Procrastination and Falling in Love with Your Capacity to Really Fail

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I had an unusual brainstorm on Easter weekend.  Before I continue, let me type out thoughts that help me get from an unproductive state to a productive state, and then I will get into new thoughts about procrastination.

I based all this on collecting failure modes.  As you run into difficulty, add the corrective thought to the list, that corrects the failure mode you just experienced in your life.  When the list gets too long and too unwieldy, just scrap the whole thing, and start with a fresh mind, because you are probably in a different place due to new habits of thoughts and actions and new life situations.

So, in my life, recently, I added these thoughts to a list that I force myself to contemplate when I am in a unproductive or incapable state.

The First Four:

Embrace Philosophical Security - this is the peace and security of the Stoic philosophers, such as found in Epictetus.  More than a lack of anxiety, it is a positive goal.

Embrace Epicurean Delight - In my mind it is taking enthralling happiness from the commonest of physical experiences, like a breath of morning air, or a sip of cold pure water, or grass felt by bare feet while morning rays hit your shoulders.

Embrace Graciousness - Tolerance - Accommodation - for other people and outside things, offer them all graciousness, tolerance, accommodation.  Easy to imagine the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, acting naturally in this manner.  Just copy that way of being

Embrace Being Informed by Honest Work - how wonderful to enter a situation being informed by honest work.  You can speak with understanding, assurance, and earned confidence.

Two More:

Is my current action or inaction in opposition to any conceivable personal hierarchy of values and goals? You have some intuitive knowledge of all possible effective hierarchies of goals and values, so kick-start yourself into a compatible action, if you find your current coping or distracting action/inaction is utterly incompatible.

Link happiness to growth & improvement, and vice-versa. You have the right to define happiness however you wish, and to call whatever you wish happiness, so why not make happiness synonymous with growth and improvement.

The Latest Two:

Allowing yourself to drift through life without active intention is poisonous, just as if you bit into the bulb of a large mercury thermometer. Do everything in your power to avoid the thieves of intention.

Procrastination is not success postponed - be serious - the habit of procrastination is already failure.  Bouts of procrastination are hammer blows on the coffin lid.  When you procrastinate, you demonstrate that you ARE a failure.  These are all demonstratively true from first principals; procrastination is just a name for a form of anxiety that helps you preserve your ego, because you are clinging to the idea of success being postponed.  So, if you have the habit of procrastination, you will eventually have a crash, and a humiliating blow to your station in life.  Your only task left is to make this crash as soft a landing as possible, and to hopefully raise the bottom to limit the extent of the drop in status.

OK, done.  The heaviest thoughts are about procrastination.

There are two viewpoints when it comes to desire, intention, values, and goals.  There is the personal + intimate + internal + subjective + 100% inclusive view where your stated future desires are taken at full face value.  There is also the economic view which is external + impersonal + objective + cohort statistical based, where your stated future desires are given zero weight.

Procrastinators will be seen as wildly different in the two views.  Objectively, the procrastinator has distraction, consumption, amusement, and numbing as their highest goals, mixed in with some self torture (anxiety about how success is being postponed) only to preserve ego and a positive self-image.  This is an extremely negative way to view a person under the spell of procrastination, but it can be defended as demonstratively objectively true.

Procrastination is the funeral ceremony of your aborted higher self, the higher self that had the ability to accomplish those higher goals.  It is the funeral ceremony because you have demonstrated no ability to fulfill those higher goals, because the creatures that can fulfill those higher goals have no time for procrastination.  If the desire truly was there, you would procrastinate on your procrastination, and just dive right into your work, like a fish flailing on land, when it finally splashes back into the water, is too busy swimming to take time to beach itself again.  Procrastination is the signal that your higher self, whatever embryonic form it managed to manifest, is now dead.

Action is based on habit, and personal desires are the genesis of new habits, or the genesis of self-flagellation to preserve ego.  If all your personal desires just prompt bouts of self-hatred because of procrastination, and never prompt simply throwing yourself into your work, what are those personal desires there for?

OK, we talked about two views: the intimate & personal or the economic.  Your expected outcome is most likely to be predicted by the economic.  The End.

