How many times have you said one of these lines? “Starting Monday, I’m going on a diet,” “Tonight I’ll study until midnight without touching my phone,” “I’m never texting my ex again,” or perhaps “I’m just going in to browse, I won’t buy anything,” “Tomorrow I’m up at dawn and I’m going for a run.” Did a resigned half-smile just cross your face? Calculating the failure rate of these good intentions would give us a rather unflattering portrait. If you are a biologically standard human being, the catastrophe rate will hover around ninety-nine percent. And do you know what the typical reaction is, the one our performance society imposes? Guilt. Every age has its secular prayers, and ours recites them like this—with the same success rate and the same complimentary guilt. You convince yourself that you are weak, that you have no spine, that you lack that magical and omnipotent substance some life coaches call mindset, focus or “willpower.”
The good news—given that three thousand years of literature and twenty years of applied neuroscience lead us right there—is that willpower is a scam: an overrated concept, sold by the pound to manufacture people who feel inadequate. The ancient Greeks, who knew immensely more about human limits than the modern gurus of self-help, had already exposed this lie. And they did it in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, handing down to us not only one of the most celebrated mythological episodes of all time, but effectively founding modern behavioral economics, which the textbooks cite as the archetype of the commitment device: the Ulysses pact. True wisdom does not consist in challenging temptations with your chest puffed out, but in recognizing that you are pathetically vulnerable and tying yourself to the mast before it is too late.
Circe’s briefing and the anatomy of fatal temptation
To understand Odysseus’s tactical genius, we must first analyze the operational context. The hero sails from the island of Aeaea with a risk report fresh off the press, compiled by the sorceress Circe: strategic consultant, hazard analyst. The first obstacle on the route is the island of the Sirens.
At this point a philological clarification is necessary: if you are picturing Disney’s Little Mermaid, or beguiling fish-women, you are on the wrong track. The archaic Sirens (Seirenes: obscure etymology, perhaps from seira, “rope”—a detail that will come in handy shortly) were hybrid monsters, half bird of prey and half woman. And, more importantly still, their temptation was not of a sexual or erotic nature. It was of a purely intellectual nature.
In the Odyssey1, when Odysseus sails past their island littered with bones and rotting human remains, the Sirens do not promise him sex. They promise him omniscience. They sing: “Never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.” They offer absolute knowledge of the universe, the definitive data-mining of everything that has been and everything that will be, starting with the true backstage of the Trojan War. For a man sick with curiositas, with intelligence and a hunger for knowledge like Odysseus, bait of this kind is absolutely lethal. It is the perfect temptation, calibrated to the millimeter on his psychological profile.
The point is that Circe knows it, and Odysseus knows it. The hero is perfectly aware that, if he listened to that song as a free man, his legendary willpower, his proverbial intellect (the metis) and his unshakable desire to return to Ithaca, to Penelope, would crumble on the spot. He would throw himself into the sea to reach the island and die on the rocks, becoming fertilizer for the meadows. And this is where the stroke of genius comes in. Odysseus does not say: “I am strong, I will grit my teeth and steer straight ahead.” Odysseus says: “I am bound to give in. I must engineer my environment so that it becomes physically impossible for me to betray myself.”
Wax for the employees, ropes for the CEO: the corporate management of risk
The protocol Odysseus puts in place is a masterpiece of asymmetric human-resources management and executive self-preservation. For the crew, the solution is preventive ignorance. He takes a large slab of beeswax, cuts it into pieces with sharp bronze, kneads it in the sun (“and soon the wax grew warm, forced by the strong pressure and the rays of the lord Helios Hyperion”) and plugs his sailors’ ears shut. The rowers must not listen. They are the engine: they must only row and keep straight, deaf to the flattery and to external reality.
