
Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination - prostoalex
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/why-do-anything.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits&_r=0
======
douche
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524250)

~~~
tambourine_man
Hacker Rehash News

This new algorithm is really annoying.

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HenryTheHorse
The author conflates procrastination, idleness and perfectionism, as if they
were interchangeable. I would argue that they are not, even if they appear to
be similar, at the surface.

While perfectionism CAN sometimes lead to procrastination and procrastination
_occasionally_ manifests itself as idleness, they are distinctly different
phenomena arising from different mental states.

But that's not all. Read the column a little bit further and you find the
author introduces _yet_ another romantic notion to support his argument:
nothingness.

> Idleness, then, reveals an experience of nothingness. While nothingness
> tends to occupy a central position in Eastern traditions like Buddhism and
> Taoism...

Nothingness ("Shunyata", in Sanskrit) is not about idleness or vacuum but
means something very specific. It refers to the absence of a solid, tangible
_self_ (or an ego, if you must use a Western term). Buddhism's core practice
is often mis-interpreted as "don't do something, sit there!" but it couldn't
be farther from the truth.

Zen Buddhism and Taoism's idea of "nothingness" is not about inactivity but
about keeping the "self" out of activity.

~~~
qntty
>First, the author conflates procrastination, idleness and perfectionism, as
if they were interchangeable

But he distinguishes them later:

 _The drama of procrastination comes from its split nature. Just like the
architect from Shiraz, the procrastinator is smitten by the perfect picture of
that which is yet to be born; he falls under the spell of all that purity and
splendor. What he is beholding is something whole, uncorrupted by time,
untainted by the workings of a messed-up world. At the same time, though, the
procrastinator is fully aware that all that has to go. No sooner does he get a
glimpse of the perfection that precedes actualization than he is doomed to
become part of the actualization process himself, to be the one who defaces
the ideal and brings into the world a precarious copy, unlike the architect
who saves it by burning the plans._

So in this view procrastination is not his idealized perfectionism ("burning
the plans") or his idealized idleness ("intuiting a cosmic meaninglessness,
which comes along with the realization that, with every action, we get only
more entangled in the universal farce"). It has a split nature that's the
worst of both.

Also it's possible that his reference to nothingness doesn't mean sunyata, but
"making no karma" by not participating in samsara.

~~~
HenryTheHorse
Re "samsara", I am sure you know that in the Hindu/Buddhist sense it is more
than just the physical samsara, whereas idleness necessarily refers to
inaction.

By avoiding action and therefore responsibility, one could still be awfully
entangled in _samsara_. (Just ask any developer who's browsing HN or Reddit
_while_ struggling to meet a deadline!)

That said, I did like your interpretation of "making no karma", even though
Buddhism makes it very clear that karma-making occurs even with the _skandhas_
, the "sense-gate" or mental/emotional fabrications.

~~~
qntty
Yes, in the Buddhist view, you accumulate karma no matter what you're doing
(even if you're procrastinating something), so long as you have an idea of
self. So the only way to "really do nothing" is to free yourself from samsara
(not a physical place, but the continuity of craving).

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Declanomous
I agree with the premise that perfection can only exist before creation, but I
disagree with the conclusion. Creation does not destroy something perfect,
rather it creates an entirely new thing. If your attempts to realize your
perfect idea destroy it, it is because you discovered the flaws in your idea
in the process.

Let's take architecture for example, and lets make Frank Lloyd Wright the
architect. Wright created some of the most beautiful designs ever. However,
I've visited a lot of his houses, and I think they make terrible houses.
Wright's designs ignored many of the aspects of what makes a home good. His
houses are beautiful in the sculptural sense, but in reality they were
failures as houses. Their perfection wasn't destroyed by creation -- it never
existed in the first place.

That being said, Wright was a visionary designer, and I'd highly recommend
touring a Wright-designed building if you have a chance.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
> If your attempts to realize your perfect idea destroy it, it is because you
> discovered the flaws in your idea in the process.

It doesn't have to be. I think my main disagreement with what you're saying
starts with how you allude to the idea of idea possession. What is "your
idea"? What does this mean? Many perfect ideas appear universal. Who "came up"
with the idea of the perfect sphere? Or the idea of love? Or the idea of
adventure? Notice how, when you try to realize any of these ideas, you fall
short.

People who created this, for example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque)

are betting that universal ideas do indeed exist, and that intelligent enough
creatures are bound to have them.

When you realize something imperfect, you are bound to lose some connection
with the perfect idea that you started with. This does not mean there was
something wrong with the original idea, that it was "bad" or "wrong" in some
sense. You cannot create a perfect sphere, but is the idea of a perfect sphere
bad or wrong?

> Their perfection wasn't destroyed by creation -- it never existed in the
> first place.

About your example with Lloyd Wright: that perfection existed in a sense. It
existed in his mind. Maybe not the plan for the house that would actually be
executed, but the idea, the feeling of living in such a house. Where do you
draw the border between pure concept and practicalities?

I remember being a kid and wanting to create computer games. I had very clear
ideas on how the best game ever should feel like. The things I actually
created were shit, and ended up destroying my ability to preserve these
initial feeling of an ideal game. Don't you see how doing can be destructive
in the realm of ideas?

