Two weeks ago I read Paul Graham’s Acceleration of Addiction essay. If you haven’t, you should.
I’m not certain that I exercise free will. I believe 100% of what I do may be controlled by a combination of various addictions and the systems I put in place to compensate for them.
Present-Me is likely to make the wrong decisions, driven by pleasure-seeking. So, Past-Me dictates how Present-Me should behave to compensate, in the form of calendars, the carefully ordered stack of books on my nightstand and my Instapaper queue, my GTD system, etc. etc. This doesn’t leave Present-Me any downtime to course-correct, without robbing time from Past-Me’s carefully considered ordering of time. This cycle, it is vicious.
I am not a healthy cyborg. I never saw this before. My wheels are spinning. More on this later.