Do it later

I don’t consider myself to be an expert at procrastination, no. Teenagers are the real experts of that domain. Put off doing the oil change for another thousand miles, sure, I could manage that level of procrastinating, but have you ever met a 15 year old with an essay due on Friday? As a high school teacher, I feel blessed to get daily lessons in procrastination from the masters. We all have a funny way of avoiding what we know we need to do sometimes. Why do we avoid our deadlines? because there is pain in them. I’ve started trying to pretend to myself that so long as what I am doing is productive, then it can’t be procrastinating. So I’ll end up mowing the lawn to avoid having to grade papers. There’s a hidden calculus in that behavior that is kind of elegant. If I have a deadline with the grades, but end up doing the lawn, then de facto, the lawn has less pain in it than the grades. If the pain in an action is what drives our avoidance, are teenagers less tolerant or accustomed to that pain, and therefore avoid it with world-class skill? That the world hurts and becoming an adult is partially just learning how to be comfortable with the pain of it? That is a bleak outlook and I think there is a more optimistic view to take. I know exactly where my shoes are right now, that little part of my life is neat, orderly and filed away. My sons shoes, for all we know, are hidden each at the end of vast labyrinths underground guarded by mythical multi headed dogs. Tomorrow morning, I will put my shoes on and be done with that, my sons will have a bit of pain as they panic and search so they can get out the door on time. I figured out some long time ago, that knowing where my shoes were was a teeny tiny little pleasure. I didn’t procrastinate putting them away, because I was doing more than avoiding the pain of the thing, I was giving future me an easier morning. Learning that there is a bit of pleasure in things going how they should, meeting deadlines, and having your shoes in order, took a while for me. I wasn’t nuanced enough to notice trivial things in life like getting a full night’s sleep made me less sleepy the next day. The calculus of pain avoidance now has another element in it, our lizard brains are still optimizing that calculus, but I have the ability to have a positive action outweigh a negative. It might be a bit too Zen to think of it this way, but I might be much more lazy now by putting things away. I think we should try to notice this in ourselves and to share it with the younger people around us. Turning in that essay early feels good on its own, and the several extra days of not worrying about it feels good too, but maybe as teenagers, we aren’t calibrated to notice those teeny little joys. We can harp until we’re blue in the face about teenagers making the right decisions so that they’ll have a good life with a fancy car and a fancy house and a fancy spouse, but they don’t make the right decisions because those big pleasures are too far away. They are over the horizon, abstract and meaningless. I think young people might make good choices if their rewards were smaller, more proximate, and easier to understand. We spend a lot of time telling young people to be ready for college, or their career, but do we ever worry if they are ready for this afternoon? If we know where our shoes are, lets teach them to find theirs.