Am I taking things too far?  I remember that I lost my religiosity because I focused too much on an intense commitment to perform all the duties of religious faith.  I overdid it, because it is not the job of the common believer to maintain that intense commitment; I took it too far, I used a partial commitment as an excuse to dispense with all commitment.  I have mixed feelings about this, because, on the one hand, I am being honest about having a false viewpoint about religion, and, on the other hand, I cannot "rewind" my mind back to that earlier state, and I cannot say that I would prefer to be a believer again.

OK, back to the issue at hand; am I taking things too far, by calling procrastination the nails on the coffin of a higher life goal or value?

I will have to try out this viewpoint for a few days.  I will do this... Really bring into mind the feeling of realizing that my higher life goals, that I have had as constant companions for all my life, must be set aside for moving forward with more down-to-earth issues, and concentrating on preparing myself for the day when I must submit to a humiliating loss of status, and disown a big part of my past ego.  It brings things into sharp focus, and it brings home how serious is the issue of losing intention to the distractions, vices of consumption, vices of cheap amusement, vices of self-numbing.

I like this, because I cannot think of anything more fundamental than acting under intention under a moral commitment.  Forget procrastination and anything I may be procrastinating, this concentrating on action under intention is the primary important issue.

The Unibomber could teach me about being more neighborly

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I have always had the introverted & Aspergers thing going on, so I have always found neighborly-type relationships anxiety laden to the point of being painful. The neighbors I have found myself saddled with have not done anything to help. A motley crew.

I have found there is not fence high enough to make a bad neighbor into a good neighbor, so giving them a fake smile and giving with a wide berth and meeting them more than half-way is the best solution. Give them an inch, watch them take a mile, and just trust the universe to dole out the bad karma to them in the next life, and suck it up. I always assume I will end up paying for 150% of any neighborly transaction, so when it turns out I am *only* paying 145% I am pleasantly surprised, and I use all my spiritual energy for that fake smile I was talking about, and never give any thought to revenge.

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The worst neighbors always have the most free time, and the best neighbors are always working too hard to give any time or energy to a bad scene. So, if you are gainfully employed, you will never win any battle with a bad neighbor. Just be polite, and save your pennies for lawyer's fees, if they *really* *really* overstep.

People who think they are more restrained are more likely to succumb to temptation

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Wow, I am going to visualize myself childishly succumbing to temptation, and adjusting my state of mind and my physicality to avoid falling into that fate. My temptation: web surfing! Read on...

People who think they are more restrained are more likely to succumb to temptation : Not Exactly Rocket Science:

In a series of four experiments, Loran Nordgren from Northwestern University showed that people suffer from a 'restraint bias', where they overestimate their ability to control their own impulses. Those who fall prey to this fallacy most strongly are more likely to dive into tempting situations. Smokers, for example, who are trying to quit, are more likely to put themselves in situations if they think they're invulnerable to temptation. As a result, they're more likely to relapse.

The restraint bias stems from the fact that we're generally bad at predicting the future and how we'd feel in circumstances that are different to our current ones. When we're full, we underestimate the powerful pangs of hunger. When we're cold, we can't imagine what it's really like to be sweltering. Addicts underestimate the pull of their drug-of choice when they try to quit.

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The restraint bias could also help to explain why people willingly take up activities they already know to be addictive - they simply believe that they're strong enough to resist the addiction. As a powerful example of this, one study showed that heroin users are less willing to pay for the substitute buprenorphine if they weren't currently experiencing cravings. If experienced users underestimate their urges, imagine how monumentally more difficult it would be for a naive person to do so.

This study, like many others I've reported on, speaks to the massive importance of self-awareness. Unrealistic perceptions of ourselves can wreak havoc with our decision making. Overinflated views of ourselves give us further to fall when our status is challenged. If we think we're more controlled than we are, we're more likely to lose control. If we say unrealistically positive things about ourselves, we could actually damage our self-esteem.

It's no coincidence that many addiction programs encourage people to have a more realistic sense of themselves. Alcoholic Anonymous, for example, emphasises that alcoholics should admit that they are powerless over alcohol and that they will always remain an alcoholic. Nordgren says that these recurring themes could help people to avoid "[drifting] back toward the illusory belief that they can handle their cravings."

