“I understand there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.”
- Anthony Bourdain

I return home from the gym. Leg day. Knees wobbly, quads halting, calves vacant of all bounce. I enter the front door, immediately sit. I pull out my phone, instinctively, to have a scroll.

From here, there is no path to productivity or meaningful leisure that does not run through a shower. I will do nothing worthwhile while I’m sticky and damp. But I don’t want to take a shower. Rather, I don’t want to muster the activation energy required to lift myself from this seat.

There is one clear answer to the question of what I should do next, but since my primitive lizard-brain wants to conserve energy, it exempts just hopping in the shower from my mental list of available options. I rule the best choice out so certainly that it ceases to exist, at least to me. What follows is an agonizing attempt to trade off all the other options, each tied for a second place so distant as to be useless.

Shall I unload the dishwasher? That doesn’t sound good (because I’m sticky and damp). Maybe it’d a good time to journal (will not, I’m sticky and damp). I’m free for the next 1.5 hours; I could jump back into my coding project (won’t, b/c I’m s + d). How about making those Amazon returns? (ibid).

This cyclical consideration and dismissal of bad options while ignoring the obvious solution is The Shower Problem.

stateDiagram-v2 direction LR s1: What do I do? s2: Clear winner state "Misery Zone" as MiseryZone { s3: Worse option s4: Waste more time } s1 --> s2: How about... s2 --> s3: I lack agency.
What else? s3 --> s4: That sucks s4 --> s3: Other ideas?

Once one enters the Misery Zone, they are likely to spend much time there. Symptoms of acute exposure to the MZ are irritability, attention fragmentation, brain fog, and general malaise. Symptoms of prolonged exposure include unaccounted-for hours-long blocks of your day/weekend and the sudden recognition that, despite your ambition and self-image as a hard worker, you haven’t actually done much to achieve your goals.

I’ve spent on the order of 1,000 hours battling The Shower Problem. I haven’t beaten it yet, but the best weapon I have against it is asking:

If I had unlimited energy, what would I do right now?

Twists on this hypothetical may instead marginalize the questioner’s fear, distractedness, self-conciousness, self-doubt, etc. For me, lethargy is the biggest inhibitor of my desire to do what I know is good for me, and the person I am without it makes choices I admire.