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Does anyone think a cause of procrastination might be... the fear of Death? Being lost in thought and having to suddenly divert your attention to other things means you're erasing your current state of mind, never to return to this exact combination of thoughts and feelings again.
By the way, sometimes "fear of Death" is actually a fear of not living your life the way you would like to.
To avoid misunderstanding, Death is bad. But that's too abstract, and people usually don't react emotionally to this kind of abstract things. (Unless something threatens to kill you right now. Or someone you love. Or someone you love has died recently.) More often there are other problems that make us sad, and instead of facing them directly, it is easier to complain about Death in abstract.
When you say "Death is bad", if you explore your feelings, sometimes there will be a more specific emotion, such as "Death is bad because I will lose eternal time I could spend doing X which I want to do". Now the real source the emotional reaction may be that you would actually want to do X right now, but for some reason you don't. Maybe you are afraid to take the necessary risk or pay the necessary price. Instead you just dream that maybe one day in the unspecified future you will be able to do X without the sacrifice. And then Death reminds you that your time is actually not infinite, and that procrastination may actually mean you will never do X. And then you feel bad.
Again, to avoid misunderstanding, Death is bad. If there is something you want to do to prevent Death, do it. But in addition to that, you could also think about the possible X and face it directly.
What if you want to do X, Y, and Z, and you have time for any single one of them but not all of them (which you then pick based on arbitrary reasons)?
In that case, whichever you pick, you're not doing the others. But it's not because you're afraid of risk, and it's only about paying the price in a very trivial sense. And while non-infinite time is involved, your choice to not do two of them can't reasonably be described as procrastination.
Thinking about the possible X and facing it directly, in this situation, does you no good, because the problem is the lack of time, not the fact that you are refusing to do any specific one. You could only do that specific one by refusing to do another.
Interesting idea. I have a strong fear of death and also despite my best effort, I am prone to procrastination.
But my procrastination diverts my attention from the things I really want to be doing. So it wastes my time more than anything.
Does this help explain why I spend so much time browsing reddit instead of doing the slightly more fun (but also more effort) thing of learning how to program?
Or to put it differently, I don't think it is since I don't think anyone values their "browsing tumblr" state of mind more than their "learn something useful" state.
Things like browsing tumblr are often coupled with thinking of something important to me in the back of my mind. To put my own question in a less interesting way, I think this desire to capture the fleeting realization I seem to be on the verge of makes me delay quitting the mindless tumblr browsing and having to think of something else.
I could divert my attention to useful things, too. For example, instead of reading the web, I could be programming computer games. But I am reading the web instead.
But when certain level of fear is already there, it can be difficult to focus on anything productive, because it is too complicated for the moment.