How to Work Up the Strength to Work

An honest response to the question: ‘How do I deal with procrastination?’

John Gorman
Forge

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A photo of a sleeping man on the couch, laptop on the floor.
Photo: Letizia Le Fur/Getty Images

Last weekend, I hosted an Instagram Q&A and one of the questions posed to me was: “How do I deal with procrastination?”

Look, kittens. I want to keep it 200% with you: If you’re asking me how to avoid procrastinating when there’s literally no hope that society will ever return to the garden-variety dystopia in our regularly scheduled programming, I want you to harness your inner approximation of chi. What we’re dealing with here is not a “working vacation.” This is full-scale, warp-speed civilizational collapse — or, at the very least, a dress rehearsal for it. You know those scenes in the movies where someone’s captaining a ship, or piloting a plane, or commanding a spacecraft, and all the lights are flashing red and the screen is shaking and everyone’s yelling, “Uhhh … guys …. GUYS!” That’s this. We’re the pilots, and the plane.

My point is that it’s okay to be too scared to work. It’s hard to muster the strength to open your laptop when it feels uncertain if or when we’ll get civilization back together. We were not put upon this earth to fight a pandemic that could have, and should have, been prevented by rapid government intervention and an intelligent, globally coordinated public health response.

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John Gorman
Forge
Writer for

Yarn Spinner + Brand Builder + Renegade. Award-winning storyteller with several million served. For inquiries: johngormanwriter@gmail.com