Procrastination seems to be a force beyond our control, beyond ourselves — the gremlin of sloth ambling on the wings of our productivity, messing with the machinery that makes us stay on task. It is different from mere laziness: You want to be lazy because laziness is fun. You don’t want to procrastinate. Procrastination is painful, a gnawing dread. If laziness is a delightful stroll up and down some Sound of Music hills, then procrastination is a desperate clinging to the side of a cliff, legs dangling in the air, knowing that you will slip eventually, but just … not … yet …
We live in a time and place where the famed Protestant work ethic is a virtue held above almost all others, yet it seems less and less people care to practice it. A major corporate presence on this campus implores us to Just Do It, though many would rather not. We tend to look down on the person who prefers bathrobes to business suits and reading volumes of prose to Excel spreadsheets, or, to be less sophisticated but more realistic, smoking pot and playing video games. Of course, it must be said that not a single lazy person has ever triggered a global financial calamity or plunged whole societies into bloody vortexes of violence. Only busybodies do that.
In our work-obsessed culture, procrastination is a kind of moral deficiency, one that must be dealt with at any cost. Doctors assign mental disorders to millions of college students and prescribe them drugs like Adderall, which then get sold as performance-enhancing study drugs to other students who aren’t mentally ill. One wonders how college students managed to get anything done before Adderall. Surely attention-deficit disorder existed a hundred years ago, unless, of course, it’s a recent creation.
When something is said to be construct, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real or shouldn’t be taken seriously. Buildings are constructions, after all, and we take them seriously by not driving into them. By calling something construct, it makes it easier to define and analyze and, if necessary, criticize it. All disorders are constructs of a given social order, and this realization serves to help diagnose the diagnosis. ADD is a symptom of a society in which there are numerous things competing for our attention and working is the default mode. An essayist and epistemologist named Nassim Nicholas Taleb once said, “Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.” It is natural to feel trapped by what you don’t want to do, especially when it’s a term paper due in eight hours.
To squash this rebellion against entrapment, we enlist the services of drugs that keep us focused but also might sap our humanity. “It’s not life-or-death,” said Cat Marnell, a writer and noted prescription-drugs enthusiast. “But it is a very quiet soul-murder.” Or very tragic self-murder. In 2011, a college graduate named Richard Fee killed himself after his Adderall prescription ran out. He’d been using the drugs for a couple of years after being diagnosed with ADHD. In his initial evaluation, Fee’s doctor observed: “(H)e has been an A-B student until mid-college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading. He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”
If we understood procrastination differently (and correctly), Fee would still be alive. Procrastination is not a retreat from work. Procrastination is work. The process of making or doing something requires idleness. We cannot innovate or explore or achieve incredible things if we don’t let dreamers dream. Until we realize this and reconfigure our notions of procrastination, work and play, there will be more Richard Fees to come. This is not something to put off for later.