Great read, Maarten!

The connection between routines and values is a painfully ignored subject in psychology/ethics/personal development. Glad you’re on it!

Question: You brought up the idea of willpower (via Baumeister’s book and his ego-depletion theory). What do you make of all the recent failed replications of the theory? The paper I link to suggests that a big point of confusion is how slippery a concept it is to operationalize and define.

Does your argument here still hold without the idea of a fixed amount of willpower (I think so, but I’m curious about how you might see it…)?

My thought would be, terms like willpower and self-control are too big to be helpful, and that maybe we should break them down into smaller, more specific concepts.

For example, an aspect of willpower that’s important for adhering to one’s values is attentional control when faced with distraction. Now, that’s a mouthful, obviously, but it may be that being mindful of and skillfully managing the mind’s tendency to get distracted is a very different ability than some other aspect of willpower…