On Procrastination and the Enlightened Playground
This essay contends that procrastination is increasingly not a psychopathological condition, but a state of mind into which cultural frame conditions push the human being. While a flood of fitness apps and self-help literature suggest to the modern individual that it has to fight harder in order to function properly, I defend humanity and put the blame for procrastination on our social systems.
The reader is introduced to the concept of exogenous and endogenous procrastination as a terminology which differentiates between cultural causes and psychopathological causes that allow such a diagnosis. With procrastination being only a mild form of psychopathological behavior, which starts a spectrum that stretches over depression to suicide, this paper calls for a transformation of our education systems and a culture which allows more play.
Written in 2016/17 in Shanghai, where the author had spent two decades in total and several years thereof in the automation industry, it suggests that the compressed industrial revolution of Far East Asian societies will most likely lead to at least temporarily higher levels of mental health issues than this is the case in Western industrialized economies where societies had more than a century to digest the impact of technological transformation.
The reader is introduced to the concept of exogenous and endogenous procrastination as a terminology which differentiates between cultural causes and psychopathological causes that allow such a diagnosis. With procrastination being only a mild form of psychopathological behavior, which starts a spectrum that stretches over depression to suicide, this paper calls for a transformation of our education systems and a culture which allows more play.
Written in 2016/17 in Shanghai, where the author had spent two decades in total and several years thereof in the automation industry, it suggests that the compressed industrial revolution of Far East Asian societies will most likely lead to at least temporarily higher levels of mental health issues than this is the case in Western industrialized economies where societies had more than a century to digest the impact of technological transformation.
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