Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [28]
One of these forces is a cumulative and unconscious resistance against abandoning the sum total of all the unfinished business in our life. When we procrastinate, we seem to be free of any prior agenda. But the experience of an unobligated moment is a rare event for those who haven’t rid themselves of mental traps. Every project that has ever been on our agenda and not been brought to completion is on our agenda still. The press of more immediate concerns may have forced us to set these activities aside. But mental inertia doesn’t simply evaporate when it’s overcome. When the time arrives to start something new, the unfinished business of our life returns in a flood, clamoring for completion. Before we can turn our attention to reading a book, we need to exorcize ourselves. We have to tear ourselves away from the ever-present backlog of competing claims for our time.
We’ve seen that some mental traps involve us in projects that are literally endless. Striving to anticipate the future course of our life, we always have another day or another year to account for. The desire for absolute certainty or absolute precision requires us to amplify without end. The more we fall prey to traps like these, the greater will be our tendency to procrastinate before beginning something new. Once such a trap finds its way into our agenda, we have something to occupy us forever after. Every time we sit down to read or write a letter, we have to convince ourselves anew that our career plans won’t suffer from being put aside for the evening. In the meantime, the world will continue to present us with new tasks; and we will get busier and busier, until we can no longer notice the taste of our food without engaging in a colossal struggle to clear our head.
It’s this continuous burden of unfulfilled agendas that explains the most striking fact of all about our mental life: the fact that we’re always thinking. Our mental engine is always in drive. As soon as we find ourselves between tasks, we’re overwhelmed by ideas related to our inexhaustible fund of unfinished projects. We resume our anticipation of futures without end and our reversion to immutable past failures. We should have done this; we will do that. It isn’t surprising that we procrastinate when a call to the new always finds us already occupied.
The burden of unfulfilled agendas also explains a rather odd behavioral phenomenon. We’re in the habit of postponing the start of a new activity until some definite point in the future that is thought to be more opportune than the present. The oddity is that these points are selected for some calendrical property rather than for any characteristics that relate them to the activity itself. We decide to start our diet next Monday, as though a Monday were more suitable than a Thursday. We say that it “might as well” wait until the start of the week, whatever that means. New Year’s resolutions belong to the same category of phenomena. If we’re convinced that a course of action is desirable for us, why do we delay its adoption until the first of the year?
In part, such postponements are a device for permitting us to procrastinate while holding on to the illusion that we’re dealing with the situation. Instead of conducting our business today, we schedule it for Monday and feel that it’s already as good as done. After all, it will have been done by Tuesday. We need only endure the passage of time and it’ll all be over. When Monday comes, of course, we can simply reschedule the task for a later date. In this way, we manage to procrastinate forever, remaining all the while convinced that we’ve let nothing slip.