Sometimes a particular thing will seem very important. This can be awesome as you'll dedicate lots of resources to the thing. Whether it be a new skill you need to acquire or a problem that needs to be fixed, greater resource allocation is cool.
I love playing card games so it is easy for me to spend a lot of time reading up on different strategies. It doesn't take discipline to read articles online. It is a pleasure. I feel great while I'm doing it.
Why can't I have just as much pleasure in driving to work? I don't. I make myself drive to work. I don't sit at home anticipating with glee my drive in to work.
Now sometimes you can hack your priorities. Recently I was able to convince my wife that since I was going to endure misery to save us some money (by driving us for 16 hours instead of paying for plane tickets) that I should get a little bit of that money. She agreed and my priorities shifted. Rather than complaining endlessly about having to drive (which I hate) I quietly got in the car and got to work.
The trick was associating the pleasure of getting $ (which could be spent on frivolities) with the work. It's a direct correlation to try and make the work a little less worse. This is the main driving force behind me going to work. I do something I don't want to do (write financial software) so that I can do stuff I do want to do (eat, sleep in a bed, buy board games, etc...).
But wouldn't it be nice if we could just decide to set priorities in our head the way we set CPU priorities for different processes? Being in shape is important to me and I know in my head that in the long run being healthy will pay off. But I can't just shut off my desire to do something fun or make carrots magically taste like cake. There are external constraints my brain and body put on me.
Some of these are probably adaptive. Sweets (highly dense in energy) should produce a pleasure reward so that you seek them out. They are great food sources for anyone who is worried about survival. Sex better be pleasant or you'll have people weighing the cost of raising children with maintaining a fun going life style and have a dropping population rate.
At the end of the day though the reason I'm glad we can't do this is the creative impulse. It isn't efficient. It isn't always useful. But it is beautiful. It would be too easy in a world where we can hack our brains to make doing the optimal thing easy for us to lose sight of beauty. We've come up with a lot of beautiful and crazy stuff in our pursuit of being happy. The world would end up being a cold sterile place if we only make the smart efficient choices.
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