akrasia is a hell of a failure mode, a self-made pit of suffering w/ no one else to blame but your lack of agency in your own life; I've fallen prey to it more often than I'm proud to admit, w/ instances ranging in severity from eating junk to sabotaging a treasured relationship.
even with all the efforts I've invested in defeating it all I've managed to accomplish is lengthening the gaps between episodes; when they happen, they're no less severe. altho tbf, I get back out of the hole a bit faster, nowadays. or so I'd like to believe.
this past year or so may have just absolved me of that illusion as well, being one of the longest episodes of executive misalignment I've experienced to date; I've just left the climbing gym for the first time since March 2020, something I used to do biweekly for 6 years straight
before the pandemic, I likely would've claimed to have defeated the worst of my executive dysfunction, that it was exceedingly unlikely for misalignments to persist longer than a week or so. as always, hubris is the downfall of man, & now I'm having to claw my way out of the hole
I've missed climbing horribly over this past year, it having been my primary sport for years, something which comprised a good portion of my life habit foundation. w/o that bedrock, the rest of the stack collapsed, quite predictably. I knew it was happening, but just watched.
it's hard to verbalize the subjective experience of akraisia, the shape of its qualia, to justify why one would self harm in this way; and make no mistake, its very much self harm, in the same way that watching someone fall & not helping is a violation of Asimov's second law.
if I'm being honest, some amount of it is a sort of dark glee, a perversion which almost longs to see you fail, to wonder if you'll REALLY let this happen; this is a dangerous, but universal impulse, hidden in our shadows. it's called the imp of the perverse, and we all have one.
as one who believes in materialistic determinism, I don't think we have much of a say in which voices are loudest at any given moment, nor exactly what we choose to do; but we DO have the power to change the symphony over time, with a consistent practice of memetic gardening.
we are but vessels for the spirits which fill us, ancestral and societal both, in the form of our genes & memes, respectively. we can do little but gently nudge the engine; our free will is comparatively small. take care with your psychic immune system.
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RT @pee_zombie
this execution engine forms the basis of our memetic host & is how egregores take root in our minds, making us worker nodes; I call this process memetic hijacking, of…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1405617778124636160
there are many voices inside each of us, a veritable society of mind, w/ positive & negative influences both; N wolves, so to speak. the specific mix in any given mind is influenced by one's environment, but ultimately its on us to choose which voices we heed, which wolf we feed.