You can't do a thing you don't feel like doing. Ask David Hume, or ask any depressed person.
In reality our ideas about what we should be doing co-evolve with our feelings about doing those things.
In reality our ideas about what we should be doing co-evolve with our feelings about doing those things.
Now, you might counter this argument by saying you were only able to do it because you "felt" like doing the experiment.
Here, we must acknowledge a distinction between wanting to do something and feeling like doing something. And a further distinction between different reasons for wanting, and the ways you think about those reasons (logical steps, assumptions, context).
That's exactly correct. Every action you took voluntarily was your choice.
You are always doing whatever you want to do. You may tell yourself many stories in your head, and we can dispute free will, but as long as we assume it for the purpose of this discussion, what you do is your choice.
So to me the biggest step in fighting procrastination seems to be deciding what do you really want to be doing with your life and eliminating wishful thinking (i.e. thinking that you can get foo without doing bar in case where that is not possible)
> You are always doing whatever you want to do. You may tell yourself many stories in your head, and we can dispute free will, but as long as we assume it for the purpose of this discussion, what you do is your choice.
I understand what you are getting at, and I agree with the basic fundamental idea within a certain context. However, we have to be careful with how we extrapolate and attempt to re-interpret words and phrases such as "choice", "want", "feel like doing [x]", "deciding" , and so on.
The part quoted above basically makes those words meaningless. Regardless of what one thinks about free will, those words have great utility and fulfill roles in the human experience for which there isn't really any replacement.
You yourself demonstrate this quite plainly in your last sentence, when you say we should "decide" what we really "want" to be doing with our life.
But yes it's just rephrasing. I explained myself in a bit more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17524210
I guess I knew that already, but probably thanks to him and his intellectual descendants. Free will arguments have never really interested me...
What most people mean when they say "you can do something even if you don't feel like it" is "you can do something even if some other task sounds more appealing, even if inaction provides a refuge from the tension of engaging the task, even if you've been experiencing anhedonia for days/weeks."