I didn’t walk to the train today, nor did I walk from the train yesterday evening.  I just felt too mentally fatigued‒no worse last night than this morning, and no better.  Also the weather is still just disgusting.  It’s almost as hot this morning as yesterday, and it’s just as muggy.  I am, however, saddled up (so to speak) for walking back from the train this afternoon.

We’ll see what happens.  My current self thinks it’s a pretty good idea, but my afternoon self, faced with his immediate set of metaphorical force vectors, may arrive at a different vector sum than the one at which my current self wishes to arrive.  It’s always easier to discount future costs than present ones, even if those future costs might be extreme.

For good, sound, biological reasons, we’re “designed” to weigh present costs and benefits far more seriously, to find them much more salient, than future costs.  But things like game theory and other decision theory matters can make it clear to us that, sometimes at least, we should override those weightings of present cost/benefit relative to future ones.

However, knowing what we “should” do and doing it are not the same.  And then, of course, there’s always the is/ought separation, pioneered by Hume, which some people find worrisome, but which I think doesn’t make much difference in most cases.  Anyway, we all know that a person saying, “Starting next week, I’m going to give up desserts” (and really meaning it when they say it) is much different than someone actually turning down an offered slice of one’s favorite cake (or whatever) in a given moment.  Different parts of our brains dominate at different times.

The urge for cake is a strong one*, especially if it’s a habit, and to suppress it in the moment requires effort, what one might call willpower.  But willpower, in some senses, is like muscular strength and endurance.  It has limits, and it can be fatigued.  For instance, it’s harder to resist temptations at the end of a busy day, especially if one had to concentrate and think and focus a lot during that day.  There are likely to be exercises that one can do, so to speak, to make one’s willpower stronger and improve its endurance, but they will not engender perfect willpower any more than weightlifting can give one limitless strength and never-ending endurance**.

This is one of the reasons it pays to have the people around you on your side if you’re trying to break some bad habit you don’t like.  Make sure no one offers you dessert, or drinks alcohol in your presence, or smokes near you.  And for gosh sakes, stay away from the crack dens if you want to break that habit!  Eliminate temptations as well as you can, unless and until you’ve broken that habit for a long enough time that your new habit of not having that old habit is consistently stronger than the old habit.  This can take a long time.  Sometimes it can take longer than one’s remaining life, and in such circumstances, one should never be complacent while one is alive.

Are the dead complacent?  Are they indulgent?  I suspect the answer is that they are neither, and that to ask such a question is a kind of category error, or at best something like a Zen koan.

How did I get onto this subject?  Oh, yeah, I was talking about my hopes and dreams for my future actions.  They’re not exactly inspiring or impressive future hopes and dreams.  But then, I’m not a particularly inspiring or impressive person, so I guess that’s appropriate.

My own personal future horizon, at least as far as I can see‒which I guess is sort of what horizon means‒is starkly limited, and often seems obscured by an impenetrable fog.  I have no feeling, no intuitive sense, of any real future for me.  I don’t really have any dreams or goals or wishes right now, other than negatory ones:  I want to stop, I want to escape, I want to cease having to try.  I’m tired 

I have thought, at times, that depression and dysthymia are, in some sense, disorders of the will, perhaps analogous to some type of muscular dystrophy or ALS or similar.  They can be progressive, relapsing/remitting, ebbing and surging, and yet overall persistently degenerative, depending on the individual and upon variables many of which are not well known.

In neuromuscular or related illnesses, one can probably improve one’s function or slow deterioration by doing physical and occupational therapy, including exercise of various kinds, taking appropriate medications, and so on, and this can make a real and substantial difference in the life of a person with a given disorder.  But unless one can correct or remove or even reverse the cause(s) of the disorder, assuming that cause is not an isolated event, then deterioration will continue, and the disorder will progress.

The rate of progression and its ultimate outcome will surely depend on many variables, and that rate might in some cases be brought to such a slow progression that it becomes irrelevant on the scale of one’s remaining life.  That’s the situation of someone whose depression is successfully controlled by ongoing therapy and medication.  It’s not cured, but it is held in check, and the result can at least be satisfactory, even if not ideal.

Some people don’t have that luck.  Some people have faster and more persistent progression.  It is not by their own doing; it is not something for which they can be blamed.  I think I can fairly say that no one ever made a fully informed choice to suffer from depression‒the disease itself affects one’s ability to choose rationally, and this is part of its corrosive power.  So cut them some slack if and when you can do so.

That’s about it for today, I think.  Have a good weekend.

*If cake and other desserts don’t do much for you personally, then substitute some other less-than-perfect habit.  If you’re a smoker, consider the process of quitting smoking.  If you have other drug or alcohol problems, that will surely be a pertinent related concept.  If you just waste too much time on your phone rather than doing things you would have preferred to have been doing in hindsight, consider that.  There are probably at least some analogous situations that apply for everyone.

**Sorry, fans of One Punch Man.