I'm beginning to wonder if you've got a case of Robot's Revenge (a notion which I think is from RA Wilson, but I can't find a cite). Robot's Revenge is what can happen when you try to make yourself do something you just don't want to do, and you find yourself forgetting, making mistakes, and generally unable to be effective at obeying. Wilson's description implied that it was something which could happen when someone else is giving the orders, but I don't see why it couldn't happen internally.
This fits with a general model I've been developing that you've done a lot of being harsh with yourself, and aren't letting natural systems that help you function do their work.
Important note: this is all hypothetical. I'm not a therapist and I don't have studies backing me up, either. All I've got is a lot of self-observation, and some recent improvement in my levels of depression and inertia.
This doesn't stop me from giving advice, of course. And my current notion is that you'd benefit from giving up on self-improvement for at least a month. Possibly for a year.
And my current notion is that you'd benefit from giving up on self-improvement for at least a month. Possibly for a year.
I've tried to do exactly that, actually. The result is no employment, no medical insurance, and no social safety net. Our culture is rapidly losing patience with my inability to man up and earn my keep.
My name is Brent, and I'm probably insane.
I can perform various experimental tests to verify that I do not perform primate pack-bonding rituals correctly, which is about half of what we mean by "insane". This concerns me simply from a utilitarian perspective (separation from pack makes ego-depletion problems harder; it makes resources harder to come by; and it simply sucks to experience "from the inside"), but these are not the things that concern me most.
The thing that concerns me most is this:
What if the very tools that I use to make decisions are flawed?
I stumbled upon Bayesian techniques as a young child; I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to perform a lot of self-guided artificial intelligence "research" in Junior High and High School, due to growing up in a time and place when computers were utterly mysterious, so no one could really tell me what I was "supposed" to be doing with them - so I started making simple video games, had no opponents to play them against due to the aforementioned failures to correctly perform pack-bonding rituals, decided to create my own, became dissatisfied with the quality of my opponents, and suddenly found myself chewing on Hopfstaedter and Wiener and Minsky.
I'm filling in that bit of detail to explain that I have been attempting to operate as a rational intelligence for quite some time, so I believe that I've become very familiar with the kinds of "bugs" that I will tend to exhibit.
I've spent a very long time attempting to correct for my cognitive biases, edit out tendencies to seek comfortable-but-misleading inputs, and otherwise "force" myself to be rational, and often, the result is that my "will" will crack under the strain. My entire utility-table will suddenly flip on its head, and attempt to maximize my own self-destruction rather than allow me to continue to torture it with endlessly recursive, unsolvable problems that all tend to boil down to "you do not have sufficient social power, and humans are savage and cruel no matter how much you care about them."
Most of my energy is spent attempting to maintain positive, rational, long-term goals in the face of some kind of regedit-hack of my utility table itself, coming from somewhere in my subconscious that I can't seem to gain write-access to.
Clearly, the transhumanist solution would be to identify the underlying physical storage where the bug is occurring, and replace it with a less-malfunctioning piece of hardware.
Hopefully someday someone with more self-control, financial resources, and social resources than I will invent a method to do that, and I can get enough of a partial personectomy to create something viable with the remaining subroutines.
In the meantime, what is someone who wishes to be rational supposed to do, when the underlying hardware simply won't cooperate?