Destination Procrastination

(repost from Substack: originally published May 22, 2025)

We are helpless when faced with the temptation of distraction. We can no longer recognize our surroundings, so we self-soothe. We doom scroll and procrastinate - hardly understanding why we do things that enable the most aggressive anxiety responses we are capable of. It seems counterproductive to our happiness. We procrastinate even when we know completion of the next task at hand will enliven and lighten our load. So why do we come back again and again?

Many of us want time to stop. To kill the ticking crocodile as it chases after our every hope and dream. Time so we can feel less tired. Time to be the most perpetually elusive thing: ourselves. In this TIME, we will live without the digital - in the present! Just as the wellness guru on tiktok instructed. And we’ll ignore the pestering feeling that few words ever said in succession are as oxymoronic as “wellness guru on tiktok”. Because to ignore that is to invite in the youthful aura their filtered faces never lose. Maybe if we scroll our self-esteem into oblivion, we’ll possess that youth again. Even if that youth is a mythology, and our collective past equally apocryphal.

Beneath procrastination there is a delicious sense of control in every scroll and self-immobilizing action we may pursue. A reclamation of our own time. A sense that even if something is bad for us we deserve to do it. We deserve to scroll on instagram absorbing the career accomplishments of people who we would never think of otherwise. We deserve to take any measures that jettison our own career advancement, but at least place us at the helm. At the moment of procrastination, your boss doesn’t control you. You’re not stuck in a job you hate, only seemingly able to enjoy the moments of diversion that delude you into another world. You are free to be the captive of your own brain's misguided self-preservation systems.

See, when I spend an hour removing every miniscule strand from my hairbrush, I’m actually improving my own well being. It is stripped of all evidence of past use - it is a shining achievement. It’s clean now. It’s new again! Once I file my nails into the perfect oval shape, they will be ready for the demands of the day. That deadline was worth missing. This was positive. What’s more: it was necessary.

With each moment not spent on delay, time marches forward. When we meditate, as we are often instructed by the aforementioned wellness gurus, we do not control the passage of time. Neither do the monetized gurus who's videos offer the promise of self-actualization. A promise which is much more satiating than the actions to achieve it. While it’s true that in moments of presence, time may slow - that’s not enough. Because it doesn’t cease. We know better. Meditation allows for the influence of something that the most controlling part of ourselves (and thus the truest) cannot fully tame. The anxious mind is the great crusader for self-preservation. And this pernicious influence is antithetical to its mission.

The influence of mediation is surrender. A surrender to life as it is - to its passing. To the passage of things we cannot control. Procrastination is a rebellion against the existence of limits. It denies the necessity of change. Nothing needs to change so long as its reflection can be avoided. A gorgon of our own creation.

We collectively procrastinate. By electing officials who promise to bring us back to something we know cannot actually return. When artificial intelligence threatens the virtue of our own intelligence, we look to the man who says he can change the tide of a present we cannot endure. But we are procrastinating the painful reality that inflation does not reverse course - it can’t without risking a recession. The reality that immigrants are not what is changing our lived experience into something we do not recognize. It is our technology - the collective whole of the human endeavor brought to its most monetarily beneficial and soulfully disastrous - which has irrevocably shifted the earth upon which humanity stands.

Technology in itself is neutral: it is the marble slab before the artist. It was unearthed because of our curiosity, but its existence need not be exploitive. How we engage with the medium (to borrow a notion from Postman), and what we accept from those who wield the chisel, will determine the form of the sculpture. The marble either morphs into Gods of the holiest image, or a God in the worst of our own.

Deporting every face that looks different than yours cannot bring your son, who was claimed by fentanyl, back. It cannot make you feel useful again in a job which may not exist in 5 years. It cannot save your retirement pension that was invested in a mercurial crypto currency. It cannot save us at all. But if we delay and deny reality - the future feels ignorable. Controllable even.

But feeling is not a fundamental truth. We cannot control the future if we give over our most precious resource of time and attention to the cause which seeks to numb it most effectively. Only the present can determine the future. I will miss the present as I refresh the New York Times every 5 minutes to self-flagellate. I will miss it as I look up the ages of all the successful people I’ll never emulate. And I will miss it as I shape my nails into an arc bending towards perfection.

But then there’s that hangnail.

In an attempt to remove it, I cut off my own flesh.

I should have soaked my cuticles.