June 3.

2019-06-03T15:30:42Z

June 3. Procrastination is an emotional problem. The article has some decent advice, but the title and the framing are wrong. Procrastination isn't even a problem -- it's a symptom. The problem is the growing gap between what we think we should be doing, and what we feel like doing. And even this is not an emotional problem, but a social problem.

I see three dimensions of the problem. First, human society has veered off a long way from human nature, probably farther than it's ever been; so there are more tasks than ever that society wants us to do, but it's not in our nature to feel like doing them. Some of this is covered in David Graeber's classic essay on bullshit jobs.

Second, technology has created a lot of hedonic traps, more than we've ever had. A hedonic trap is something that feels good, but leads down a path that eventually feels bad. Here's a smart new article about it, How Limbic Capitalism Preys on Our Addicted Brains.

The third dimension is hard to explain, because we're so deep into it that we have trouble seeing it from the outside. What drew my attention to it was this bit in the limbic capitalism article: "Not everyone was happy with all the talk of addiction.... Libertarians dismissed it as an excuse for lack of discipline."

Libertarians are individualists, everyone knows that. Except I don't think they are. Libertarians are capitalist authoritarians. They define economic freedom, not as the freedom of individuals from economic coercion, but as the freedom of the economically powerful to exploit the economically weak, which in practice means giant concentrations of money exploiting people made weaker by their separation.

But this is not a fringe political ideology. The whole attitude of American culture is to take problems created by society, and put the burden of those problems on each one of us alone.

I haven't identified as libertarian for thirty years, but I'm interested in this subject because I still live like one: my default behavior is to try to figure out rationally what the best thing to do is, and force myself to do it. And as I get older, this strategy becomes more and more exhausting. I think a lot of people are finding the same thing, which is why burnout is now an official medical condition.

Here's my crazy new hypothesis: each person's sense of self, how sharply separated they feel from the rest of the world, is proportional to how much self-discipline they have to use. Or, a culture's belief that the individual self is important, is proportional to how much self-discipline that culture requires.

So the more we can change society to make self-discipline unnecessary, so we can just do what feels good without getting in trouble, the more we'll feel part of a larger whole. This is confirmed by anthropological reports of less individualist cultures, like Richard Sorenson's essay on Preconquest Consciousness.

Ran Prieur

June 3.