Akrasia

Akrasia

Lack of self-control or the state of acting against one's better judgment.

For example: who alive in the modern world does not know the following?

• One should eat healthily
• One should exercise regularly
• One should floss regularly
• One should save money for retirement and plan for one's future

But why do only some people do these things, do them well and do them regularly?

Psychologist George Ainslie argues that akrasia results from the empirically verified phenomenon of Hyperbolic discounting, which causes us to make different judgements close to a reward than we will when further from it.