Statue of Pál Pató in Svodín, Slovakia [1]
You know when your procrastination is becoming serious when you choose to write a post on procrastination rather than work on the 8000-word essay you should be writing ...
Procrastination is an ugly word for an ugly thing; the act of unnecessarily delaying or postponing something that needs to be done, despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing so.
Apparently, it's quite a common thing, although until now I've never experienced it. Someone suggested that it's sign of an underlying mental health issue, such as depression, or possibly related to old age - which didn't really help.
I tend to suspect that in my case, however, it's more due to the fact that after 13 years of writing nothing but fragments and short posts in a cheerful manner, the thought of composing a long and serious piece of scholarly research in a formal academic style no longer comes naturally and no longer appeals.
Also, because the essay is on the Sex Pistols I can't help hearing the mocking words of Johnny Rotten at the beginning of 'No Fun' - A sociology lecture, with a bit of psychology ... etc. [2]
Having said that, I do want to write the essay - and I will write the essay!
Just not today ...
Notes
[1] Pál Pató is a popular pipe-smoking character who appears in a poem by the 19th-century Hungarian poet (and liberal revolutionary) Sándor Petőfi and personifies procrastination. His catchphrase is: We've got time for that ...
[2] 'No Fun' is the B-side of 'Pretty Vacant', the third single released by the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to play the remastered version as it appears on the 35th anniversary edition of Never Mind the Bollocks (Universal Music, 2012). Although not strictly relevant to the subject of this post, being left in a void of indecision and unable to act by procrastination is certainly no fun.
Personally, I don't necessarily see procrastination as an 'ugly word for an ugly thing'.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the cult of chronology (which over-values quantitative/repetitious action), allied to capitalism (which over-values productivity), are the twin drivers of the prejudice against this inextricably human phenomenon. The Greeks, who were far more energetically and imaginatively extended than we moderns (as the early Nietzsche enthusiastically understood), had a fourfold of words/concepts for time rather than our paltry/normative one, governed as it by the common/vulgar cult of the clock. Apart from 'chronos', they also conceived of 'kairos', 'aion' and 'eniaustos'. A more complex language usually attests to more nuanced perception, whether inner or outer - important in this domain, as what we call time is basically a human invention/overcoding of eternity.
Procrastination may also be a healthy compensation for impulsivity and 'status anxiety'. When I think about my own life, a number of my academic accomplishments were, with hindsight, executed too hastily/prematurely, i.e. I would likely have felt more rewarded (and also brought more to the table) if they'd been undertaken later. Second, in retrospect, one or two decisions of the heart would have been better shaped by a realisation that I had far more time than I thought.
In short, even if at times there are definite times to spring and act, and even if I am very much the archetypal 'late flower' 'more haste les speed' would have probably made me, in many ways, a more compassionate (and not merely passionate), circumspect and cultivated person. Meanwhile, I would argue, 'indecision', far from necessarily being the 'void' the poster asserts in footnote 2, can be a plenitude of held tension and considered complexity, which Keats called 'negative capability', that mostly attests to the deep courage, symbolically, not to kill (de-caedere = to slay).
Thanks for this Simon. I have posted a short reponse picking up on this (Keatsian) idea of negative capability here: https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2024/06/on-negative-capability.html
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