"The balm of human anguish"

I’ll resist the temptation to joke about how I was going to post on this until — you know — other stuff came up.

In 1978, only about 5% of the American public thought of themselves as chronic procrastinators. Now it’s 26%, Steel said.

And why not? There are so many fun ways to kill time — TVs in every room, online video, Web-surfing, cellphones, video games, iPods and Blackberries.

At work, e-mail, the Internet and games are just a click away, making procrastination effortless, Steel said.

“That stupid game Minesweeper — that probably has cost billions of dollars for the whole society,” he said.

One summer while I was supposedly writing my dissertation, I served the temporary labor industry at an office gulag in downtown Minneapolis. The person I replaced was on eight-week leave to have a full hysterectomy; before leaving, she had pretty much gotten eight weeks ahead on her job, so there was little for me to do beyond the usual chair-warming duties. I could have spent those days drafting chapter outlines, editing what little I had already written, or writing notes to myself about how great it would feel to complete my degree. Instead, I spent two months playing Minesweeper for eight hours a day, five days a week. One afternoon, I came home with serious intentions of working on the project I’d been avoiding since my preliminary exams six months before. Instead, I played Minesweeper for four more hours, then went to bed. It really doesn’t get much more pathetic than that.

Oh, and I should be working on syllabi tonight.

***

Appropriately enough, today is Paul Lafargue’s 165th birthday. Lafargue, born in Cuba on 15 January 1842, eventually married Karl Marx’s daughter Laura and — while languishing in prison — wrote The Right to Be Lazy, published in 1883. In this pamphlet, Lafargue urges the abolition of work, or at least its limitation to no more than three hours a day, in order to correct the maldistribution of leisure that enabled a tiny elite to spend their days in idle corpulence. According to Lafargue,

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.

Obviously, there’s an important difference between laziness and procrastination; the latter is merely a symptom of labor rather than the avoidance of it. Procrastinators like myself are incapable of actually refusing to work — because we prefer to maintain the facade of productive citizenship, we agree to do more than we’re truly willing to do. The agony that results from this, I think, is probably just as pulverizing as the work we’re trying to dodge.