But Odysseus, in his capacity as leader, wants to secure an extreme privilege for himself: he wants to cross hell while savoring its essence, to store the data (hearing the song) without suffering its fatal consequences (death). He therefore orders his men to bind him tightly to the ship’s mast with sturdy ropes. And above all, he stipulates with them a binding contract that cancels any future executive power of his:
“Me alone she bade to listen to their voice; but do ye bind me with grievous bonds, that I may abide fast where I am, upright in the step of the mast, and let the ropes be made fast at the ends to the mast itself; and if I implore and bid you to loose me, then do ye tie me fast with yet more bonds.”2.
It is the first contract with oneself in the history of literature. When the ship enters the range of the song, exactly what had been foreseen and calculated at the table takes place. Odysseus hears the voices. His rational mind collapses. His willpower zeroes out. The Homeric text shows him, “and my heart was fain to listen”, beginning to make desperate signals with his eyes and eyebrows to his companions, ordering them to untie him. He is ready to throw the mission, his life and his throne overboard just to indulge the impulse of the moment.
But Perimedes and Eurylochus, faithful to the “contract,” get up, do not listen to him (because they are deaf) and tie him even tighter. The ship passes. The spell fades. Odysseus comes back to himself, and the mission is saved. He has lived the peak of gratification (he heard divine knowledge) and survived the destructive impulse—not thanks to his inner strength, but thanks to an apparatus of ropes and knots prepared while he was still lucid.
From myth to behavioral economics: what a commitment device is
Take a leap forward of three thousand years, leave the coasts of the Mediterranean and settle into the lecture halls where behavioral economics is taught. Figures like the Nobel laureate Richard Thaler3 or the psychiatrist George Ainslie have spent entire careers demonstrating with mathematical models exactly what Homer had described in dactylic hexameters: human beings suffer from a chronic hyperbolic discounting.
It means that our brain assigns enormous value to immediate rewards and dramatically discounts future rewards (or punishments). Your “present self” wants to eat three slices of chocolate cake right now, and could not care less about your “future self,” who ten years from now will have cholesterol problems. Your “present self” wants to buy that useless gadget on Amazon immediately, for the dopamine hit of the checkout, robbing your “future self” of the vacation fund. Between the two temporal entities (present self vs. future self) there rages a constant civil war.
How is it solved? With what the scientific literature has officially named the Ulysses pact (or Ulysses contract) or commitment device (a device of preventive self-binding). It is a choice you make voluntarily in the present, while in full possession of your rational faculties (your executive brain, in a cold state), which restricts, limits or punishes your future options, knowing full well that in the critical moment (hot-minded, under temptation) you will become an unreliable, impulsive and stupid person.
Behavioral economics is full of these pacts. Think of time-deposit accounts that slap a heavy penalty on you if you withdraw the money before five years. Think of software applications (like Freedom or Cold Turkey) that block access to social networks on your computer for a set number of hours, disabling the option to turn them off. The most clinical case: the drug Antabuse (disulfiram), given to alcoholics, which you take in the morning in a cold state and which, for the rest of the day, turns every glass into physical punishment—nausea, tachycardia, a sense of suffocation. The alcoholic version of yourself, tied to the mast by chemistry.
Positive experiments have been run too: for example, it was noticed that in cafeterias the vegetables were often snubbed, in favor of tastier and less healthy food. How was this solved? Banning the discouraged foods? No—simply making the vegetables easier and quicker to find. The foods to avoid were systematically placed in less convenient positions.6
Neuroscience and marketing: why willpower runs out (and how they get us)
One might object that training one’s willpower would be more dignified than resorting to tricks of cognitive bondage. In the classic version of the research, that of Roy Baumeister4, the answer is no, and it is not a question of dignity: it is biology.
Contemporary science has shown that rationality, self-control and long-term planning reside in our prefrontal cortex (the most evolved and “youngest” part of the brain). Impulses, immediate desire, addictions and emotional reactions reside instead in the limbic system and the amygdala (the most ancient, fastest and most animal part).
