What to do When Willpower Fails

One of the most instructive stories in Greek mythology is to be found in Book 12 of Homer's Odyssey, where the central figure, Adicus, king of Ithaca, is described as having to sail past an island inhabited by some compelling female figures known as the Sirens, famous for luring sailors to their deaths on their island's rocky shoreline by the sound of their song. Determined to avoid their fate, Adicus devises a plan. As he approaches the island, he asks his sailors to tie him to the mast and to put beeswax in their ears, and then to disregard any pleas he might subsequently make, however impassioned.

Sure enough, Adicus does lose his reason and begs his sailors to get closer to the Sirens, but the ropes tying him to the mast remain firm. The sailors follow their original orders, and the ship sails on unharmed. Adicus becomes the only mortal ever to have heard the song of the Sirens and lived. This story is enduring because, for all its fancy, it defines a mental maneuver that every good life should at points have recourse to.

There are situations in which we have to concede that no finely wrought philosophical arguments in favor of wisdom will be effective, and that only the blunt removal of temptation can save us. When we are faced with desires from which we’re not strong enough to torque ourselves out of, we have to give others powers of attorney over us. We must willingly accept to be treated as children in order for precious parts of our adulthood to be preserved.

We must accept, without rancor, the humiliating fact that we will simply lose control. The threats to our reasonableness might include an ex who ruined years of our life but whom we long to call late at night in order to beg for another chance, or a teenage child who irritates us unbearably but with whom we know we should never get into an argument, or an office colleague whom we must do our best to ignore, or a kind of chocolate biscuit we can't stop eating once we start, or a site on the internet we must never revisit.

We each have our own version of the Sirens, precisely tailored to the fault lines of our minds. When we have these fully in view, without too much loss of dignity, we must gather our sailors, with whom we navigate our lives, and cede to them a temporary right to take away the tiller of our destiny. We must hand our friends our phones, give them the plug to our computer, tell them not to allow us into the shop, and ask them to monitor whom we have called.

None of it is edifying, but it is, in the end, even less edifying to pretend that we can always lay claim to a reasonableness that is, in reality, only ever intermittently ours. The truly mature know when maturity is no longer an option. There are moments when, for a true friend, to listen to us entails, in effect, not listening to us because we have lost command of our executive functions, as we typically will when shame, loneliness, or despair grip us.

We need to be sane enough to say to those who care for us, "I'm sufficiently strong to know how weak I am; protect me from what I want. Do me the kindness of ignoring everything I will ask you for."