Epistemic status: Toy model. Oversimplified, but has been anecdotally useful to at least a couple people, and I like it as a metaphor.

Introduction

I’d like to share a toy model of willpower: your psyche’s conscious verbal planner “earns” willpower (earns trust with the rest of your psyche) by choosing actions that nourish your fundamental, bottom-up processes in the long run. For example, your verbal planner might expend willpower dragging you to disappointing first dates, then regain that willpower, and more, upon finding you a good long-term romance. Wise verbal planners can acquire large willpower budgets by making plans that, on average, nourish your fundamental processes. Delusional or uncaring verbal planners, on the other hand, usually become “burned out” – their willpower budget goes broke-ish, leaving them little to no access to willpower.

I’ll spend the next section trying to stick this discussion into a larger context, then get back to willpower.

On processes that lose their relationship to the unknown

Good scientists seek truth, craft hypotheses that stick their necks out, and send their ideas forth to die in their stead, while retaining their own ability to change their minds.

Actual humans who aspire to be scientists, on the other hand, often forget that this is the goal, and instead get stuck defending some fixed theory.

I suspect this forgetting is a special case of a general phenomenon: many processes, if they are to remain healthy, must take an active interest in things they don’t yet know. And yet those same processes will tend to collapse into structures that actively resist new data. To list a few other examples:

Romantic relationships, family relationships, and friendships all work better when one remembers the other person is partly unknown (and practices “respect,” “paying attention,” “not taking for granted” – practices for consciously relating to the unknownness); but this is easy to forget.
New businesses often take an active interest in e.g. what their customers want, how to make it, what their surroundings are like, or other things they don’t know. But many later turn into bureaucracies that protect their local stasis from new data.
“Every cause wants to be a cult.”
Jordan Hall argues that our society as a whole has gradually replaced "thinking" (which has the ability to explore awkwardly when that's the thing to do) with "simulated thinking" (which looks better, is more easily taught in schools, and lacks this capacity).

I hope someone someday writes an essay kind of like the Waluigi essay, that gives a decent, rent-paying model of why processes often collapse in this way. (The tie-in to willpower is that IMO a lot of burnout is downstream of this kind of collapse.)

Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”

I love the model of Rand’s that I’m about to share because it offers a crisp microcosm of the junction between “I want power enough to do what I want, whether or not that fits easily with the world” and “if I don’t attend to how the world is shaped, I’ll cease to be.”

The model is set in an ideal economy – the sort of place libertarians would want to build. (If you think this isn’t possible for humans, imagine a different species and context for which it is possible; I want this as a toy model, or a detailed metaphor.)

In this ideal economy, people can only make money by creating something people want. (Otherwise, those others wouldn't part with their money.) So, if you want money, you basically have to attend to things like "what do people want?" and "how does the world work -- e.g. how do I make metal for train tracks that will hold together well, or bread that will be tasty, or etc.?" Even if you're a bit of an idiot who wants only the temporary illusion that you're creating value, by getting to e.g. boss people around and make what looks like a business even though it's destroying value or something -- even then you need to pay attention, because otherwise you can't get people to do what you want, and can't get those with land or factories or whatever to loan it to you. Unless! Unless you have savings.

Savings are interesting in this model because they give you the temporary ability to get people to mix metals or bake bread or whatever in the way you want them to, whether or not your way makes sense to them (by paying them to do this). On Rand’s model, there’re two superficially similar, but really very different, ways this ability can be used:

Living money: Sometimes an entrepreneur sees a new path to produce real value and makes a bet, spending their savings to set up a factory/research lab/etc. that has a real shot at later making things people want (even though others can't see this yet, and so wouldn't yet want in unless paid in advance). Such an entrepreneur’s money is “living” in the sense that it is part of a homeostatic dance that spends and replenishes, sustains itself over time, and creates more life/value.

