Procrastination

Procrastination gets quite a bad rap and I've been thinking about why that's the case. In a previous post I mentioned the fact that our society dominated by capitalism is obsessed with productivity and uses it to define our self-worth and I've come to the conclusion the derision for procrastination is just an extension of that obsession.

When you really stop and think about it, procrastination is the only true choice a human can make, because you're actively choosing to do something you want to do as opposed to something you're expected to do. When you're supposed to do something, or there's an expectation placed upon you, it's because it is a choice someone else has already made for you, the only thing you get to "choose" is whether to go along with it or not.

If you take a step back and look at the notion of free will, ostensibly a gift from God if you're religious, or simply something innate in human beings if you're not religious, in either case a true freedom of will would require the ability to create and destroy, but as human beings we aren't capable of either. We are bound by the laws of physics and as such energy can only be transferred from one form to another, we can't actually create or destroy anything, despite using those words quite often in other contexts.

When we talk about human creativity we think of art, design, music, forms of expression but all of those things are actually acts of transformation not true acts of creation. They all require us to interact with something that already exists and turn it into something else, we exist inside an infinitely complex system of intricate pieces with our only true purpose being to reconfigure those pieces.

If you fulfil an expectation, or an obligation, you achieve the objectives that someone else set out, who in turn designed those around the decisions someone else made, you can chase that chain of command as it were, but you'll ultimately find yourself come full circle when you realise that most things in society exist by convention, that is to say they are things we do because we always have in some way, those things just mutate slightly depending on the advancement of technology.

If you choose to procrastinate, you choose not to follow someone else's choice but instead to do what you want to do. The disturbing thing however is that even when you do this it's often impossible to escape the choices of others entirely. Simple choices you make every day like what to eat and when to eat are the product of the decisions others made.

From the social convention of when to eat, morning, noon, or night, to the names of those meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner, to the foods you're expected to eat and when, cereal for breakfast etc. Even when you break with convention and eat whatever you want, unless you make that food from scratch with ingredients you grew yourself, you're otherwise using products that were designed, produced, packaged, and distributed to you. From highly processed foods right down to the loose apple you pick up in a grocers, you're choosing something that was already chosen for you, its size, weight, shape, colour, were all deciding factors in whether it was fit for sale.

Even if you go the route of wholly organic food, buying vegetables seemingly indiscriminate with the dirt still on them, you're picking food that a farmer decided to plant, varieties of that food, how long to grow it, what to feed it, and when to harvest it, it's impossible to pick a product that hasn't already been subject to a million choices someone else already made.

On the off chance that you do decide to grow everything from scratch yourself, most of the foods we eat today do not occur in nature, the most obvious example being the orange colour of carrots which almost everyone knows the legend attached to - but this interference in natural selection when it comes to fruit and vegetables isn't limited to carrots, it applies to virtually everything we eat. If you do decide to grow your own food, the seeds you buy are already the by-product of countless generations of farmers and their choices as they cultivated the crops those seeds came from.

There's a game called The Stanley Parable, spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't played it. Throughout this game the recurring theme is choice, the entire narrative of the game pivots around Stanley the main character being presented with two doors, the narrator telling him to go through the left door and the player with free will able to make any choice.

The interesting thing about this game to me isn't the fact that you can disobey, it's the fact that each choice leads down a path to one of many different endings, one in particular sees Stanley approach to large metal plates before being crushed and dying instantly - except at the last second an alternate narrator intervenes and frees Stanley, who then finds himself in "The Museum of Choice" which explicitly informs the player of the true nature of the game - the parable, or hidden meaning, is that Stanley has no free will and no true choices exist in the game, because every path was decided ahead of time, the only true choice is whether to play and go along with it, or to quit the game and go do something else - the thing you're not supposed to do.

