March 25, 2002
Here's my question. Why
Here's my question. Why do we procrastinate? I'm not looking for an off-the-cuff answer, like "because we'd rather be doing something else". The more I think about procrastination, the more I think it just doesn't make sense on a root, emotional level. Which makes me think that any of us who is prone to procrastination has some sort of dark dank tightness within us, some old misunderstanding that we adopted back when we were guppies in the ocean/spirits in the void (choose one depending on your creationist/new-age-uh-nist beliefs).Think about it. Procrastinating isn't the same as putting something on the back burner. It's not the same as delaying the completion of something until a more appropriate time. The nature of the concept says that we are *acknowledging* that it's probably best to do it now, we're just going to do it later anyway. In fact, it's often with the knowledge that it will probably suck MORE to do it later rather than now. And yet, we still put it off for when it will suck more.
The part that gets me is that it feels instinctive. It's not like that human thing we do, where we can deliberately go against our instincts. We've got this dim awareness that it would be in our self-interests MORE to go ahead and do the task now, but we almost instinctively resist. Instincts shouldn't be about going against our own self-interests, should they? Why is it such a base impulse? Maybe that dim awareness we have of consequences is just a bit too dim?
It shows a lack of balance in our perceptions of now and later. It's like going into responsibility debt. So, uh, WHY AM I DOING IT NOW? I should be programming, god damn it!
This entry ended up funnier than I intended.
Posted by Curt at March 25, 2002 07:35 PM