Oh, for sure! “It’s −20º C outside and I’ve been out of the house for 16 hours and I really don’t want to go jump into a cold pool and swim laps for an hour, and I’ll be exhausted after, but I haven’t exercised in 2 days and I really should.” This is kind of a worst-case scenario. Most of the time, for me anyway, the parts of me that do want to do something and the parts that don’t are equally lined up. (For example: I don’t want to swim because I could go home and play on the computer and go to bed early instead, but I do want to swim because I’ll get crabby if I don’t and I’ll feel better afterwards if I do.)
To me, simplifying it down to ‘feeling like it’ collapses the difference between someone who consistently will choose to swim in the aforementioned example, and someone who consistently won’t. You could call the difference ‘being better at delayed gratification’ but I think the usual definition of willpower covers it quite well.
Oh, for sure! “It’s −20º C outside and I’ve been out of the house for 16 hours and I really don’t want to go jump into a cold pool and swim laps for an hour, and I’ll be exhausted after, but I haven’t exercised in 2 days and I really should.” This is kind of a worst-case scenario. Most of the time, for me anyway, the parts of me that do want to do something and the parts that don’t are equally lined up. (For example: I don’t want to swim because I could go home and play on the computer and go to bed early instead, but I do want to swim because I’ll get crabby if I don’t and I’ll feel better afterwards if I do.)
To me, that reads as a more complicated form of “feeling like it”...
To me, simplifying it down to ‘feeling like it’ collapses the difference between someone who consistently will choose to swim in the aforementioned example, and someone who consistently won’t. You could call the difference ‘being better at delayed gratification’ but I think the usual definition of willpower covers it quite well.