This idea that every path you can walk has already been decided is hard to dismiss when you put in the context of the concept of a Multiverse, or the idea that across multiple dimensions every possible timeline exists with every possible outcome because it makes your perception of life, or rather your experience of life feel much more like a movie than a game, in other words, something you watch rather than interact with.

If every possible timeline exists somewhere in the multiverse then free will is an illusion, just as Stanley has the freedom to navigate the game world of The Stanley Parable, we have the ability to navigate through the multiverse, but just as every choice Stanley gets to pick from is one decided in advance the same becomes true for us. If every timeline exists then no choice is one of consequence, instead you're choosing to see the outcome that was already decided.

In terms of morality, that has very dangerous consequences for the simple reason that if every outcome exists, which one I choose to see is irrelevant, as the others still exist you can no longer attribute blame or guilt or any concept of culpability on the individual as they didn't design the choices or their outcomes, and whether they choose either, or neither, those outcomes still exist. The obverse position would otherwise conclude that you are responsible for every outcome including those you do not pursue.

Procrastination is our only true choice because we live in the moment when we do, rather than chasing death pursuing paths to their ends. When we live in the moment we choose not to navigate, but to resonate, to stagnate, to exist in the moment and refuse to look beyond it.

Then again this whole thought experiment might just be my attempt to make peace with the fact that life is stagnating. Not just for me but for everyone I know, there are very few people now who can tell me their lives are drastically different from 10 years ago until today, there are a few exceptions but for the most part forward momentum seems to have ceased. Social mobility is dead, growth is an economic pipe-dream, supposedly more people are in work in the UK than every before and we're still stagnating as an economy, you can make the argument of domestic policy being the cause but we have an import driven economy which means our ability to grow in production and consumption relies upon others ability to supply and that ability is dwindling.

My Education is in Computing primarily with a degree in Computer Science one measure of growth or progression that was heralded as evidence that momentum was maintained was Moore's Law, and observation that processing capabilities doubled more or less every two years, there's significant debate as to whether or not Moore's Law is dead, or if it is even relevant anymore.

In a similar vein the philosophical side of computing and technological advancement long predicted a future event called the Singularity, being a point of technological convergence with varying predictions as to when it might happen, the implication being that once it occurred the advancement of technology would be beyond our control.

Many people fear that AI would be a catalyst for this Singularity but perhaps an alternative interpretation would be to say that the singularity is the point at which technological advancement ceases completely because it goes beyond our needs. That can seem irrational or naive to suggest but we have already reached a point where upgrade cycles have become harder to justify as the marginal gains don't offer enough to warrant the effort. The deployment of Windows 11 is a key example of this, by incorporating hardware requirements that necessitated upgrade for many, adoption of the OS has been extremely slow as a result because most people don't want to upgrade their hardware because they have no reason to. The gains are marginal at best, and the OS offers very little as an incentive.

That's a view that's shared across many different products and their consumer bases, even Apple, once at the forefront of the manufactured obsolescence game has seen upgrade rates slow, the reality is that the advances between major iterations of so much of our technology now offers performance increases that the vast majority of users don't actually need. Most people would rather have a longer battery life and faster internet with no other change to their device and its connectivity. Which really isn't surprising when you consider the fact that the physical appearance of smart phones ceased iteration almost 20 years ago, every smart phone is now a variant of a rectangular black screen of varying sizes and thickness, the only real distinction is in the internal components, which again if they already meet your requirements and are usable, it becomes very hard to argue the need to upgrade.

The conclusion this all leads to is the idea that we aren't advancing as a society because we don't need to. Make no mistake there is undoubtedly a desire to advance that is still present, everyone has a dream of it, but there's very little impetus to actually push for that change. People are comfortable, some a lot more than others, but even those that are uncomfortable have become complacent, they accept that their discomfort is their lot in life. In centuries past when society reached this point there were revolutions, coups, and depositions, elites were unseated, monarchs beheaded, institutions torn down and rebuilt, but all of those things happened because there was a collective need for change, not just a desire for change.