Interesting article in the New York Times magazine about decision fatigue. The research suggests that any decisions you make take something out of you, which is why people can be wiped out after a day of shopping or making a lot of decisions at work. But the research really suggests that any consciously directed activity has a cost, and that we have a limit to how much of such activity we can handle. This suggests a solution to the question of whether we have free will or not. The answer seems to be that while willpower and self direction is not totally free, we do have a “will budget” that we can spend as we choose. But it is not limitless, and eventually we fall back on automatic behavior and automatic responses.