This series of events - or rather, this series of no events - would be interpreted today as 'procrastination'. I have, by dint of my dazzling indolence, completed approximately 0% of the tasks assigned to me so far this year at university. Indeed, by rights I should make a start on catching up with my homework from primary school. A foul essay looms on the horizon of my mental calendar, and I have done impressively little to prepare myself. So impressively little that it might understandably be termed, 'shit all'. I am a matador, awaiting my adversary with staid resolution. It will come to me, and I will defeat it in a stretch of time which, if offered to me at first, I would publicly ridicule. Yet I refuse as much as possible to ascribe the toxic label of 'procrastination' to all this. I have instinctively disliked the word for a great stretch of time, but was never quite sure why. Then, at 6am this morning, before sleeping, I had a shuddering pang of an epiphany.
Type 'procrastination' in the search bar on Twitter and there will be thousands of recent mentions awaiting your perusal. This, to me, is quite saddening. As you scroll down, through the ocean of worthless text punctured by the emboldened studs of 'procrastination', a similar sense of despair might descend on you. It is not that people are lazy or leisurely - indeed, these attributes propound great nobility in their mute defiance - it is far worse.
It is this: today there is a sense of shame, a transgression attached to leisure. This is what is so iniquitous. The guilt evinced in this litany of self-loathing is there for all to see. This is all to say: enjoyment has become a sin. It is ignoble, debauched, hedonistic, and not socially beneficial in the way that toil is. Bertrand Russell discusses this in his incredible In Praise of Idleness, writing that:
Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them.
This is bad enough, but there is another, more sinister layer to be grafted onto this cake of turd: due to the odd but popular thought that work is Good and leisure is Bad, we have come to see leisure not as leisure, but as time which could be spent producing, or at least preparing to produce. In other words, the supposed moieties of work and leisure are both seen only in terms of work. We are so balefully conditioned that leisure cannot be enjoyed in its own right, rather it meekly hangs in the colossal shadow of toil. There is a secret anxiety that we are not working. This is the wishful sadism in 'procrastination', and its only beneficiary is the capitalist system. We are Rousseau's men who 'ran headlong to their chains', we are Goethe's men who 'have to work for the greater part of their lives in order to live, and the little freedom they have left frightens them to such an extent that they will stop at nothing to rid themselves of it'. We have been transformed into such feeble invertebrates that we weep at the superficial charity of our manacles. We are Winston Smith, who 'had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.' I have seen so many people talk of how they are procrastinating by watching television, or playing a video game - this is leisure! The entire scenario sickens me profoundly. The vicissitudinous anxiety, the sense of eternal persecution in this mode of thought is an ungovernable fetter on the human spirit, and must be shed if humankind is to rise to the summit its faculties demand.
So I sit in my room, voluntary zoo animal (without the free food), and I do not work. And I say, 'fuck you,' and the beast grinds on.
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