Dead money: Other times, a person spends down their savings (and thereby gets people to do things those people don’t independently see value in) while taking no interest in the complex and often not-yet-known-to-us processes by which value is created and destroyed. For example, Rand’s fiction depicts characters who inherit large sums of money without any corresponding virtue. Sometimes these characters say they want to “help people,” but “help people” is for them something of a detached symbol; e.g. one such character who inherits a bank preferentially gives bank loans to people who’re pitiable but unlikely to repay the money (“to help people”) until the bank they are running goes bust and loses the entrusted savings of many; another inherits an energy research firm and makes “compassionate” changes that make it far less likely to create good power plant designs. Such an heir’s money is not a living system; it gets used up via paying people to do things that usually cause destruction. And then it’s gone. There is no sustained or life-aligned dance this money takes part in.

The tendency of “dead money” to burn itself out helps keep the idealized economy in a state where businesses are mostly “living,” are mostly curious about and responsive to the question of what will actually create goodness for the economy’s inhabitants.^[1] The bankruptcy of particular businesses and of particular piles of savings is part of what keeps the economy in living relationship with the unknown, instead of letting it get closed off and colonized by stasis. Sort of like how the “death” of falsified scientific hypotheses is part of what keeps the process of science alive despite the tendency-toward-closed-offness of the humans who aspire to be scientists.

An analogous model of “living willpower” and burnout

My toy model of willpower is basically the same:

There’s a bottom-up process within us (as within young children and non-human animals) that tends, if left to its own devices, to do a lot of good things (going on a walk when restless, eating when hungry, gravitating toward conversations or play activities that help us make sense of things, etc.). But as humans we can sometimes do better than this – we can sometimes foresee steps that seem dumb to our more visceral processes, but that pay off in the long-run, including from a visceral perspective.

“Living willpower” is willpower that is consciously understood as a bet on unknowns: “I don’t know whether this project will pay off, but I am betting my finite credibility on it anyhow.” “Dead willpower” is willpower that has forgotten where it comes from, that tries to arbitrarily make up some actions that are “good” to do (in some sense of “good” that is not accountable, not based in the conditions required to sustain life and choice, as with the Rand villain who wanted to "help people"). ^[2]

Basically: “living willpower” understands itself as accountable to the conditions required for life, consciousness, and choice – while “dead willpower” doesn’t.

On this model, burnout is the analog of running out of savings – burnout is running out of the ability to get your visceral process to follow your suggestions. Burnout is what happens when either living willpower makes enough bad bets despite trying to make good ones until it “goes credibility-broke”, or when dead willpower makes many bad bets while forgetting it is making bets at all.

This has some upside: once a person is credibility-broke, they can more easily study which things are and aren't bottom-up motivating (since those are ~the only actions they can take); and which uses of their tiny willpower do and don't rapidly produce more; and this is sometimes helpful for learning the difference between uses of willpower that form part of the living dance, and uses that don't.

^{^}
Again, this is within an idealized economy. IMO it is an important question to what extent today's actual economies in e.g. the US cause "dead money" to burn out, vs having pathways whereby dead money can acquire more dead money via regulatory capture or similar without any need to create value.
^{^}
This is perhaps something of a digression, but my own experience is that when I’m using “dead willpower,” there is in practice a “tiny note of discord”-type sensation that tugs gently at my sleeve, letting me know that there’re some clues I’m not looking at, concerning whether this is what I want to be doing.
Perhaps another word for what I’m calling “dead willpower,” here, is “being dissociated from some of your own caring, or some of your own capacity to care.” IME it often comes with a desire to stay distracted, to continue blocking out that “tiny note of discord.” Also IME, folks living this way are more likely to get hijacked by ideologies (or to invite ideologies to come distract them?) – more likely to e.g. feel as though they “need to” do what (wokism / EA / staying “okay” relative to some middle class notion of career success / whatever) demands, less likely to enjoy and appreciate getting to choose. (But this is all anecdotal with small n, I admit.)