Friday, August 17, 2007

Procrastination

Ever since the dawn of mankind, even way before all of this civilisation malarkey came about, man was dogged by an issue greater than the chaos that we now call global warming: it was, and still is, procrastination. Now, man has been fighting this since the dawn of time, and you'd think with all this technology we have today, we'd have moved a step up; what with all our PDAs set with reminders and sticky notes shouting at us, reminding us to get going, and just do what we're supposed to be doing to make our lives seem more productive..or even more meaningful. Now I don't doubt that even the Egyptians of ancient er.. Egypt had similar procrastination issues when building the great Pyramids, or even the American government, if not for pure spite for the Russians would have made sending a man to the moon a task for tomorrow, or the day after. Simply leaving them as dreams. We can also argue that dreaming and procrastination compliment each other very well. Everybody has the capacity to dream, imaginative or not. To do is a big issue for many, and to do it right now is an even bigger one. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I strongly disagree. It's basically like saying that you'd invent a pencil sharpener because the good old blade was not necessary anymore. More like the other way around. The point is, the mother of invention isn't necessity, it's being better than the other person. Being smarter. Being faster. Being better. When the car was invented, the horse was doing just fine. It's just plainly obvious that man just wants to be better than the rest of humanity, and just as an excuse to be socially accepted, it was then thinly disguised as a good for all of mankind.

So what has this got to do with procrastination then? Well it just goes to show that man has never gotten over procrastination because of the good of someone else, and rarely even for the good of himself; just mostly to be better than the rest. Does this mean that as long as man decides to compete with the rest of the world, then procrastination altogether ceases to exist?

Sadly, no. Unfortunately, there is no way to beat procrastination. This is because, try as you may, and as millions of others who have hopelessly failed before you will tell you, it is impossible. You might get up right now, being spontaneous and think you've just flipped the bird at the face of procrastination, being proud of yourself even; but all you would have achieved is this: you'd have procrastinated to procrastinate. Think about it. In order to do something straight away, you'd have put your other task; such as sleeping or whatever to secondary, or something you'll do later. You've just procrastinated on that task, and have failed miserably.

Besides, if you haven't realised yet, procrastination is just a word for a condition that doesn't really exist. It goes deeper than the human mind can actually fathom. It has no beginning, nor an end. So really, what do we learn from all of this? We just shouldn't bother. I say, procrastinate away, do what you want to do; and live your life as you want to; unless you too have something against the Russians.