Comment by jonnybgood 4 days ago
> procrastination happens even when they actively don't want to procrastinate, and even when it hurts them right now to procrastinate.
That applies to just about everyone. It’s why there are countless books and articles on defeating procrastination.
No, most people have never found themselves staring at a pile of unpaid bills and collection notices, while knowing there's work they should be doing that would pay those bills...and feeling physically and mentally incapable of starting that work. Not "I don't wanna" or "I'd rather play games right now," but "I know I should do that, I know it would make my life better and I want that so bad...but I just can't."
It's horrible, and definitely not something that applies to just about everyone.
I do need to push back because I think what you're describing here is an emotional dysfunction, not an executive dysfunction, and I think the former really is a nearly universal experience to some degree or another. Maybe not all the time but certainly some of the time.
I had never experienced this exact scenario before my thirties but I ran into an exceptionally busy period in my life where I found myself overwhelmed with tasks and accidentally ignored my credit cards for a couple months. I eventually realized this, but I put it off for at least another month, even though every other day I was thinking about it and I wanted to solve the problem, knowing it was an easy problem to fix and that I had the time to solve it despite being busy. The reason I didn't was because of fear, the dread of the unknown (how bad were the overage charges going to be?) but also a fear of being faced with such an obvious failure, even though objectively I knew the loss would be trivial.
I think this drives most forms of procrastination, certainly everyone I've talked to about it (parents, friends, coworkers) describe it in similar words, comparing it to the anticipation of touching a hot stove, etc.
I get that this is partly HN devils advocacy and partly a very human bias towards thinking all brains are your brain, but it's like saying that everyone has creaky joints so people with arthritis are just complaining too much.
Inattentive type ADHD makes you physically incapable of concentration. Procrastination is a symptom of the underlying problem, which is that the attention mechanism in your brain is chemically broken. People with this disorder are forced to 'manually' drive executive functions in a way that people with fully functioning norepinephrine synthesis systems can't really understand.
It is surmountable, but it's very hard and it's an 'invisible' condition. The sad thing is that most people with this (actual, real, chemically identifiable) condition spend most of their lives internalizing that they are lazy and worthless and desperately wishing they knew how to not be that. I have vivid memories of thinking those things when I was in elementary school. I am relatively high functioning now because I understand that my mind needs external control loops to keep me halfway productive but it comes with a whole lot of constant anxiety and shame that I can't do anything about.
It's a real thing.