Here’s one that doesn’t exactly fit on your scale—it broke a massive fit of paralysis, but has made only a minor long-term contribution so far—Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris.
When I heard about the premise, I knew it was something I needed—the idea was that the collapse of motivation is a current disposition of mind rather than a deep psychological flaw. This was enough to break some of the self-hatred (I’m fucking up, so I’m defective, so it’s too much work to bother with anything important) which I think drives akrasia in my case.
The book is a Catholic take on the problem of acedia—what’s sometimes called sloth, and reading it has done more to offer me clues than a solution. It’s got a historical overview of what people have written on it through the centuries—it’s kind of nice to know that looking for grudges as a distraction from getting work done predates the internet.
I think there’s something about time and impatience which leads to paralysis, but I don’t quite have it pinned down. It’s partly about believing that the work should be done already which makes the process of getting it done seem like an intolerable burden.
I’ll add it. How do you rate your experience with it? (Breaking a massive fit of paralysis definitely counts as something people would find useful, so it does count here.)
I’ll give it a plus 5, since it really was important for me.
However, it looks as though most of the people who’ve posted in this thread either don’t have self-hatred problems as severe as mine—they seem to already model akrasia as a bad current habit rather than as a fundamental defect, though I leave the possibility open that there’s some fundamental defect premises leading to the tendency to let time drift by rather than doing things which would be more useful or more fun.
I haven’t read all the amazon reviews of Acedia and Me, but those I have read reviewed it as a combination of history and memoir. None of them seemed to get any personal good out of it.
Having been very Catholic for a good chunk of my life, I tended to categorize my akrasia in the “fundamental defect” category up until about last year. Seeing it as something lots of smart people struggle with was helpful, as was seeing the ‘engineering’ model of correcting it as opposed to the ‘strength of character’ model.
Anyhow, don’t worry about skewing the average by giving your honest experience. Nobody’s results are perfectly typical.
Here’s one that doesn’t exactly fit on your scale—it broke a massive fit of paralysis, but has made only a minor long-term contribution so far—Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris.
When I heard about the premise, I knew it was something I needed—the idea was that the collapse of motivation is a current disposition of mind rather than a deep psychological flaw. This was enough to break some of the self-hatred (I’m fucking up, so I’m defective, so it’s too much work to bother with anything important) which I think drives akrasia in my case.
The book is a Catholic take on the problem of acedia—what’s sometimes called sloth, and reading it has done more to offer me clues than a solution. It’s got a historical overview of what people have written on it through the centuries—it’s kind of nice to know that looking for grudges as a distraction from getting work done predates the internet.
I think there’s something about time and impatience which leads to paralysis, but I don’t quite have it pinned down. It’s partly about believing that the work should be done already which makes the process of getting it done seem like an intolerable burden.
I’ll add it. How do you rate your experience with it? (Breaking a massive fit of paralysis definitely counts as something people would find useful, so it does count here.)
I’ll give it a plus 5, since it really was important for me.
However, it looks as though most of the people who’ve posted in this thread either don’t have self-hatred problems as severe as mine—they seem to already model akrasia as a bad current habit rather than as a fundamental defect, though I leave the possibility open that there’s some fundamental defect premises leading to the tendency to let time drift by rather than doing things which would be more useful or more fun.
I haven’t read all the amazon reviews of Acedia and Me, but those I have read reviewed it as a combination of history and memoir. None of them seemed to get any personal good out of it.
It isn’t a how-to book.
Having been very Catholic for a good chunk of my life, I tended to categorize my akrasia in the “fundamental defect” category up until about last year. Seeing it as something lots of smart people struggle with was helpful, as was seeing the ‘engineering’ model of correcting it as opposed to the ‘strength of character’ model.
Anyhow, don’t worry about skewing the average by giving your honest experience. Nobody’s results are perfectly typical.
I wasn’t so much concerned about skewing the results as that the scale didn’t fit my experience.
The book might be more likely to be useful for people with Catholic backgrounds.