My Take | From philosophy to procrastination
- Why Plato is the forefather of modern pop psychology
Alfred North Whitehead, the great philosopher and mathematician, famously wrote that Western philosophy was a series of footnotes to Plato. Well, I may add pop psychology too. I have been thinking about that because lately I have been trying, hopelessly, to improve myself, at least give my life a slightly greater direction; a midlife crisis, perhaps. I have been trying not to procrastinate.
And so, I have been following Tim Urban, himself a master procrastinator and an expert on the psychology of procrastination. His popular and funny website Wait But Why has useful advice on everyday conundrums. It has many amusing cartoons, so you can often skip the words and still get the message. His Ted Talk on why people slack off has been viewed more than 48 million times since 2016. He will also have a new book out later this year. All things considered, he is not a procrastinator any more, if he ever was one.
He has redeemed and reformed himself, and become a guru on how NOT to waste time. Alas, I am still dilly-dallying, thinking about what I will probably never do, like writing a book, learning some music theory or the piano, so I can understand music better; or reading some heavy-duty philosophy classics too formidable I dare not approach them though they have been sitting on my bookshelves for decades and collecting dust.
Urban’s pop psychology can be summed up by his Trinitarian structure of the human mind: the rational decision-maker; the instant gratification monkey; and the panic monster.
In his own words: “It seems the Rational Decision-Maker in the procrastinator’s brain is coexisting with a pet – the Instant Gratification Monkey.
“This would be fine – cute, even – if the Rational Decision-Maker knew the first thing about how to own a monkey. But unfortunately, it wasn’t a part of his training and he’s left completely helpless as the monkey makes it impossible for him to do his job.
“The Instant Gratification Monkey is the last creature who should be in charge of decisions – he thinks only about the present, ignoring lessons from the past and disregarding the future altogether, and he concerns himself entirely with maximising the ease and pleasure of the current moment. He doesn’t understand the Rational Decision-Maker any better than the Rational Decision-Maker understands him.
“Given this predicament, how does the procrastinator ever manage to accomplish anything? As it turns out, there’s one thing that scares the s*** out of the Instant Gratification Monkey: The Panic Monster.