Thoughts on failure 4, procrastination

A while ago -- well, maybe it was a month or two -- we were visiting my parents who live a couple of hours' drive away from here. Late in the evening, after everyone else had gone to bed, my dad and I sat up and talked. We've done this a fair bit over the years, and usually it is fun but not terribly personal: my dad is a great talker and can expatiate about almost anything. He didn't have any whiskey in the house -- finally in his mid-seventies my dad has cut back on his late-night drinking -- but otherwise it was indistinguishable from any of dozens of other occasions.

Anyway, somewhere along the line he started talking about procrastination. My father thinks that procrastination is something like his own personal besetting demon: he has always had these grandiose, oversized visions of what he should be accomplishing in life (a lot like someone else you know) but he has never accomplished any of it. And the story he tells himself about why he has never accomplished any of it is that he procrastinates too much. In his study he has a shelf-full of self-help books about how to defeat procrastination (and clutter), but he never seems to get any better about it. And he never quite seems to do all those Great Things he believes he was made for.

The theory he explained to me that night was that procrastination is a form of childish rebellion gone crazy. In other words, when you are little your parents tell you what to do. If you want to carve out some pocket of autonomy, one way to do it is to say "No" -- to fail to do what they tell you, either overtly (in defiance) or covertly (in "forgetting"). But once you grow up, your parents no longer tell you what to do. Now it is you yourself who sets your goals. The only catch, he added, is that if the habit of defiance is well-established, you may start defying your own instructions the way you used to defy those from your parents. This, he said, takes the form of procrastination. And that's why he hasn't achieved all the grand things he ought to have achieved in life, ... because he sabotaged himself in a misapplied quest for freedom and autonomy.

Well, maybe. Certainly my dad can dither with the best of them. But is that really so unusual that it requires a theory to explain it? Isn't it rather the normal behavior of anybody who is not positively constrained by necessity? Why else does it sound like a cliché when someone says he "works best under pressure"? And why else do we celebrate the supremely accomplished, save that they are so very rare?

I didn't bother to explain to my father how much time I have spent thinking about failure (here and here, for starters). But I did think that this notion he had of himself as somehow a victim of his own misguided rebelliousness was misplaced. So I tried to suggest as much, in words something like the following:

You know, you talk a lot about procrastination. And right now you are suggesting that this is a way you undermine or defy yourself, ... a way that you prevent yourself from achieving what you really want to achieve. But is it? Let's take a look.

Suppose you pick some particular day when you procrastinated over something, and imagine following yourself around and watching everything you did that day. Now imagine that you stop yourself at the end of the day and ask: "The stuff you did today ... did you want to do it? Or did you do it despite not wanting to do it?" Wouldn't you agree that most of the time, you made the choices you made about how to spend your time because you wanted to do whatever it was that you chose to do? And in that case, how can you claim that your "procrastination" prevented you from achieving what you wanted to achieve? Didn't you actually do, each day, what you wanted to do that day? And that's not really the same as preventing yourself from doing what you wanted to do, is it ...?

I don't know how much of this is actually a developed theory, but maybe a little bit. After all, failure does bring us some positive benefits: peace and quiet, for example. A life of ceaseless striving and achievement is also a life of turmoil and turbulence. Ease, rest, and peace of mind can be far more pleasant, and by many reckonings they might be far more valuable than the contrary. But getting them also means giving up the race and the fight to someone else ... the swift and the strong, for example. Not winning. Epicurus himself says as much, recommending peace of mind as the best and loftiest goal in life but warning that the only way to achieve it is to renounce all the goals that other people pursue (such as wealth or fame or power). You would never guess it from the modern understanding of the word, but the original "Epicurean" teachings were that you could be happy as long as your body's basic wants were met -- not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold -- and that honestly these wants could be met pretty easily and pretty cheaply. But to meet them easily and cheaply, one has to give up ambition. One has to give up wanting an immortal name, wanting to be the best. And that's not always easy.

In any event, though, one can't have it both ways. Greatness and ease, or comfort, or peace of mind ... one can't have both pieces at once. My only point to my father is that he wasn't left with nothing ... but in reality he had bought something (pleasantness, ease, peace of mind) with the inaction that he kept calling Procrastination. It wasn't self-sabotage. It was a choice -- a choice that he made for reasons. I suppose this probably wasn't a lot of help to him.