In Praise of Procrastination

Ponca City writes "Every year, millions of Americans pay needless penalties because they don't file their taxes on time, forgo huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never get around to signing up for a retirement plan, and risk blindness from glaucoma because they don't use their eyedrops regularly. James Surowiecki writes that procrastination is a basic human impulse, a peculiar irrationality stemming from our relationship to time — in particular, from a tendency that economists call 'hyperbolic discounting,' the ability to make rational choices when they're thinking about the future, but, as a future event gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. Game theorist Thomas Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves a collection of competing selves, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control, where one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. Philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: 'Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.'"

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Thoughts Avoided

[b4upoo]

It is quite easy to anger people if you direct them towards certain thoughts. We do at some level know that the Earth, the Sun and the entire galaxy will vanish as will all memory of humanity vanishing with it. Perhaps the entire universe will vanish as well. That means that all human activity is only meaningful in a very temporary way and only in relation to other humans and perhaps a few of our pets.
                  But the New Testament addresses that directly. Christ spoke of our lives being as brief as the twinkling of an eye. Therefore money, family, society, human goals, events were all void of worth with one exception. That exception was salvation and the prerequisite of baptism and repentance.
                  The easy way to confront that reality is to try to name one Etruscan or one Babylonian. Chances are that you can not. What then does it matter if an Etruscan committed a robbery, a theft, a rape, or a murder? Any harm done was fleeting and of no lasting importance at all. Without religious faith a man might think just like that. After all, we will be no more remembered than the Etruscans or Babylonians or members of thousands of other empires many of which are now not known to even have existed at all.