Enemies of Willpower

Or, how I attempted to write an Important Blog Post but delayed it over and over again, and decided to write about my attempt to write instead…

Willpower is a strange strange thing. One can spend all day prepping for it, cajoling it out of its hidey-hole, building it up piece by piece in preparation for some project … then it disappears just when you need it, abducted by its evil twin, Apathy, heralding the appearance of its cousin, Guilt.

Guilt and Apathy co-exist rather uneasily. Their alliance is necessarily infected by the truism of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, but really, they are cats of different stripes. Guilt is a nervous, high-strung and disorganised individual, swinging between extremes of anxious nagging and studious avoidance. Apathy is a chill-out laid-back comfortable depressive who yo-yos gently between mild dissatisfaction and insensate listlessness. Guilt will say lots of things but won’t do anything. Apathy doesn’t do anything, period.

Guilt is a pest, Apathy is a bum. Their fundamental modus operandi aren’t aligned with each other, much less so their personalities. So by any rational thought, Guilt and Apathy ought to be nemeses. How did they get inducted into the same dark brotherhood, set in opposition to the shining light of Willpower?

Perhaps because both are resistant to change. At its most basic, Willpower is the intent to inflict and engage in change. Change requires more effort than status quo, but Guilt is too scared and Apathy is too lazy.

While there’s no change on the horizon, all three probably fall into an equilateral triangle, like this:
(all oppose each other to some equal degree)

But once Guilt and Apathy sniff out any change that requires a significant amount of either courage or effort, the triangle quickly becomes isoceles, like this

And if these were vectors or forces in equilibrium, any beginning physics student will tell you that at any vertex in equilateral Fig. 1, the magnitudes of the vertical and horizontal components are equal, but in isoceles Fig. 2. the former is always more than the latter.

In other words, in Fig 1 (no change), Guilt, Willpower and Apathy are all fighting each other in an equal three-way battle. Once we get to Fig 2 (change), Guilt and Apathy might have mini internal bickerings, but are definitely united in an alliance against Willpower.

So the question is – how to make Guilt and Apathy fight each other instead? How to play off fundamental misalignments, incite dissent and leave Guilt and Apathy tangled up in each other so that Willpower has breathing space to act? How do we make the diagram look like this:

Anybody have any ideas?

Note: Before I wear out the personification and physics analogy (if there are glaring inconsistencies in the physics, please ignore them), here’s some background on these musings. Since going offline sometime in Feb, and on a rather questionable note , I wanted to write a post updating readers (if there are any left) about my life. Unfortunately I hit by, you guessed it, Apathy and Guilt!
And after writing about all that, I still haven’t written what I was going to write. Productive procrastination, indeed!