Here I am, once again, last week I didn’t post and it’s the second time in a row that I post only once every second week, that’s half the productivity I had before. It seems I’m running out of gas and that’s a very bad sign. If we’ve learned anything together is that we must keep on going, and I am the first one that has to show this perseverance and push, so I will. And with that I can start with our post. This week I’d like to talk about how we procrastinate in the most crass way we can, by being completely lazy and oblivious to our future. A quick comment over this, because it seems to have a contradiction in it. We are lazy and don’t do what is good for our future selves, so it seems that we are living the moment, nothing more zen than that, right? Not so fast grasshopper, sometimes we only do what we feel like doing right then, but not because it’s important but because it can give us a strong immediate rush. And then, after that rush we are back where we started, seeking to fill a void we don’t know how to fill or with what, so, we go ahead and look for that rush, and end up binge watching some dull television series, while we eat junk and don’t even get out of our pajamas for the whole weekend, just wasting away. Man what a depressing sight! But, what is a person on the 21st century that has most of the needs met to do? How can I find meaning and purpose? How can I fight that pull from the mundane but colorful world of junk food, junk music, junk TV, junk cinema, junk everything?
This is not a trivial problem for humanity, and it has been with us for a long time. Religious texts have some saying on this although they are more versed on rewarding us later they have some wisdom in them, but you have to sieve it out, and that can be time consuming and dangerous. So I like more to the point texts, like Seneca’s “On the shortness of life” that says “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it” this when life expectancy was a mere 47 years, if you survived childhood that is. So, we see that we have that problem always, we tend to waste our lives, we seek immediate pleasures, we go from one rush to another always ending up feeling empty. You might argue that I’m quoting Seneca, stoicism personified, but what about other ideas? Well, let’s see what the other side has to say, the epicureans, but the real one, I won’t be dragged into the “mud of hedonism”. Our good old friend Epicurus, 300 years before Seneca, stated that pleasure is the greatest good, but not the pleasure given by this rushes, that one prevents us from living a life with the least pain possible, because in the intervals of this pleasurable rushes we sink in horrible pain. I will stop right here with this philosophers because this is not the point here. My intention is getting us to do what is best for us, even when this might not seem like doing it. The contradiction remains seemingly then, we want to live the moment but we can’t live only from one pleasure rush to the next, we must think of the future, but that seems not to be living the moment, so how can I do it? The way we bridge this gap is by realizing that even if the rush is lived in the moment, the time afterwards it is not, when the rush is over we seek a new one, and that is when we are not living in the moment, we want to escape the moment and get that rush once again. We forget ourselves and all around us to seek the rush, in the most extreme cases this is called an addiction and the addict can forgo everything just to get that next rush.
When we do live in the moment we are not searching for our next rush, as a matter of fact we are not searching actively for anything. We are completely self regulated. We do what is that we have to do, right there and then. It sounds impossible and yet it is not. When you live in the moment completely you are still doing your tasks and chores, as well you should, and if that task implies you thinking about the future and making plans, you’ll do them, but you are not wishing that you were somewhere else, you’re just planning what you’ll do on another time. This is a difference that is as big as night and day, as full and empty, as life and death, although not as permanent. When we fail to self regulate we find that not only are we making ourselves miserable by getting this rushes, but also by actively knowing that we are procrastinating on what we should really be doing, we always have a better option than that pursuit of the rush, and we know it, and we feel guilty when we don’t seek it.
We see now that self regulation is important, so what to do to get us to do it? We can use many of the tools we’ve discussed before, setting triggers, being more empathic, reviewing our long term goals periodically so we can more easily bring them to the front of our mind when we feel like slipping, coping with change, embracing it and not fighting it, etc. We can go on and on, but what is really important is our willingness to actively fight and self regulate, as it comes out is an important tool in our box to fight procrastination with. How well do you self regulate? Please comment below or on our facebook page.