The problem is that the prefrontal cortex gets tired. Self-control is literally a depletable resource, very similar to the battery of your smartphone. This phenomenon, studied in psychology by Roy Baumeister, is called ego depletion. Every time in the course of the day you make a decision, solve a problem, suppress an emotion or resist a small temptation, you consume a piece of your prefrontal battery. By eight in the evening, your prefrontal cortex is running on fumes. The limbic system takes total control, and you find yourself on the couch eating junk food and doomscrolling Instagram until two in the morning, unable to tell yourself “enough.”
And guess who knows this structural weakness of the human brain inside out? Exactly: the marketing experts and the designers of digital platforms. The entire infrastructure of modern consumption is engineered to intercept you exactly at the moment when your ship is passing the rocks and you are not tied down.
Why are sweets, chocolate bars and gossip magazines strategically positioned in supermarket checkout lines? Because the supermarket knows that to reach the checkout you have just had to make dozens of micro-decisions among the shelves (“Brand-name canned tomatoes or the ones on sale?”, “Whole-wheat or regular pasta?”). Your prefrontal cortex is worn out (ego depletion). You get to the register, you are tired, the Siren sings in the form of a salted-caramel snack, and you give in.5
Looking for the cheapest product? You will probably not find it on the shelf at hand, right in front of you—try looking in a less convenient position, low or high.
Why does TikTok’s algorithm, or YouTube’s related videos, start in autoplay without asking for confirmation? Because they exploit inertia and decision paralysis. They remove the question precisely where stopping to think could be the only defense.
In praise of limits: let us accept our failures and buy ourselves a good rope
The greatness of the Greek myth lies not in proposing unattainable models of moral perfection, but in offering us a mercilessly sharp mirror of our cognitive miseries. Odysseus survives not because he is invincible, but because he maps his own weak points with the coldness of a structural engineer and acts accordingly before the disaster.
If there is one practical lesson we can extract from this story, it is the abandonment of the toxic pride of self-control. Stop trusting ourselves to willpower. It is a lazy, unreliable muscle that will leave us stranded at the first real sign of stress, the first sugar shortage, the first setback of a dull day.
If you want to stop bingeing on junk food, the heroic act does not consist in keeping a cake in the fridge and striving to look at it every day without eating it. The heroic act is not buying the cake at the supermarket—physically throwing it out of your ecosystem while you are lucid. If you want to lose weight, the way is not fasting or an empty fridge: it is a fridge full of healthy food; it is not waiting for hunger at the moment when you would grab the first junk food within reach, but anticipating it by eating better and at regular times. If you want to work on an important project without distractions, do not promise yourself that you will ignore the notifications: put your phone in another room. Rely on systemic constraints. Make the wrong action physically, economically or technologically impossible to perform.
And now that I am almost done writing, I hear the fireworks being shot off in the nearby square: there is a little neighborhood festival, and a nearly full moon. I walked past it during my brisk walk—a habit. I noticed a stall with a sign that read “fried dough bombs.” My commitment device was poor timing: it was early, and the guys at the fryer were still eating their own dinner, minding their own business. If there had been cotton candy (the true Siren, the bait calibrated on the profile), I might have come back later.
Notes
- Homer, Odyssey, XII, lines 184–191 (the song of the Sirens). For the complete episode, lines 158–200. The verses quoted are from the translation by A.T. Murray (1919; full text on Perseus); the numbering of the verses follows the Greek text. ↑
- Homer, Odyssey, XII, lines 160–164. ↑
- The term Ulysses pact (or Ulysses contract) was born with Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (1979); for commitment devices in behavioral economics, Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics; for hyperbolic discounting, George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will (2001). ↑
- Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, where the myth of infinite resilience is dismantled piece by piece. An update from the scientific front: a large preregistered replication of the effect (23 labs, more than two thousand participants) failed to confirm it, and the debate is far from closed (Martin S. Hagger et al., A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect). ↑
- To dig deeper, I recommend reading a classic: Martin Lindstrom, Buyology. ↑
- The cafeteria example is the original nudge of Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge. ↑
