Akrasia

QUOTE

Viktor Frankl once said…

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

(Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and author)

CONCEPT

Akrasia

Akrasia is the ancient Greek term for acting against your own better judgment—doing the thing you know you shouldn't, or failing to do the thing you know you should. It's the gap between intention and action.

Aristotle wrestled with it seriously, finding it philosophically troubling: if you know what's good, why wouldn't you do it? The answer, it turns out, is that knowledge and behavior operate on different systems. Knowing is cognitive. Doing is emotional.

Akrasia isn't weakness—it's a structural feature of human psychology. Understanding it doesn't make it disappear, but it does make it workable. The people who manage it best don't rely on willpower. They design their environment so that the right choice becomes the easier one.

STORY

I’ll Get to It … Tomorrow?

George Akerlof—who would eventually win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001—has written candidly about a period in 1995 when he needed to mail a box of his colleague's belongings from India, where he was living temporarily, back to the United States.

It was a simple task. It should have taken an afternoon.

It took eight months.

Akerlof knew he needed to mail the box. He intended to mail it. But every day, he failed to do so. The task sat in his apartment like an accusation. He later described the experience with remarkable honesty: each day he would think about mailing it, conclude it was slightly too complicated to deal with right now, and return to it tomorrow.

Tomorrow had a way of never arriving.

What makes the story more than just an amusing anecdote is what Akerlof did with it afterward. He recognized in his own paralysis the same structural problem he had been studying in economic behavior—the tendency of humans to discount future costs and benefits in ways that consistently undermine their own stated preferences. Present-you perpetually hijacks future-you's plans.

His insights contributed to the growing field of behavioral economics, helping explain why people under-save for retirement, delay medical checkups, and abandon goals they genuinely care about.

The gap between intention and action isn’t a moral failing—it’s a predictable, measurable, and surprisingly universal feature of human decision-making.