Anyway, the alternative is cleaning my room, so let's talk about them now.
What I mean by this term are things which require significant willpower to accomplish during the course of the day, yet which do not contribute in any way toward my goals. These things need to be done, but only in a jumping-through-hoops sort of way. The most obvious example I can give you is climbing up the hill to go to class, because somebody thought putting a university on top of a small mountain and the housing at the foot was a sensible and intelligent plan.
Getting to class facilitates my success. Climbing up a hill does not. Insofar as I have to put up with it, it's a willpower sink. I dump willpower into it, and don't really get anything back out.
Maybe it's just my perennial cynicism, but adult life looks increasingly like a collection of willpower sinks which could be avoided if people just agreed to do away with them. Climbing the hill seems this way, to an extent. We could level Mount Oread and rebuild KU at a more sensible elevation, but that's unfeasible for multiple reasons. Only a few of them are very good.
Someone (probably my mother) is going to tell me that doing things we don't like is just a part of life. That's my whole point here! We have to do tons of things we don't enjoy to achieve our desires. My response to this reality is to not waste willpower on unnecessary things, because willpower is scarce and human happiness is scarcer.
The best argument I can generate in the defense of willpower sinks is that they help build discipline in the face of adversity. In an idealized case, that would be valid. In the real world, I'm 22 and literally complaining about walking uphill (both ways!) to school. Character-building experiences are not evenly distributed, and I can only see this problem getting worse as the 21st Century continues.
For the solution, I invoke Weird Sun Twitter:
Game theory is asleep, cooperate for no reason— Deity Of Religion (@DeityOfReligion) October 7, 2015
