I keep hoping someone else will post their interpretation of it from a sufficiently different viewpoint that I can at least understand it well enough to know if I agree with it or not.

There are two types of thinking: sensory experience, and abstractions about sensory experience. Each type of thinking has strengths and weaknesses.

Sensory thinking lets you leverage a high degree of unconscious knowledge and processing power, applied to detailed models. Abstract thinking can jump several steps at a time, but lacks precision.

A major distinction between the two systems is that our actions are actually driven almost exclusively by the sensory system, and only indirectly influenced by the abstract system. The abstract system, in contrast, exists primarily to fulfill social goals: it's the brain's "spin doctor", whose job is to come up with plausible-sounding explanations that make you seem like an attractive ally, mate, etc.

Thus, each system has different biases: the sensory system is optimized for caring about what happens to you, right now, whereas the abstract system is optimized for thinking about how things "ought" to be for the whole group in the future... in ways that just "coincidentally" turn out to be for your own good. ;-)

The two systems can work together or against each other. In a typical dysfunctional scenario, the sensory system alerts you to a prediction of danger associated with a thought (e.g. of a task you're about to complete), and the abstract system then invents a plausible reason for not following up on that thought, perhaps followed by a plausible reason to do something else.

Unfortunately, once people notice this, they have a tendency to respond by having their abstract system think, "I shouldn't do that" or "I should do X instead"... which then does nothing. Or they invent reasons for how they got that way, or why other people or circumstances are against them, or whatever.

What I teach people to do is observe what the sensory machinery is doing, and retrain it to do other things. As I like to put it, "action is not an abstraction". The only time that our abstract thoughts lead to behavior changes is when they cause us to make connections in the sensory machinery...

Which is why one little story like "Stuck In The Middle With Bruce" has so much more impact on people than just talking in an abstract way about self-defeating behavior.