[comboy]

> "If you did it you must have felt like doing it"

That's exactly correct. Every action you took voluntarily was your choice.

You are always doing whatever you want to do. You may tell yourself many stories in your head, and we can dispute free will, but as long as we assume it for the purpose of this discussion, what you do is your choice.

So to me the biggest step in fighting procrastination seems to be deciding what do you really want to be doing with your life and eliminating wishful thinking (i.e. thinking that you can get foo without doing bar in case where that is not possible)

[dwaltrip]

> That's exactly correct. Every action you took voluntarily was your choice.

> You are always doing whatever you want to do. You may tell yourself many stories in your head, and we can dispute free will, but as long as we assume it for the purpose of this discussion, what you do is your choice.

I understand what you are getting at, and I agree with the basic fundamental idea within a certain context. However, we have to be careful with how we extrapolate and attempt to re-interpret words and phrases such as "choice", "want", "feel like doing [x]", "deciding" , and so on.

The part quoted above basically makes those words meaningless. Regardless of what one thinks about free will, those words have great utility and fulfill roles in the human experience for which there isn't really any replacement.

You yourself demonstrate this quite plainly in your last sentence, when you say we should "decide" what we really "want" to be doing with our life.

[comboy]

That's a fair point. I think we inevitably end up in a discussion about free will if we try to pin those words down. That part of the last sentence could have been written as "thinking what values are important to you".

But yes it's just rephrasing. I explained myself in a bit more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17524210

[diminoten]

I'm not going to presume to argue with David Hume, but I'm not sure what I can do with something that tells me I have agency. Or is that the point, that I do have agency?

I guess I knew that already, but probably thanks to him and his intellectual descendants. Free will arguments have never really interested me...