Why do we sabotage our fulfilment by putting off doing the things that would make us happy, asks Simon May

Do you repeatedly defer life to later, convinced there will come a time when you’ll be optimally prepared to seize its opportunities? Do you spend your best hours on chores or trivia before allowing yourself to get to what most matters to you? Do you avoid pursuing a treasured goal for the sake of an easier or more immediately pleasurable activity – although you believe that doing so will harm you?

Many of us procrastinators will unhesitatingly answer yes to these questions. We might recall, too, how we knowingly embarked on romantic relationships or even marriages with the wrong people all the while assuring ourselves that we’d eventually choose someone we genuinely love. Or how we postponed the vocation we craved and instead spent years in occupations alien to who we are. Or how we put off living more healthily, aware of the harm we’d likely inflict on ourselves by going on as we were.

As a result, we spend too much of our life mourning the time we’ve lost, the energy we’ve misspent, the chances we’ve missed out on that might never return. Perhaps the worst part of it is that we were sure of what we wanted all along, and yet we kept wilfully dodging it, consigning its pursuit to a nebulous future and submitting to the urge to do something else less arduous. Or to sabotage our own success and fulfilment. Or to avoid testing our abilities and finding them wanting.

All this can feel irrational. We’re knowingly inflicting harm on ourselves, but we do it nonetheless – often under cover of the illusion, with which I’m all too familiar, that there’s always more time in life to get around to our priorities; or that, after further delay, progress on them will somehow come more easily to us; or that another bout of relaxing distractions will boost our motivation to pursue them.

But there’s one reassuring reality here: we’re not lazy. The fact that we’re so tortured by our stuckness and wasted time; that we turn again and again to the goals we most care about; that when we procrastinate over them we cast around for some productive or at least enjoyable displacement activity – all this is evidence that our problem isn’t indolence. Rather, it’s self-sabotaged motivation. It’s that we avoid what we most value – what we most want to go after.

For indolence and laziness are states of inactivity in which action and intention are suspended, surrendered, or simply absent – states of ‘Tumid apathy with no concentration’, in T. S. Eliot’s marvellous words.

By contrast, procrastinators can be stubbornly ambitious – knots of fierce intent. And there’s another key difference between indolence and procrastination. Indolence is often a lifestyle choice – and in some cultures, such as the ancient Roman, a proudly displayed privilege of an aristocratic elite, a mark of the leisure peculiar to a noble way of life. But I doubt anyone would regard procrastination as a lifestyle choice – as the prescription for the best life to lead; a symbol of status to which the less fortunate can only aspire.

Nor are we likely to find anything beautiful, or elegant, in procrastination in the way that we might in leisure or dolce far niente – the exquisite pleasure of lingering in the present; freely, indifferent to goals and their achievement, and with no care for our future well-being. On the contrary: we procrastinators are painfully aware of our goals and their non-achievement. And we care very much about our future well-being. We plan for it; we’re anxious for how it might turn out; we pamper it with open-ended and often extravagant promises of getting around to doing what we need to flourish.

In the meantime, we won’t do nothing. Rather we’ll likely devote ourselves to a succession of substitute tasks that we might never have been motivated to pursue were they not in the service of escape from our priorities. I’m not referring only to binge online surfing, watching multiple news reports of the same event, cleaning the kitchen, or other activities that would otherwise be uninteresting or even oppressive.

Although we usually think of displacement activities as trivial, they can be anything but. They can include the most demanding jobs and professions, serious romantic relationships, and long-term marriages. Yet for all the delight, fascination, and security they afford us, we find that we never love them – and even resent them, eventually saying to ourselves, with St Paul, ‘I do the very thing I hate’.

In fact, some procrastinators pursue a substitute activity with such alacrity and brilliance and diligence that neither the people who applaud them nor even they themselves (for some of the time) are conscious that they’re motivated by a deep urge to escape what they most care about. Their achievements in this activity might be the lifetime ambition of others, commanding the widest admiration.

This is an extract from Jump!: A New Philosophy for Conquering Procrastination by Simon May (John Murray Press). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Simon May will be talking about Procrastination on this week’s “A Drink with the Idler“, Thursday 29 May, 6-7pm. Free to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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