Breakdown of will

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re: media memory & metaphor

Breakdown of will

July 21, 2018 × Aaron Z. Lewis × San Francisco, CA

This post is a reflection on George Ainslie’s book, Breakdown of Will.

Breakdown of Will orbits around a few really basic questions: Why do we feel like we need willpower at all? Why does it take so much effort to resist temptation? How can we make sense of the fact that people’s preferences are super inconsistent over time, and why is it that people so often undermine their own long-term goals?

In order to understand this bizarre behavior, we have to put aside some pretty foundational assumptions about identity. Most people live their lives in the first-person singular. You’re supposed to “be yourself” and “follow your passion” and “go with your gut"—as if there’s only one "you” that can be uncovered with enough introspection. The foundational assumption in Breakdown of Will is that we should stop thinking about the self as a singular entity. It’s better understood as an internal marketplace of competing interests—a mini society inside your mind that’s constantly at war with itself. There are a few examples of this idea in pop culture: the devil and the angel on your shoulder, the alter ego, Jekyll and Hyde. But Breakdown of Will takes this model of selfhood to the extreme.

Delaying gratification

Each one of us contains a lot of short- and long-term preferences that are always competing with one another. To go to bed on time or to stay up late? To drink or to stay sober? To eat the donut or the carrot? It turns out that there are some remarkably consistent patterns in how people make these trade-offs. Behavioral economists have created a model that pretty accurately describes how we choose between immediate and distant rewards. The easiest way to understand this model is to try a little thought experiment. Answer these two questions for yourself:

Would you prefer $1,000 today or $2,000 a year from now?

Would you prefer $1,000 five years from now, or $2,000 six years from now?

Most people choose $1,000 in the first scenario and $2,000 in the second scenario. This is because it’s easier to delay gratification when you’re comparing two options that are very far away (five vs. six years) than when you’re comparing two options that are very near (now vs. a year from now). The fancy academic term for this psychological bias is hyperbolic discounting.

Here’s a more everyday example: when I wake up feeling exhausted, I promise myself that I’ll go to bed at 10pm come nighttime. It’s easy to set this goal when night feels far away. By the time 10pm actually rolls around, I want to spend a few more minutes on Twitter. And before I know it, another hour has gone by. It’s easier for me to value a good night’s sleep at a distance (i.e. when I wake up in the morning) than when the choice is at hand (i.e. when I want to spend just a few more minutes on Twitter).

In general, we know that people are biased towards earlier, smaller rewards over later, larger rewards. How, then, do people manage to defend long-range interests against temporary preferences? Some people use external commitment tactics, like refusing to stock junk food in the kitchen. Some use third-party accountability, like public declarations of goals. Still others use physical devices, like pills that reduce appetite.

But the strongest and most versatile tactic seems to be raw willpower. People set rules or resolutions for themselves and adhere to them through sheer force of will. It’s surprising that the mere act of making up a rule can be such an effective antidote to impulsiveness. Why does this work, and what does it really mean to use willpower?

A mistaken metaphor

Breakdown of Will’s main insight is that we’re using the wrong metaphor to describe what the will actually is and how it works. Traditionally, we’ve thought about it as a kind of muscle that can be strengthened through repeated exercise—or as a corporate executive who can give orders directly to employees. Hence the term “willpower.”

In actuality, the will is more like a bargaining game or a “limited war” among your present and future selves. Limited warfare is the relationship of bargaining agents who have some incompatible goals, but also some common goals. For example: “countries want to win trade advantages from each together while avoiding trade war; merchants want to win customers from each other while lobbying for the same commercial legislation; a husband wants to vacation in the mountains and his wife wants to vacation at the shore, but neither wants to spoil the vacation by fighting; a person today wants to stay sober tomorrow night and tomorrow night will want to get drunk, but from neither standpoint does she want to become an alcoholic.”

The will to stick to a...