Mark Manson

And he had this metaphor.

He called it the tripartite soul.

He basically said that the human soul is divided into three parts and the three parts are all wrestling for control at any given time.

And those three parts basically boil down to kind of our impulses and instincts, our animalistic side, our emotions and our passions, and then our rationality and our higher level decision-making.

And it turns out,

Psychology has largely borne Plato's model to be true.

I mean, there's some nuances and a couple little changes here and there, but we generally have these different parts of ourselves and they're generally wrestling against each other for control.

Anybody who has struggled to follow through with something they wanna do has experienced this, where you intellectually understand

I should get off the couch.

I should go to the gym.

I should hire a trainer.

But emotionally, you're like, these potato chips, they sure do taste good.

So Plato had this metaphor to describe this, which is that our soul or basically our psychology is like a chariot rider trying to control two horses.

So one horse is our animal instincts and our urges, and the other horse is our emotions and our passions.

The chariot rider, which is our rationality, his goal is to control the horses and point them in the correct direction.

But the interesting thing about this metaphor is that it shows us that ultimately feelings are what drive our actions and our decisions.

And when it comes to changing ourselves, to trying to be a new person, ultimately that is a

emotionally based problem.

Like the reason we don't do things that we know we should do is simply because we don't feel like it.

It's not that we don't know we should do it.