001 : AKRASIA.
❥ ⸺ FROM THE AKRASIA PROJECT.
sometimes i wonder why it’s so easy to know what i should do, but so hard to actually do it. aristotle had a word for this: akrasia — the state of acting against your better judgment.
akrasia shows up in small ways: the snoozed alarm, the assignment opened but never finished, the “tomorrow” that never comes. psychologists have tried to explain this for decades. decision fatigue tells us that self-control drains like a battery (baumeister et al., 1998). hyperbolic discounting suggests that we’re wired to value small rewards now over larger ones later (ainslie, 1975).
the famous marshmallow experiment by mischel (1972) framed this as “delay of gratification” — a four-year-old choosing between one marshmallow now, or two if they wait. for the kids, waiting fifteen minutes felt impossible. but doesn’t it feel the same, even as adults? we all have our marshmallows.
what fascinates me is that akrasia isn’t just about weakness. it’s about conflict: the present self versus the future self. in cognitive terms, it’s a misalignment of short-term and long-term goals. in human terms, it’s the struggle of wanting both comfort and growth at the same time.
this project exists in that space. somewhere between psychology and daily life, between research papers and journal entries.
for now, i’ll start here — by pressing “publish.”
sources / further reading:
baumeister, r. f., bratslavsky, e., muraven, m., & tice, d. m. (1998). ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? journal of personality and social psychology, 74(5), 1252.
ainslie, g. (1975). specious reward: a behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulse control. psychological bulletin, 82(4), 463.
mischel, w., ebbesen, e. b., & zeiss, a. r. (1972). cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification. journal of personality and social psychology, 21(2), 204.
⸺ love, asteria.