Mark Manson

Like, how is it that our behavior gets divorced from our knowledge to such a large extent?

And that book, it...

Anyway, I didn't end up writing it.

But I did do some interesting research for that book when I was writing it.

And this problem is as old as civilization, obviously.

The Greeks referred to this as akrasia, and they took it very seriously as a philosophical problem.

It didn't make sense to them that if you know something is good, why should you be capable of doing anything to the contrary?

Why should there be any resistance towards doing it?

And it's interesting because the major Greek philosophers had, they each had kind of a different angle at which they tried to answer this question.

Socrates

just rejected the premise outright.

So in the dialogue, Protagoras, he argued that it was actually impossible to not do the thing that you wanted to do.

He said that if you experience a discrepancy between what you want to do and what you actually do, he just said you don't actually want to do it, which to me feels like a cop-out.

That's very circular, right?

It's like, well, if you wanted to do it, you would.

And the thing you did, it's because you wanted to.

It's like, well, yeah, that's not very helpful, Socrates, but thank you.

Thank you for your participation.

Yes, it does.

Plato was really the one that kind of nailed this.