The messenger

Charlton Heston: Damn it, George! You just don't get it. Guns don't kill people.
George W. Bush: They don't?
Charlton Heston: No! Bullets do! Guns just get 'em going really really fast!
— That's My Bush

I think one of the most abused words when talking about motivation or productivity is "procrastination". I was pleased to learn that it's not as commonly used in the rationality community, until I found out about akrasia, a greek word for acting against your own interests, which is basically used as a synonym. It's not that these words aren't useful or meaningful. It's just that, like death, depression, or cancer, they represent an entire category of problems as one big problem. That big problem tends to absorb attention and makes it harder to think about and solve the little problems that constitute it.

I've heard this idea referred to as a semantic stop sign: "Why didn't you finish this?" "Procrastination!" "Oh, okay". Every kind of motivational failure ends in procrastination! We're not satisfied with hearing that someone died because their blood stopped circulating, even though it's true in the vast majority of cases. We want to know what led up to it: their blood stopped circulating because they stopped breathing, because of massive trauma to the chest, because they hit the ground really hard, because they jumped out of a plane and their parachute didn't open. The situation merits a lot of analysis if you let it. Indeed, there's no reason to stop there. Why did they jump out of the plane? Why didn't their parachute open?

This process is sometimes called the 5 whys technique, though obviously the number 5 is pretty arbitrary and these days most people just say root cause analysis. Of course, root cause is a bit of a nebulous concept as well. You could keep running on this until you get answers like "because humans evolved in small social groups", or "because the fine structure constant is approximately 1/137". So it's definitely possible to go too meta when looking for a root cause, and you see this most often in the "society is to blame" genre of explanations, On the other hand, it's probably more common to not go far enough.

The real issue is that determining the cause of something is an essentially political exercise. People often have particular things that they would rather not consider. So the reason you're overweight is definitely not the proximate cause of eating too much, it's a distant cause like genetics or GMO foods or alkalinity or whatever. On the other hand, there are particular things that it is expedient to believe in because they fit our expectations. So if you believe that willpower is the most important thing, you'll stop as soon as you reach a willpower-related explanation for a problem. If you believe that you're suffering from a terrible disease called akrasia, that's where your search for the cause for a missed deadline will land.

Sometimes, as in this last case, it can lead to particularly distorted thinking because it hits you right in the insecurity. If you're trying something new and you're not sure it'll work, or if it's outside the status quo in some way, it'll be a lightning rod for anything that goes wrong. You have a few bad days and your new side project goes to shit. "I knew it!" you say, "this side project was never going to work". In reality, the problem is that your crappy day job is hugely draining your motivation. The failing side project was actually a helpful messenger coming to tell you about a problem you could fix, and you went and shot it because you were already convinced it was going to be the problem.

Of course, it could be the other way around: if you're convinced your main job is a problem, maybe you'll blame it for a doomed side project. When I say "essentially political", I mean that there are lots of different options for causes, and you're free to pick between them on whatever basis you choose. It's true that in a different society we wouldn't have as many murderers, and also true that if you took away the guns, they wouldn't kill so much, and also true that you could just control bullets instead. Hell, we could breed people with thicker ribcages. The point is that anything is a cause if it being different would have prevented the effect.

So as far as which is the true cause, I think there's no such thing. Rather, I would say: which are the useful causes? Society might be responsible, but it's pretty difficult to change. As is human sternal strength. You want the causes that act as the best levers for you to manipulate to get the change in effect you want. And for that it's important to evaluate the causes rationally: not to get fixated on one particular cause, ignore causes that are uncomfortable, or let your expectations tell you the cause before you've had a chance to figure it out for yourself.