“A British man who took a selfie with the EygptAir hijacker while being held hostage sent messages to his friend in which he bragged: ‘You know your boy doesn’t f**k about. Turn on the news lad!!!‘” - Daily Mail (full story)
2. i am nearly 25 and have accomplished nothing i feel proud of
3. i feel very alone and have lost many friends. i end up sitting alone in my bedroom wasting time on the internet every night.
4. i’m paralyzed by fear of getting old and dying and i’m terrified i’m just going to keep slogging away at life with big dreams but no results until i wake up and my life is over
4.5 i suspect that i am untalented at music and my friends’ positive reactions to songs i show them were purely to avoid hurting my feelings
5. i feel i am unattractive and women find me boring and unappealing. i think no one will ever truly love me. i have been single for 14 months and still feel heartbroken from my old relationship
6. i hate living as an adult, the world is hard and scary and don’t think i can survive out here. i just want to give up.
It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.
But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.
Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.
