Dispirited

A common occurence, I think, among the users of this website¹ and perhaps the internet in general, is spending copious amounts of time idling and then regretting it afterwards. And I know this, because there are plenty of dank memes about it.

Presumably the most suggested antidote is productivity. There are countless motivational posts telling you to finally get started with that thing you’ve always wanted to do! Hell, even I’ve written one of those before.

Sure, programming is good and all, and it’s nice to feel like you’re finally doing something with your life when you pick up a cheap tablet and create a Pixiv account or borrow someone’s camera and start a YouTube channel.

But, like startups, we often fail. I’m not saying we aren’t successful at getting a million subscribers or thousands of deviantART followers. That’s a given.

But often we fail at alleviating the problem. After a few days, the novelty of doing something new wears off, and we get lazy and bored and end up back where we started. That’s not a surprise. That’s the biggest hurdle: Getting in the mindset working your ass off on something that matters to you.

What happens, then, when someone finally pushes through the constraints of procrastination? When they break free, only to find out that on the other side… nothing is different?

This is the verdict: Spending your entire day working on projects doesn’t feel any better than spending it all on looking at funny cats on the interwebz.

It’s disheartening. Maybe we shouldn’t have fallen for it. It should have been glaringly obvious that having finally finished that novel doesn’t change your life. It doesn’t even make you a good writer.

But it was the only solution we had. And I’m thinking that there really is no cure for listlessness.