Procrastination in the good old days

Lately I’ve been thinking about procrastination and how it seems like most of my procrastination activities are related to being online. This has made me wonder what procrastination was like before the advent of internet. Surely people throughout time must have had the feeling they were wasting time doing nothing- but what kind of nothingness? True, I have been known to spend time glaring out the window, probably scaring small children (I have a scary staring face). But it only happens for minutes at a time, never for hours. Some would say that having a snack also qualifies as procrastination, but I can’t but disagree. Food is food, consuming it is an activity for survival, regardless of whether it’s filling up an empty stomach with lunch or just having a cookie. It therefore qualifies as an activity.

I tried a couple of google searches to see what I could learn about pre-internet procrastination, but the paradox of looking for the answer on the internet was too much for me (besides it was a bit boring). Wikipedia has an article on it (quite scary stuff actually), but most of the websites that popped up were about how to fight the temptation to not do what you’re supposed to.

However, on example of it can actually be found in one of my favourite books (“The Song of the Red Ruby”). The main character is a dedicated student, but throughout the book he is tormented by the fact that he does not study often enough, long enough or well enough. Instead of studying as he should the poor guy wastes his time on violin playing, picking up girls and going to political meetings. In my world these qualify, again, as activities. This leads me to think that what we conceive of as procrastination has changed somewhat fundamentally with the internet.

Because what do I actually achieve by pressing ‘send and receive messages’ in outlook, by looking at a friends pictures from a trip I did not take part in, by watching videos (again) of stand-up shows on youtube, by reading web comics or headlines in a tabloid newspaper? The list could go on. There is something telling me that my own creative and intellectual development would improve if I, instead, spent time learning how to play the violin. I don’t know where this comes from (my mum probably).

It could be that this is not the right way to look at it. Perhaps this feeling of guilt for “wasting” time doing nothing, learning nothing is all wrong and that it is instead time to embrace procrastination as a meaningful activity in itself. There is something Andy Warholish over it, like instead of saying that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, we’d say that in the future everyone will procrastinate for 15 hours. Straight. And after having done so they’ll go out and tell people, and everyone will make big eyes and go “oooh” as a true (non-sarcastic) token of appreciation of the obvious intellectual development that has taken place.

So I should transform my guilt of procrastination into feeling content about my personal development (perhaps the same feeling my mum would have if I got really good at playing the violin). Meanwhile I’ll go have a cookie.