# The Problem With My Friend Who Has This Problem

Originally published: 2012-07-03
Canonical URL: /2012/Jul/the-problem-with-my-friend-who-has-this-problem/

Dear reader, I have this ... friend, who has this problem, and I wanted to ask—

What do you mean, _Who is he?_ You wouldn't know ... _her_, and—

You must realize that I'm already aware that it's a standard trope for someone [to say "I Have This Friend" when they're really talking about themselves](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IHaveThisFriend), and given that I _know_ it's already a standard trope, I would never be so obvious as to actually do it! Therefore you must truthfully conclude that I _really am_ talking about a—

Okay, that's a good point. No, I didn't consider the fact that that reasoning can't possibly be sound because if it were, then people would use it as an excuse to falsely claim that they were speaking about a friend rather than themselves, thereby contradicting the assumption that the reasoning is—

Well, we _could_ try to calculate the probability that I really am talking about a friend conditional on your epistemic state and taking into account the game-theoretic considerations just mentioned, but that could take all night, so will you just _listen to my transparent lies for fuck's sake_?

Thank you. So I have this friend, who has this problem, which is that there's a not-infrequently-occurring scenario in which she has trouble doing stuff, which is this: she feels morally obligated to make progress on some work she owes someone else, but she _also_ wants to make progress on her own personal projects. She thinks she ought to work on the thing she owes someone before she works on her own stuff, but doesn't feel motivated to work on the thing for someone else, and she doesn't feel like she's earned the right to work on her own stuff, so she just ends up doing nothing instead. (Or not _literally_ "nothing"; she looks at mildly informative articles and mildly amusing captioned images on the internet. But that should be considered a ground state which might as well be called _nothing_.) And so the day becomes a _double_ tragedy: not only has she failed her sacred duties to someone else, she's _also_ failed her sacred duties to herself, and for _what_? [Tech news emphemera](http://news.ycombinator.com/news)? Keeping up with all the [comments](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/comments) on her favorite community blog? An [adorable animated Graphics Interchange Format file of Rainbow Dash jumping on a bed](http://vexpon.deviantart.com/art/Bouncy-Dashy-308600016)? _Not worth it!_

Of course the _right_ thing to do would be to efficiently work on the project she owes someone for a reasonable amount of time, and _then_ work on her own project, but if my friend knew how to "just" do the right thing regardless of psychological state, then this problem wouldn't exist (and I wouldn't waste your time telling you about a problem that doesn't even exist on behalf of my friend who also doesn't ex—uh, doesn't ex–_pect_ me to annoy you with problems that—unlike my friend—don't exist). To say that she should "just use willpower" isn't necessarily _wrong_, but it needs to be made more _specific_ for the use of my poor friend, or an easier-to-use (although morally or pragmatically inferior) strategy is needed.

So I recommended to my friend that when she notices herself in this situation, maybe she should just _start_ working on her personal stuff _that moment_, with the quiet hope that the psychological momentum of doing something, _anything_, can be carried over to fulfilling her obligations to others later in the day. Again, it's not the _right_ thing to do, but surely it's _better_ than what she lets happen _now_. It is written that _the perfect is the enemy of the good_, with the implied moral being that we should side with the merely good. I would prefer to say that _the perfect is the enemy of the good, and while we would hope for the perfect to mercilessly annihilate all its enemies, sometimes you have to temporarily ally with a stronger enemy (in this case, the good) in order to vanquish an even greater foe (in this case, evil)._ But for humans at least, it amounts to the same thing.

Did I say the Right Thing?