behave yourself

Discovering a word that exquisitely captures one of your greatest flaws is extremely liberating. At worst, it encourages you to continue on your self-defeating path because it's gratifying to see yourself in the dictionary. At best, it provides solace, proving that you are not alone in your neuroses. Which, again, sort of makes you shrug your shoulders and think, oh why bother? 

Akrasia is a word derived from an ancient greek term meaning weakness of will. More elegantly and accurately put, it is "a perplexing tendency to know what we should do combined with a persistent reluctance to actually do it." That is me all over, and it's probably you, too. 

Philosophers as early as Plato and modern psychologists have tried to explain why we often do X when we know and believe Y to be better. It seems the best anyone's come up with is that we act on conflicting motivations. In other words, reason and logic are but mathematical equations we choose to ignore.  

The whole world is X-ing when we should be Y-ing, and the worst part is that we know it. We're well aware of our nonsensical X-ing, yet we carry on. It's fascinating. 

I have no lesson to offer here, but doesn't it make you feel just a tiny bit better to know there's a nice Greek word to blame for at least one of your shortcomings?