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This also could explain why so many Conservative and Church leaders fall into "sin" with infidelity and homosexuality. Their megalomania spills into an inflated sense of self-control. By the way, this "Ed Yong" fellow seems like the kind of fellow that really annoys me - much younger than myself, much handsomer, much smarter, much more successful and accomplished. How this type of fellow can bare to live with himself, is beyond me.

Emotion - A Tool to bring Daily Behavior in congruence with Moral Goals [Rev 2]

I am struggling here, at my desk at work. I am keenly aware that my daily behavior is not congruent with what I perceive as my highest moral goals, for the short-term and the long-term. I have a lot of excuses for it. My "best" excuse is that I will have some flash of insight, and then and only then, for the rest of my life, I will effortlessly daily work in the direction of my highest moral goals.

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But I know that waiting for this flash of insight is a cop-out. There is no substitute for the daily grind of doing the best you can with your available resources, however meager you consider them to be, now. I have a friend who spoke of someday taking a few years off to meditate in the seclusion of the wilderness and really come to grips with his place in the universe, and how he would manage his future. And I felt so sad, because I know that these deep insights only come to people who are... fully engaged in life and fully engaged with the real word and fully engaged with the daily grind and fully engaged with the mundane and fully engaged with people. You get better insights when you subject yourself to the daily rigors of real world living. Any "truth" you discover in the wilderness will be hollow in comparison.

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But, if I know that to be true, are my actions consistent with that? Am I throwing myself into honest daily work? [I feel] I have to formalize immersing myself in the emotional feeling of what is at stake when we are talking about fulfilling or not fulfilling my highest moral goals, for the short-term and the long-term. Because I am terrified of days slipping away. And I cannot count on those moments of terror alone to spur fruitful effective daily action, and correct priorities towards choices about action and choices about limited resources. Also, in the past I have used over-complicating a formal system as a way to have an excuse to not do it: either, I need time to make the system more rigorous, or, the system being so laborious, that I needed to be in a very resourceful state to even be able to perform the system.

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God, I pray: please help me to utilize emotion to bring my daily behavior in congruence with my highest moral goals, both in the short-term and the long term. So, along with the prayer, what is action I can take now to help myself? The task includes asking the questions that will identify the highest moral goals in the short term and the long term - but not using the desire to be totally and rigorously comprehensive as a stalling technique. The task includes linking those goals to actions I can take now (even if that action is taking some analysis and consideration), and linking those goals to priorities towards choices about action, choices about time, choices about energy (including restorative meditation, etc.) and choices about limited resources. The priorities will suggest certain actions. Be realistic about the free hours available, and the free energy available. We are pushing past the comfort point - so pushing back on daily, habitual, typical activities. We are pushing back on activities that are inconsistent with accomplishment. Remember: We are planning for today, and making the week the smallest unit of balance. The task includes identifying a list of actions to take place in the day or the next few hours. Better too few than too many, because this activity can be done several times a day, if necessary. The actions will also be in a specific order of completion. The task includes identifying a motivating emotional trigger to each action - positive towards the successful completion of the action, and negative towards failing to complete the action. Now, complete the actions in order. If, cannot, then write out the renunciation of that driving highest goal. This is the renunciation of any and all higher goals that could lead to that action, because we want to see the choice with stark consequences. If that does not spur on action, then consider restorative activities (first consider some exercise to get the blood pumping, before laying down. A few moments to meditate is consistent with high levels of productivity and effectiveness as well.) Remember: action _IS_ emotion, emotion _IS_action, and neither is consistent with sitting and coping and wasting time and waiting. Action/emotion put off for later _IS_ action/emotion suppressed _IS_ the embryo of stress & anxiety; when we are talking about effective action. Collect these writings of goals, actions, motivating emotional triggers, and renunciations. Collect the completed tasks and the uncompleted tasks. What to do with the collection: If, over the course of weeks, the renunciations for a particular goal accumulate, then, at the least, that goal has to be discarded now. Leave aside the question of if the goal needs to be discarded permanently - it may need to be discarded several times, each at a point where an excess of capability and resources is accumulated first, and still judged to be lacking, before being discarded permanently. What to do with the collection: See if I am meeting the ideal of the week as the smallest unit of balance, from the written objective evidence. OK, looks good.