Excellence is a habit, but so is failure

It’s interesting to me to see this comment, because “today” is very much the focus in recovery circles. If you’ve ever been to AA or any of the other 12-step programs you’ve probably heard someone say something akin to “one day at a time”. In general, though, it is important to note that part of what makes an addiction an addiction is the lack of willpower to overcome it. So if you tell an addict “it is a choice” they’ll ultimately agree with you, knowing that in the moment of their failure it very much did not feel like one.

For those of us who have had to make drastic life changes in order to make “making the wrong choice” difficult or impossible, there’s definitely an amount of life planning (and before that, honesty with self and others) that has to happen in order to balance the scale and turn those forks in the road into ones we can look at and say, “Today, I’ll make a good choice.” For some there are ways to reset and never look back, and I’ve seen it happen. One good choice can be the difference. For others, as you mention, there are daily choices, and it continues to take effort to make the right one every single time.

That’s an okay attitude from an interpersonal standpoint, but horrible advice from a mental health perspective.

There's the saying that "we are free to do what we want, but not to want what we want". I'd guess that at the moment of a lapse, the drug/alcohol is all an addict wants. Changing that want into something else is the hard part and also depends strongly on the environment.

A framework that I have found helpful for situations like this:

When you feel this way, that you "want to" do something but it keeps not happening, then there's evidently something inconsistent in your mental state: you seem to think you want to do one thing, but (it would be fair to say) since you're not doing it, maybe you don't 'actually want' to do it. The idea being that 'true wanting' compels actions. So when you fantasize about doing one thing, which you think you want, you're actually in the process of fulfilling a different want about something else (such as: "to feel like you are making progress on demonstrating value").

To disentangle this you have to figure out what you "actually want", resolving the inconsistency, usually by asking yourself: "what do my actual behaviors reveal of my actual desires?" Recognizing the revealed desire seems, empirically, to help move past it, while not recognizing it leaves you/me/whoever in this seemingly infinite loop of feeling incapable of action.

Sometimes just revealing the loop you're in unkinks it immediately and leaves you free to do something new. Sometimes, strangely, it makes you instantly uninterested in the whole topic, and then, in the space left by the now-uninteresting topic, new interests float in --- real interests, which come packaged with 'real' wanting that you can actually act on.

> Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice.

This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our actions. It would be extremely inefficient and energy-consuming.

99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli.

Habits explain neatly concepts like addiction, while the choice story applied to concepts like addiction or self-destructive acts is reductive at best, and catastrophic on a societal level. Yet the majority of people, those that have been lucky not to have yet felt the grip of addiction, tend to have this opinion that addicts are just weak-willed idiots. This is not referred to you in particular, I am generalising based on common and frustrating opinions about addiction and recovery by well-meaning, but ignorant people.

Functionally and neurologically, there is no difference between a heroin addict and someone that has been going on a run every day for a decade. It's just that their autopilots have been trained to prefer a different action in response to similar stimuli, and brains respond and adapt much more readily to super-stimuli found in drugs and other destructive habits, than with natural and healthy "highs".

I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.