Lethargy and related matters (draft)

[NOTE: Was working on this earlier today, thought I'd completed it already, but upon rereading realized that I wasn't being as clear as I could be. For the sake of posting something today, I've patched it up a bit so the holes don't gape as huge. But this is a draft which may be revised later on.]

Even with all my good intentions, it's all too easy to succumb to plain old-fashioned laziness. I've ten 500-word articles to submit tomorrow night, and yet I've finished only one, last night (EDIT: I've finished them all, yaaaay).

Lethargy must be at least partly due to personality and predisposition. There are those people, after all, who seem to prefer remaining busy all the time. And then there are those people who prefer to slack off and exert effort (when necessary) only at the last possible moment. I think I'm somewhere in the middle, if leaning towards the latter.

What do I mean by "personality and predisposition"? Predisposition of course refers to some innate attitude towards something, but in fact I realize that any predisposition is never simply inborn, but rather is induced. How one was raised, social context, and personal experiences are all possible factors that lead to the formation of these attitudes.

In my case, I was born the youngest of four siblings, fourteen years younger than the next one in line, in fact. As you would imagine, this set me up for a rather cushy life. Some level of natural intelligence (or at least aptitude) also served to see me sail smoothly through most of grade school, high school, and early college. Hence I never really had to work hard for anything, and this shaped my expectations of the future: that things would largely work themselves out without much effort on my part.

A remark that could be made here is that people tend to have different perceptions of what constitutes "effort". Specifically, there is a certain variable threshold of resistance to different tasks. This threshold is affected by personal distinctions between "work" and "play", between merely tolerable and enjoyable activities, among other things, but the main point here is that this threshold depends largely on perception.

I think that this is a powerful realization. If only it were easier to fool oneself into thinking of all work as play, then the only remaining problem would be to find the time for all of our pursuits! However, it is usually harder, in practice, to trick oneself into liking some (at the moment) undesirable task.

Well, as some of you might already know, I've resolved to (stating it simply) get my act together this year. This resolution of course works under the assumption that my abilities and skills are more than adequate, and the only thing I'm lacking is motivation (which is, I admit, quite a different thing from just relative resistances to tasks, but they're related, in a way that I'm too lazy to elaborate on right now, so there). Or perhaps the willpower to create my own motivations (using the term a bit loosely).