“So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself: What I Found in the Mire § The Try-Harder Fallacy”, Adam Mastroianni2024-01-02 (willpower)⁠:

I played a lot of Call of Duty in high school, and I used to roll with a gang of bad boys who would battle other gangs online. (Our leader claimed to be a Marine, which I kind of doubt because he spelled the name of our group as “Delta Compa​nay”.)

We weren’t very good. Whenever we lost the first round, which was almost always, we would regroup in the pregame lobby—basically the online locker room—and decide what we really need to do in the next round is “try harder.” As if the reason we had all just been shot in the head 25× in a row was that we were not sufficiently dedicated to avoiding getting shot in the head. Armed with the most dimwit plan of all time, we would march into battle once more and lose just as badly. As our virtual corpses piled up, we’d yell at each other, “Guys, stop dying!”

This is the try harder fallacy. I behold my situation and conclude that, somehow, I will improve it in the future by just sort of wishing it to be different, and then I get indignant that nothing happens. Like, “Um, excuse me! I’ve been doing all of this very diligent desiring for things to be different, and yet they remain the same, could someone please look into this?” See also Sasha Chapin’s “Certain ways that ‘try harder’ can be a bad strategy”.