I think that the heart of executive dysfunction is the conflict between your own guiding forces and the guiding forces offered by society.

In our society it is assumed that it is only good and healthy that you submit to the latter. And the vast majority of us do, smoothly and automatically.

But some of us are different and this process of submission is not smooth. It might not even happen at all. There will be that ongoing conflict.

One aspect that I'm missing here is the fact that it's a vicious cycle as well. The feeling bad makes it harder to start, which in turn makes you feel worse, which in turn makes it harder ro start, and so on.

You should never feel bad for laziness. In fact the notion of laziness or sloth is a device by industrial authorities to press more work out of an already beleaguered labor force.¹

We've seen how it goes during the 2020 epidemic lockdown and furlough: most people couldn't couch potato for a week and turned to hobbies, enough of which were monetizable enough to cause the great resignation and give us a moment of elevated ground-floor wages. The rest of us suffer from avolition, a symptom of major depression (or a number of other potential diagnoses).

Industrialists (and churches and civil officials) fail to recognize that the drive for profit to upper management and shareholders has made a lot of work environments toxic. Most of us who work are overworked, underpaid, and poorly treated by management, if not also dealing with bully coworkers, pollution from industry without adequate PPE, safety hazards and oppressive work conditions. Our capitalist masters could treat workers well, and even would see a productivity surge worth the additional cost, and yet they still crunch in the video game industry, and overtask rather than running a high-morale clerical pool with slight redundancy (where the task list is always short).

I was lazy enough in my career as a victim of major depression to sleep for about nine months (getting up only to eat or excrete), I am a pro at couch potatoing. Granted, it's not good for me to go without some contact outside, but I'll happily do it. In the meantime, when I was forced to work in late 1980s clerical pool conditions, it drove me to suicide, and typical conditions are even worse today.

Laziness is a product of slave drivers or mental health disorders. If you're feeling too tired to get work done, it means it's time to take a break. Don't worry, if you're mentally fit, you'll be on task again.

¹ Though my sin nun explained the cardinal sin of Sloth as avolition specifically to engage in the work your faith calls for (e.g. feeding the poor, housing the stranger and the transient, healing the sick, etc.) If you have energy to engage in costly signalling and praying loudly in public, but don't mind the unfortunate, then you're engaging in the cardinal sin -- according to a cloistered nun I called for tech support.

I guess I agree, but also there's the type where I don't want to do something because of its sheer boringness. Not sure if that's ADHD though.

I heard that laziness is pleasurable, and executive dysfunction is not.

What about when you know how to do it, and you will be happy to have it done, but you know it's going to be annoying, and you're going to hate it, so you push it back as much as you can.

I partly agree and disagree with the description of executive dysfunction. I would also break it into two categories, but the first encompasses both aspects of the description by "overwhelmed".

In this case, the anxiety or stress that impedes function is due to uncertainty around how to achieve the desired outcome. The degree of anxiety or stress is dependent on the cost of failure; e.g. something with no perceived stakes (or very low stakes) allows for a high degree of uncertainty and an imperfect or incomplete plan can be executed because the cost of it going wrong is negligible. However, as the stakes rise, the degree of uncertainty required to create a "barrier to entry" (i.e. a sufficient amount of anxiety or stress to prevent action) decreases. The uncertainty itself could simply be not knowing how to approach or break down a task as per the comment, but it is also often the uncertainty introduced by other people. If you know someone well, then you can have reasonable confidence in how they might respond to a particular topic. If not, though, and they are a key part of achieving said goal, then oh boy does that cause stress!

The other category is not directly due to anxiety/stress but instead a result of fatigue, burnout or being overwhelmed (i.e. near meltdown). The brain effectively goes "nope" and refuses to process the required information no matter how much you want it to or how important it is. The irony is that if the anxiety or stress from the previous category is high enough, it can actually create this overwhelmed state, but in my experience severe fatigue, too much sensory input or too many cognitive demands (i.e. being forced to juggle too many tasks/problems/interactions at once) will readily create this situation too.

I still don't like the term "executive" disfunction, since "executives" in real life don't do shit. Makes me feel like I'm being told I haven't been deemed successful by some stupid corporate standard.

I basically have to bribe my brain to do anything. Stupid electric soup in my skull.

Yes for sure. Doesn't always help when it comes to bigger tasks on my to-do lists, but sitting down and making those lists helps me a lot personally.

I usually make one annually every spring because there is a time pressure where I live with only 4-5 months of nice weather.

yeah

Also confusion about what to even do at all.

God part two of that is my problem. Thanks brain!