hilker:

mills:

When I spend hours outdoors with my dogs, they occasionally regress to their days as strays and begin eating the inedible: dirt, plants, garbage, cat shit. They do this despite inevitably vomiting every time they do so; they’re now seven and eight years old, respectively, and it’s clear they will never stop.

This is likely because, as dogs, they cannot make a causal connection between eating crawfish shells and throwing up on my carpet three hours later; it’s one of the most upsetting cognitive limitations they have, as far as I and my carpet are concerned.

But when I’m feeling particularly judgmental about it, I just reflect on my own persistent inability to enact the lessons I do learn. For example, while I know that staying in the sun too long will not only give me sunburn but will indeed destroy my skin over time and is completely pointless and superficial, I still do it every damn summer.

There are dozens of such examples: substantial sleeplessness will destabilize my mood and render me emotionally volatile, but I still stay up way too late if there’s anything even remotely interesting going on.

Most of us are defined as much by our failures to enact painfully acquired existential wisdom as we are by its acquisition. From knowing we should exercise and diet but just not doing so to repeatedly dating the wrong sort of person despite being fully aware not only of what sort they are but indeed why we’re dating them, we fail to put into practice what we learn.

What’s fascinating to me is how little effect cognition has on the will; we are aware of our bad habits, our self-sabotaging tendencies, yet at those moments of choice, those binary Y/N instants when we are ordering the desert, kissing the girl, choosing to stay at the job, etc., we utterly fail to implement what we know.

My dogs have an excuse: they don’t know. What is wrong with humans that we can be so fully aware of ourselves on the meta level and so incapable of actualizing that awareness? Why is the will so resistant to the intellect?

(Possible answers: because the will reflects honest desires; because the will relates to a short-term memory; because you don’t truly want to diet and stop dating lunatics).

What is most notable about this is how it demonstrates that your knowledge has little do with your behavior in many important respects; you are neither self-created nor self-directed. You do not reason your way through choices; you make choices and reason from them. Knowing rationally what to do makes as much difference to us as to my dogs.

Insightful post, but I think it might be plagiarized.