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Swimmer963 comments on Let Your Workers Gather Food - Less Wrong
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Interesting article. I really like the example that you use at the beginning, and I agree that it's a useful metaphor for everyday life and human behaviour.
The 'Now for some ideas on making yourself go FOOM' section was a couple of levels of abstraction above the kind of concrete suggestion that I could actually go out and use in real life. (Maybe because I suspect that I'm not one of the 'really smart' people.)
Maybe I'm weird, but to me this sounds like an absolutely miserable way to live. And I'm already further towards that end of the spectrum than most people I know. Then again, I consider my tendency to work obsessively to be a flaw that I want to fix.
No. Don't fix it. Akrasia is just awful.
Although you should be able to decide on what you want to work, a thing that seems to be excluded by the sentence "work obsessively".
Exactly. You could say that I have just as much akrasia as others, just about different things. I always tell my friends/family/boyfriend that I'll be less busy/take a break at some point, and I keep putting it off, despite often realizing that a state of constant near-exhaustion is not maximally efficient and that I would be able to focus my efforts a lot more optimally if I did take a break.
(I type this as I sit at the keyboard at 6 am, ready to bike halfway across the city in 2ยบ C weather, with my swimsuit packed so that I can go swim at the campus pool after my 12 hours placement in the hospital. The marks of a workaholic indeed.)
Yeah... my spouse ignores pain (to her detriment), tried to live like this years ago and still subconsciously idealizes it, and she's miserable a fair chunk of the time. She'll never stop being a bit of a workaholic, but your early 20s don't last forever, and all the motivation she can summon up (tremendous!) won't change the fact that eventually muscle and brain go "No more!"
It'd work great except for the part where you're not an abstract consciousness trapped in a clunky meat shell; you ARE that meat, and its limits are your own.
And I suppose getting her to talk to a professional about it is out of the question.
No; her physician and therapist are people she listens to (or listened to -- therapist got cancer, she needs to get a new one) about this. It's just difficult to shake off -- she's getting help for it, but it's kind of like chronic depression or addiction; making progress against the background is much more realistic than just expecting it to entirely go away, and the trait itself never does just vanish.