Daily blogging! What fun. I’m kicking off today by talking about a specific kind of procrastination that I get, and who knows? Perhaps you do too. That’s why we’re all here, right?
Let’s say there’s something you want to do, or need to do. Bad news: there’s some kind of unpleasant association or anxiety that’s making it hard to get started.
And there’s something else you’d really like to do. There’s a videogame you’d like to play, or a movie you’d like to watch, or a walk you’d like to go on; something that is unabashedly leisurely and rejuvenating and fun.
Do you do either the hard thing or the fun thing? No you do not.
You do a stupid third thing.
You go, “Oh I’ll just check this one thing.” Either on the little screen or the medium screen. Or maybe even the big screen, lining up something new to watch on the ‘flix. Because it’s not a commitment. It’ll only take five minutes (you tell yourself.) It’s productive. After all, you need to know what people are saying. It’s irresponsible to be uninformed. You can get back to either the work thing or the fun thing in a few minutes sweet Jesus it’s been four hours, where the hell has my day gone.
(My hand lashed out like it was its own alien thing to grab my phone in the middle of writing this which is truly upsetting when I think about it; I realise this actually happens quite a lot. Thank goodness for my Brick.)
When I find myself seeking this kind of Third Way distraction it’s usually a messaging app, or an app with a messaging function. Have any of my friends got in touch? Is there anything I would like to say to my friends? What are some good memes we might send each other? Oh, maybe this algorithm will suggest some. What is happening in the world today? Oh, it’s all terrible. Is there any good news? No, there’s not. I Can’t Believe What This Person Said (Their Third Screenshotted Tweet Shocked Me!). Better make my own snarky Bluesky post about it.
And so on. The reason I call this kind of not-productivity The Third Way is because choosing to do nothing is still a choice, and much like Third Way politics – a doomed “centrist” attempt to reconcile the ravages of neoliberalism with milquetoast pseudo-leftism – it simply doesn’t work. You do not get your work done. And you don’t get any fun done either. Your shows go unwatched. Your strolls go unwalked. We avoid the spending of any perceived large amount of time in favour of spending much larger amounts of time on atomised activities that seem shorter but, in aggregate, aren’t.
I do not have advice, I’m as floundering as anyone, but I know what I’m going to try: just committing to doing either the hard thing or the fun thing. I will have either ticked something off my list, or enjoyed myself, and both are preferable to the weird singularity of just kind of mucking around and choosing neither. And I can tell you that it is already kind of working, because I am writing something I committed to doing – this post – instead of scrolling.
And, as it turns out, the thing I needed to do is also something I had fun doing.
Funny how that works out.
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