![dark was the night monster dark was the night monster](https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/DarkWasTheNight_Still9.jpg)
And with the monkey in charge, the procrastinator finds himself spending a lot of time in a place called the Dark Playground.
Dark was the night monster how to#
Meanwhile, the Rational Decision-Maker, who was trained to make rational decisions, not to deal with competition over the controls, doesn’t know how to put up an effective fight-he just feels worse and worse about himself the more he fails and the more the suffering procrastinator whose head he’s in berates him. The problem for the procrastinator is that he happens to live in the human world, making the Instant Gratification Monkey a highly unqualified navigator. In the monkey world, he’s got it all figured out-if you eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, and don’t do anything difficult, you’re a pretty successful monkey. Why would we practice that instrument when it’s not fun? Why would we ever use a computer for work when the internet is sitting right there waiting to be played with? He thinks humans are insane. He doesn’t understand the Rational Decision-Maker any better than the Rational Decision-Maker understands him-why would we continue doing this jog, he thinks, when we could stop, which would feel better. The fact is, 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 maximizing the ease and pleasure of the current moment. 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. This would be fine-cute, even-if the Rational Decision-Maker knew the first thing about how to own a monkey. It seems the Rational Decision-Maker in the procrastinator’s brain is coexisting with a pet-the Instant Gratification Monkey.
![dark was the night monster dark was the night monster](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sxSFcJl3DkQ/TqGqAA5-AWI/AAAAAAAAFXY/mV10qOKAgiE/s640/final.jpg)
Pretty normal, right? Now, let’s look at a procrastinator’s brain: To understand why procrastinators procrastinate so much, let’s start by understanding a non-procrastinator’s brain: (I did get the thesis in-no, it was not good.)Įven this post took much longer than it should have, because I spent a bunch of hours doing things like seeing this picture sitting on my desktop from a previous post, opening it, looking at it for a long time thinking about how easily he could beat me in a fight, then wondering if he could beat a tiger in a fight, then wondering who would win between a lion and a tiger, and then googling that and reading about it for a while (the tiger would win). This behavior reached caricature levels when I was unable to start writing my 90-page senior thesis until 72 hours before it was due, an experience that ended with me in the campus doctor’s office learning that lack of blood sugar was the reason my hands had gone numb and curled up against my will. I would do those the night before, until I realized I could just do them through the night, and I did that until I realized I could actually start them in the early morning on the day they were due. The one exception was that I had to hand in papers from time to time. In college, the sudden unbridled personal freedom was a disaster for me-I did nothing, ever, for any reason. The thing that neither the dictionary nor fake procrastinators understand is that for a real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional-it’s something they don’t know how to not do. No, “avoid procrastination” is only good advice for fake procrastinators-those people that are like, “I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work-I’m such a procrastinator!” The same people that will say to a real procrastinator something like, “Just don’t procrastinate and you’ll be fine.”
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While we’re here, let’s make sure obese people avoid overeating, depressed people avoid apathy, and someone please tell beached whales that they should avoid being out of the ocean. Who would have thought that after decades of struggle with procrastination, the dictionary, of all places, would hold the solution.Īvoid procrastination. The action of delaying or postponing something: your first tip is to avoid procrastination.
Dark was the night monster pdf#
PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing.