Recently, I have been doing a particularly challenging task. It felt quite painful because I had to continuously fight the urge to stop doing whatever I was doing and watch some brainrot content. After finishing that task, I thought to myself: Why am I feeling lazy?

My best guess for that question right now is the idea that humans are adapted to conserve calories as much as possible. Humans are evolved to be savannah hunter-gatherers who had very limited amount of food, so laziness probably was a good adaptation to them. The particularly hard-working ancient humans probably were more likely to die from starvation. Therefore, it made sense for them to evolve mental circuits which are adapted to conserve energy and have a high discount value.

The thing is, I live in a postindustrial society with basically unbounded access to food. I do not need these energy saving, procrastination inducing mental circuits anymore. They are just making it harder to achieve goals that I want to achieve. So I just want to turn them off. I want to fix laziness. I want infinite willpower.

So far, I could not find any academic literature that focused on turning off the parts of the brain which are responsible for causing laziness. Any help with providing the academic literature that is relevant for my question is highly appreciated.

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