It is funny that what I am saying here does not feel controversial to me
(famous thinkers said this sort of thing millennia ago), but it does feel
blasphemous in current western society. We worship productivity, and forget to
question the very idea of productivity to begin with.

~~~
Declanomous
I agree with everything you said, except I think a perfect idea would be
perfect regardless of any imperfect executions. Your vision for a game might
still be perfect, but you might derive less pleasure from thinking about it
because those thoughts are now tangled up with your feelings of failure.

For another metaphor, the imagined perfection of a member of the opposite sex,
and the inability of reality to match that expectation, is a consistent trope
in art and media. Happy Together, by the Turtles, pretty much any song written
by River Cuomo (Weezer), 500 Days of Summer, etc.

I think the issue is that our individual understanding of perfection is
flawed. Perfection is more like Plato's forms, in the sense that something
perfect might exist, but we can only begin to imagine what that is. Perhaps
Plato is right, and perfection cannot exist in reality, but failure to attain
perfection in reality would not cause the true form of something to be any
less true.

------
rafinha
Because what's better than procrastinate reading an article about
procrastination?

~~~
andrewprock
If you ignore any problem long enough, it goes away.

~~~
Raphmedia
Death comes to those who wait.

~~~
HenryTheHorse
As it does to those who don't.

------
pmoriarty
Gnosticism was an amazingly diverse and interesting phenomenon, and this
article does not do it justice by oversimplifying so and making it appear so
black and white.

Some Gnostics did believe the demiurge was merely mistaken (arrogantly
thinking himself the only true God or blundering in creating when trying to
imitate the creation of the true God), others believed him insane, or even
intentionally evil.

At root, the Gnostics were wrestling with the problem of evil. That is, how
can evil exist in the world (or how can this world be as evil as it is) if God
is perfectly good, omniscient, and ominipotent? To perhaps oversimplify it
even further: how can imperfection arise out of perfection?

Their solution was to say that "true" God didn't create the world, and didn't
create evil, but rather that it was the demiurge (and his minions, the
archons) that did it. This demiurge was the creator God of the Old Testament,
the false God that what has come to be mainstream Christianity worships.

The Gnostics tried to put as much cosmological distance as possible between
their true God and the demiurge. To them not only did the true God not create
the world, but he didn't even create the demiurge. The demiurge was created by
an intermediary, who mistakenly tried to imitate the true God and created the
demiurge.

They further distanced the evil material world that was the creation of the
demiurge from the perfect realm of the true God by positing the existance of
many intermediary realms and intermediary superhuman beings, each less perfect
than the last, the further they get away from the true God and the closer they
get to this evil world.

The result is that in their eyes the true God is absolved of responsibility
for evil or this evil world, and he can remain perfect, omniscient, and
ominpotent as he is infinitely remote from the muck that us material beings
dwell in. But humans have a divine spark in them, and are capable of realizing
their divine origin and thereby escaping the material prison they are trapped
in.. but that is a story for another day.

There's a lot more to say about the Gnostics and their beliefs, but I'll just
note that decades ago scholars were debating whether to abandon the terms
"Gnostic" and "Gnosticism", as the people and beliefs so designated were so
different from each other that using a single term for them would be
misleading.

It's a bit like "Hinduism", which is not a single religion at all, but could
be thought of as a family of religions, with many different and often
conflicting beliefs. So what I say above (and what the original article says)
about gnostic beliefs does not necessarily apply to all or even most Gnostics.

Anyone interested in learning more about this is encouraged to read the
Wikipedia articles on Gnosticism (which are actually pretty good) and some
books. Pagels' books are some of the most popular. But her perspective on
Gnosticism is itself but one of many. Hans Jonas is a fascinating source,
especially for his additional link to Heidegger. An interesting fictional,
non-scholarly source is Philip K Dick, who incorporated his own reimagining of
Gnostic ideas in to much of his own work.

------
lintiness
the virtue in doing is that it's a lot harder than not doing.

~~~
KaiP
What's the connection between hard and virtuous?

~~~
sdegutis
A lot of English words have been drained of their meaning in the past 150
years[1]. Now when people say "virtue" they almost exclusively mean "some
morally positive quality" like patience, kindness, or diligence. But the word
virtue comes from the Latin word "vir" meaning "man", and had meanings like
"valor, merit, moral perfection". You can sort of already see just by the fact
that it started at the word "man" that it was associated with _actions_ that
men (humans) can perform. And the words "valor" and "merit" come from Latin
words respectively meaning to be strong, and to get what you earned. Putting
these together, it's sort of clear that the original deeper meaning of the
English word "virtue" had a lot more to do with earning via hard work. It's
evident that things like patience and kindness need to be "worked for". You
can also see this in the phrase "by virtue of", meaning "be-cause of" (or
"caused by"), that virtue is associated with cause and therefore action.

[1]: on archive.org I found a book that I wanted so much that I converted it
to a black and white PDF and printed a hard cover copy for myself on lulu.com;
but first I had to find the right version, since the original book was written
in Spanish; so I compared the various English translations ranging from the
early 1800s to the early 1900s, and at some point in the middle 1800s, the
words it chose when translating were _wayyyy_ less accurate than alternative
ones. It seems that they chose what we would call more "modern" words, or at
least words with more modern definitions to our own sensibilities, to
translate these words, and then it just kept snowballing. I still don't know
the cause of this, but I'm pretty annoyed by it. Because dammit, affection is
a way different noun than love or even charity, and you completely miss the
meaning of a sentence from the original author's perspective when it's not
translated accuratel.

~~~
quickly
Posts like this are why I always check the comments. I don't think I would
have had this thought shared with me anywhere else. Having said that, I'm
still unsure how to interpret the Oscar Wilde quote.

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midnitewarrior
I'm going to read this later.

