It's an argument against the claim that there's virtue in doing things and that those who don't are lazy.

There's a huge gap between any "natural" instincts (needing to eat, needing to sleep, breathe, keep warm, social connections) and the sort of tasks you need to do in your modern life, like writing a boring report. The idea of laziness - and that there's virtue in doing such things - is a cultural trueism, not a "natural" state of humans.

> Why are we so hard on ourselves? I think it’s because we have a bad theory about how our minds work, one so dastardly that it could have only been devised by the devil himself. It goes like this:

>> We humans are, deep down, lazy and gluttonous creatures. If left to our own devices, we will do nothing but eat Pringles and watch Netflix. The only way we can escape our indolent nature is to exert our higher faculties over our base instincts.

It's not illogical at all, although I suppose the author could have been more clear in separating the two points they're arguing against:

    1) Humans are naturally lazy
    2) Human instinct drives us to do things that are bad for us

While connected by an implicit "being lazy is bad" value judgement, these are not the same things.

Stating we are "naturally something" implies that there is an fixed equilibrium point that our behavior naturally converges to.

The second claim about basic instincts is talking about the dynamic processes going on in your body that you are not consciously aware of. It's not saying anything about how those processes work. They can be perfectly valid, important processes that only act in response to contextual information (that is, it is entirely possible for them to not have a "natural, default" behavior).

Basic instincts is an other way of saying that we are "naturally" inclined to do certain things in certain situations.

I understand that reading natural as a "fixed equilibrim" might mean that to you, but for me, and also others it doesn't mean that. So would be good to better explain that in the article.

My interpretation of "fixed equilibrium" comes from the context of the "naturally lazy" claim, which is alleged to be touted as a universal truth by the gurus. A claim of an external, universal truth is that applies to all instincts. So then I take "not naturally anything" to mean "humans are extremely variable and contextual".

I have to admit that my interpretation is biased by reading some post-phenomenological philosophy as part of my design master - I remember one paper that claimed that there is no "natural" endpoint because humans are always reacting to a dynamic context, one that is then changing in response to human interaction, meaning we're more like a chaotic pendulum swinging back and forth over ever-changing equilibrium points.

And yeah, I do agree that the article is a bit ambiguous here and could be clearer.

Yeah although that claim by gurus "naturally lazy" can also be read less absolute, as "many people are inclined to be lazy in a and b kind of circumstances". Which is not far from the truth.

Exactly. And, while it's true we're in a different environment than we evolved for, our instincts are obviously still relevant. We still get hungry, crave connection, etc. They're just filtered through different specific objects

Even the assertion that humans aren't naturally anything is absurd. We're naturally many things: social, food-motivated, curious, horny. Those traits are not cultural, and are common to humans as far back as we can trace (many shared with our ape ancestors as well).