Wow, I’m tired. I woke up at 4am this morning and I stayed up until the evening, when I slept for maybe 2-3 hours from 5pm-ish to 7pm-ish. Now it’s 1:26am and I’m still up. This is a bad start. I should go to bed immediately after writing this, and I shall. I’m making the call to write instead of going to sleep, and I hope it’s the good call. (The call to stay awake this morning was a bad one, and I shouldn’t have made it. I will learn from that.)
I read something that hit me hard in the face today like a bolt out of the sky- it was from Robin Sharma’s blog (the guy who wrote The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari), and it was something along the lines of- procrastination is the tool of those who are afraid to do their best work. I procrastinate because I’m scared. This is somewhat new to me. I mean, it’s not entirely new, of course, but somehow the way it was phrased, and the place I am in right now in my life, create conditions ripe for the ideal conceptual collision- and it all comes to me.
A friend of mine said- is scared a euphemism for lazy? Let’s be honest here. And I thought about it. Could she be right? Sure, absolutely, she could. But that doesn’t quite adequately explain my circumstances. All my life I have relished in the idea of being lazy, reckless, devil-may-care, irresponsible- I’ve found it somewhat romantic, a bit of a dandy-ish way of living. I can’t be bothered to waste my time with all the trivial things everybody cared about. I’ll gladly proclaim to the world that I’m a lazy person… if I could be bothered to. Cats are lazy, after all, and everybody loves cats.
But that doesn’t make sense. I’m not always lazy all the time. In fact, given the right task, I can be surprisingly relentless. I can argue with people for hours on the internet. I can play video games for hours. I can spend hours renaming files and folders, or reading, or putting things in alignment. I’m pretty goddamn hardworking at things that I care about. So all I’ll do is say that I don’t care about some things. I don’t care about my studies, for example, because it’s part of an obsolete archaic system that I want nothing to do with. Fuck your system, throw it on the ground. I’m lazy, I can’t be bothered. It’s stupid. Lame. Not my problem. I’m cool. I can live with that. This explanation works in the context of school, and everything is fine.
But lately I’ve found that I procrastinate even the work that I find personally meaningful. I procrastinate writing blog articles, I procrastinate creating what I believe to be art. I believe strongly that my life’s value will come in writing and curating things, yet I have not been doing it. Am I lazy? How can anybody be lazy in the pursuit of what delights them? That’s like saying a person is too lazy to eat delicious chocolate cake, or too lazy to masturbate, or whatever you can think of that might be pleasurable or meaningful. Too lazy to talk to my parents. Can’t be bothered.
Really? REALLY? That doesn’t quite cut it for me. Lazy isn’t an excuse, lazy is a condition of circumstance… lazy is what happens when there’s either no payoff, or we don’t SEE the payoff. This is why a video game can make us do simple gathering tasks that are mindless and droning, while we struggle to do the same in real life.
People log into Second Life to go to work in the virtual world- why?! Because the virtual world is more consistently rewarding than the real world. So we’re far less lazy in the online realm, because the payoff is far more immediate, predictable, understandable… so the difference between a lazy person and a hardworking person, fundamentally, I think, is their ability to create a believable narrative for themselves where their efforts pay off.
Let me rephrase that- if you work damn hard at something with no results whatsoever, you’re either a robot or a moron. Nobody can sustain that. If we work hard at something with no IMMEDIATE results, it has to be because we have a clear vision of where we’re ultimately headed. We might not lose the pounds overnight, but we know they’ll come off. We believe it, because maybe we were fit before, or we saw somebody else do it. Even better still is if we don’t actually care about losing the weight- if we do it simply because we enjoy the task.
But look at me- I enjoy writing, and I want to write, and I believe that my life’s value will come from writing, and writing gives me joy… and yet I don’t write. Because I’m lazy? Because I’m a procrastinator? Those seem like simple, straightforward and even valid answers, and I can almost roll with that- but the idea that I’m not writing because I’m SCARED- that’s something I haven’t actually considered or grappled with. The idea that I might be scared of my own best work- to find out my own vulnerability, my own weakness, my own limit- that’s new to my conscious mind, that’s kind of fucking terrifying. And sad. Somehow to me it’s always been sadder to be scared than lazy. Lazy is cool, man. Scared is noob. Don’t live in fear. Be fearless. Fearlessness is cool.
well no, fuck that shit. Life will have to be lived with fear. I think back about when I did my first stand-up at Comedy Masala. I was scared shitless. (Literally. I had to go take a dump right before going up on stage.) I remember reading about Comedy Masala in the papers, thinking, “Hey, I’d like to do that some day”, but I never had the balls to actually do anything about it- until my editor at Campus Magazine suggested that I do it, and I agreed- I needed that push, I needed someone to say “GO DO IT BITCH” and I’m like “OK OK FUCK MY FEAR LETS GO” and in the end it was fucking glorious and beautiful… all those times I got on stage with armchair and we fucked up, it was still beautiful in the end, it’s the trying that matters no the end result, and it’s a lack of focus in the present and an obsession with outcomes that leads to the paralysing fear that distracts the focused mind
Leonardo da Vinci said motion is the destruction of balance. It seems to me that I have a voice in my head that loves the status quo. This is completely anti-thetical to the philosophy I claim to believe in, but if you look at my life history, if you look at the results, it’s clear that I’m actually a creature of habit, of routine… I try to disguise that through psuedo-intellectualization but when you ultimately lay everything out in front of you, it all becomes clear.
If you’re lazy, Visa, re-evaluate your situation and put together your vision so that you feel compelled to do something. In the case of writing, you already know that you want to do it, that you believe in it, all of those things are valid. Now you just have to acknowledge that you’re fucking terrified of falling short- well, fuck that, you ARE going to fall short- over, and over, and over again. Everything you write is going to be shit.
Write anyway.
haven’t said everything I’d like to say, but I have 976,000 more words to do that in. Huh. That means I’ve written 24,000 words already. Imagine that. Fuck you Visa, go and sleep.