Procrastination is like drunkenness.
Seneca said so first. Kind of…
“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future.”
The 1st century Roman Stoic Seneca knew how to live and knew how to die. Despite his education, wealth, and influence, Seneca’s life was riddled with adversity: from an early chronic illness to being twice exiled, and finally assassinated in old age. But the harsh and unrelenting nature of life taught him a lesson: although fate is fickle and unpredictable, it’s this uncertainty that tells us what is worth living for and what isn’t. With the right mindset, we can learn to operate within life’s overbearing, inconsistent framework.
Seneca’s advice for life, surviving through his letters and essays, is piercingly candid. He realized the importance of not clinging to anything life could strip away: possessions, people, or power. Time, he explained, is our most precious resource. And using it best as we can — unperturbed by fate — is where the art of living lies.
Most, if not all, people struggle with procrastination. It’s one of the very few habits we carry across our entire lives: from schoolchildren to the elderly, everyone likes putting things off. We never learn to make use of the present moment. Not only to work more but to have a deeper sense of fulfillment and contentment with what we’re doing at any one moment.
Procrastination is more widespread today than at any point in history. Which is undeniably the result of toxically short attention spans and a daunting lack of mental discipline caused by the dopamine-flaring technology that snatches our attention from the moment we wake up.
Life has also become so complicated that most of us juggle one too many roles at the same time. Creative work, in particular, is notoriously difficult when we have many things on the table. These together form a very strong Resistance, as the author Steven Pressfield writes, to our internal drive to create. Our mind self-sabotages.
But as Seneca said, keeping ourselves on track is paramount if we don’t want to waste our lives. Because our time is finite, and every day we are closer to the uncertainty of death. So every day not spent on experiencing, creating, or acting is one that has already died. And procrastination is a primary culprit.
I’m always annoyed by my own procrastination, even when it’s not very significant. Because I know I could have finished something earlier, and with less frustration. So I listen to podcasts or TED talks for techniques and approaches. Procrastination is on my mind a lot because I’m always in need of solutions. Recently, I turned to Seneca’s thoughts on the subject, and reading his essay On the Shortness of Life, the idea occurred to me:
Procrastination is just like drunkenness.
One, it’s when on a night out, the comfortable affect of a few drinks turns into an unconsidered overindulgence as discipline and oversight fail. Like the seemingly unthreatening pull of just something easy and effortless that can snatch us out of our productive groove and set us down a path to wasting our time over anything we can find in the house.
Two, it’s when on a night out, the ego succumbs to a powerful external force — peer pressure — for acceptance and embrace but ends up feeling self-defeated. Like the external pull of technology clogging our every moment: the notifications on social media that promise validation but inevitably turn into a lethargic scroll of potentially enjoyable, yet not even remotely fulfilling content.
Lastly and most importantly, by getting drunk today, we are hungover tomorrow. We lose our today because those nice few drinks and great conversation turn into an uncontrolled spree that we might think was fun, but it’s rarely the getting drunk part that was actually fun. Then, we also lose the next day by waking up at noon, hung-over and utterly useless for anything.
Like the slippery slope of putting things off. We turn away from doing something fulfilling in the fleeting and valuable present moment and are drawn into a seemingly entertaining binge that takes much less effort, and is never fulfilling. Then, having procrastinated, we also rob ourselves of tomorrow’s present moment that we could have used for some other valuable thing. We don’t value the present and we don’t value the tomorrow.
So procrastination is just like drunkenness.
Interestingly, Seneca also alluded to this point, albeit indirectly. He called drunkenness “nothing but voluntary madness.” From his letters, we also know he considered procrastination a kind of voluntary madness. So I’m only taking his argument further.
Because I dislike being caught on a drunken night out. Yet I still procrastinate, to some extent every day. So I’d rather not give advice as it feels a tad hypocritical. I just hope that having another way of thinking about wasting time, even if it’s somewhat absurd, could help. Because ultimately, I think we all know Seneca was right:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
