do not like what you did, you still did what you did, because at that point in time it was exactly what you wanted. This is a thing economists call revealed preference. This definitely sounds very true to me, but doesn’t help us in any way to do more of the things we want to do.
If this is not helpful, what is? What is helpful is to know that our desires and preferences are time-inconsistent. They vary over time. This is illustrated in a study on online grocery shopping. When ordering groceries online, people tend to buy more ice cream and less vegetables when they are ordering for tomorrow rather than next week. (I have to add that I haven’t found the original source linked here, so don’t quote me on this one.)
In other words, our monkey brain sucks at weighing the cost/benefits when they are immediate instead of distant, heavily favouring immediate rewards.
Come to think of it, this provides weight to the explanation of why we are so addicted to our smartphones. No one really wants to browse Instagram for 2 hours every day, yet the benefit of opening Instagram is large because it provides an immediate reward.
Plan your week
Cool story: Akrasia, online grocery shopping, stupid monkey brain. But what does this mean to me? An important implication of this is that what you need to do to become successful in the long-term, is probably not what you want to do short-term. This is why you need to beat your stupid monkey brain into submission and plan out your week out in advance with important work for the long-term.
Recap
Today I talked a bit about why we don’t do the things we actually want to do. This is called Akrasia. It’s an old problem and although I don’t provide any solutions (yet) knowing is half the battle.
In one of my next posts I want to talk about the solution to this problem: self-binding or commitment devices. Think of Ulysses binding himself to his mast so he wouldn’t give in to the Siren’s song.
That’s it! You can find me on my website janmeppe.com or on Twitter at @janmeppe.
Thank you so much for reading. See you next time!