Published by Medium

(Paywalled, regrettably.)

I feel seen.

People love to blame procrastinators for their behavior. Putting off work sure looks lazy, to an untrained eye. Even the people who are actively doing the procrastinating can mistake their behavior for laziness. You’re supposed to be doing something, and you’re not doing it — that’s a moral failure right? That means you’re weak-willed, unmotivated, and lazy, doesn’t it?

For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.

When you’re paralyzed with fear of failure, or you don’t even know how to begin a massive, complicated undertaking, it’s damn hard to get shit done. It has nothing to do with desire, motivation, or moral upstandingness. Procastinators can will themselves to work for hours; they can sit in front of a blank word document, doing nothing else, and torture themselves; they can pile on the guilt again and again — none of it makes initiating the task any easier. In fact, their desire to get the damn thing done may worsen their stress and make starting the task harder.

The solution, instead, is to look for what is holding the procrastinator back. If anxiety is the major barrier, the procrastinator actually needs to walk away from the computer/book/word document and engage in a relaxing activity. Being branded “lazy” by other people is likely to lead to the exact opposite behavior.

A touching (and personally resonant) little story from Tattie, a dearly valued member of my Fediverse parasocial circle:

Even before marriage, I had always had an aversion to buying “stuff”. I always tried to get by with the bare minimum, the cheapest things, the most practical. I never felt I deserved good things, and often I didn't have a good sense of what it was I wanted, exactly.

Speaking to other transfems, it seems it's quite a common experience. Before we start to grow into our true selves, we tend to live small lives, unassuming ones. Self-sacrificing lives. If we can do without, we do without.

I remember in university feeling too guilty to buy name-brand chocolate biscuits, going for the store-brand ones instead. A matter of perhaps twenty pence, but twenty pence which I thought didn’t deserve to be spent on me. I remember living in the cheapest clothes I could find, and wearing them until they were full of holes. Cycling everywhere because getting a bus would be too bougie, apparently.

It wasn’t about needing to save money. It was about self-denial. Self-denial had become a virtue in my mind— I justified it with half-understood stoic philosophy and Buddhism, but even without that philosophical framework I would be doing it.

Why?

Because I had been told I had to live in self-denial. To pretend to all the world that I was a boy, to tamp my feminine nature right down so that nobody would notice, nobody would suspect. And if this was good and right, well, self-denial must in general be good. Otherwise what was I doing this all for?

The ‘Tragedy of Commons’ thesis, and the ways in which it is accepted as ‘common sense’, has been wildly successful at obscuring what we are actually experiencing: a Tragedy of the Non-Commons. Non-common governance and inequalities are at the heart of the climate and ecological crises.