- Changing my voter registration
- Talking to my school about my tuition payment
- Setting up a dinner appointment that I wanted to bring about
- Talking to my bank about where my new debit card should be sent
- Talking to a professor about papers and a research project
- Buying bus tickets and coordinating a travel schedule.
This cluster shares several defining characteristics: They are all relatively important, and they mostly involve other people, and mostly people or groups that I am unfamiliar with. I believe these characteristics are what make it hard for me to do what I need to do.
Notably, it's not the difficulty of the decisions or actions needed that a struggle with, particularly. Once I do manage to get myself to do the thing that needs doing, I tend to do it just fine. My problem is in getting myself to do the thing in the first place.
This is, of course, not a rational reluctance. It's merely an instance of my System 1 exerting far too much sway on my decision making. However, the fact that I have a System 1 reluctance to do these things is not particularly surprising or informative. There are many, many things I do every day that I nevertheless have a System 1 aversion towards doing. However, with more routine matters that I have faced in the past, I think I've trained myself to use System 2 and overcome my irrational impulses relatively easily. The surprising thing is that my System 2 doesn't take control easily or reliably.
In these cases, there are factors pushing me away from making the sensible choice: Needing to interact with another person or entity increases the length of the interaction necessary to complete the task, thereby increasing the opportunity for my natural reluctance to overwhelm my initial motivation to perform the task. However, this is only relevant in some of the interactions, maybe three of the six above, while in other cases I never get off the ground in the first place.
That process is combined with the weight of the decision or action to be made, which plays on my natural procrastination tendencies, where I tend to avoid doing important things, because at a System 1 level, I'm probably thinking that if I don't deal with it, I can't do it wrong. I think this might be because I reward myself insufficiently for dealing with important matters successfully, so I only remember the stress beforehand and the rare failings.
Finally, there's the fact that I've been avoiding the area for many years, leaving it for others to deal with on my behalf or actively deciding not to do certain things so I wouldn't have to do anything in the painful cluster.
But now, I'm growing up, and I can't avoid these things any longer. I'm hoping that with the realization of the issue I face with regards to this mental blockage have, I'll be able to set my mind towards overcoming it, and thereby actually succeed. Also, I'll try to be better about rewarding myself for doing things I find hard.
