Saturday, November 22, 2014

Deconstructing Procrastination

It has been a long time I updated my blog. Procrastination is said to be the most destructive habit of a writer. Da Vince suffered from it a lot, and so do I. This disease has been associated with many great writers, but with different reasons. The Urdu humorous writer Mustaq Yosufi says that he only writes when he has something to write. German author Kafka says that a writer writes from the abyss of depression.

I guess that both of them make a valid argument. Back in Pakistan, I used to think that rather then author tens of books like Stephen King, it is much better to write just a single book like "Gone with the wind" by Margret Mitchell.

Mitchell stopped writing after she publish her first book. The reason seems either to be procrastination or maybe -- as Kafka puts it -- she didn't has any thought to express. In this case, procrastination is the greatest bliss as it stops a person from authoring nonsense.

There are other reasons too for this disease. A drought of ideas or a mess of ideas also leads to a lazy behaviour. A person starts her/his day with learning something new, then goes on for reading the headlines, takes a break and then reads some stuff on 9gag, afterwards s/he jumps into university work and then finally ends his internet life on facebook, twitter, or any other social network.

Moreover, I forgot to mention the nuisance of smartphone culture, It is utterly ridiculous to see people messaging and chatting for hours without a shred of logic. Sometime I feel that they suffer from Anthropophobia. These "smart phone mammals" are a weird sort of human breed that doesn't know that there is a world outside waiting to be discovered. The smart phone mammals are suffering from the worst sort of procrastination as they have nothing to share. The outside world seems non-existent to them.

Procrastination in the above sense is neither a bliss nor a disease. It becomes a habit, or rather a necessity of life. Commonly, such people delay jobs as long as the deadline allows things to be delayed. Jobs are scheduled as late as possible, so that the smart phone can be get the longest usable time possible. The demigod, i.e. smartphone, gets the biggest time share as there is no other purpose of life.

I think that procrastination should only be enjoyed it if lets a person live like a human.