Later never comes

The other day, I read a post on immediacy by Oliver Burkeman from his newsletter, The Imperfectionist:

If you’re stuck in a rut, and you feel like you’ve stopped making progress on things that matter, it could be that you need more immediacy in your life.

To explain what I mean, I suppose I’ll have to tell you about the other day when I deleted, or threw in the recycling, about 300 articles I’d saved to read later; roughly 70 web pages I’d bookmarked; a three-inch-high stack of supposedly vitally important printouts; plus more task lists and old project plans than I care to think about.

[…]

In collecting all those articles and bookmarks, I’d been engaging in what the Substacker Harjas Sandhu, in an insightful post, calls “hoarding-type scrolling”. The hallmark of this behaviour, he writes, is “saving good posts for later instead of reading them now… I feel like a squirrel looking for fat nuts to stash in my little tree hole. The strangest part of it all? I have more saved content than I could possibly consume in the entire next year… thousands of hours of thought-provoking pieces to read and videos that might actually change how I see the world.”

The most obvious problem here, of course, is that you far less frequently get around to actually reading or watching – and thus letting yourself be changed by – the ideas you encounter. But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.

[…]

On the contrary: by hoarding such thoughts, stowing them safely on a nice big list, I’m almost certain I’d made it less likely I’d take the plunge and do them.

For me, the opposite is true, or at least I want to believe that it is: by writing things down, I am more likely to do them, so long as it is a task of its own to cross off everything on my list and I’m realistic about my expectations. It is difficult to resist attempting to catch each and every creative idea now, especially after letting them fall by the wayside for so long — therefore, writing things down is an attempt to catch up with myself, which creates a sense of safety that I otherwise feel scattered without.

Burkeman continues:

This makes sense, because I think the reason we engage in all this hoarding behaviour is that it’s a more comfortable alternative to the uncomfortable intensity of actually living. To take an action is to risk that it might fail, or that it might succeed; that it might lead to big changes, or no changes at all. And it means using up a chunk of your finite time, and maybe also money, instead of just continuing to add to the list of things you potentially could do — which stretches off into the infinite future, where mortality doesn’t apply.

To some, this might look like a repudiation of self-discipline – the discipline of making yourself grind through backlogs, or comply with detailed schedules. And yet it turns out it’s a real discipline in itself to resist the urge to flinch from the present moment, to stay with what’s immediate, to do things or not do them, rather than adding them to a mental list for later.

Perhaps it’ll come as no surprise to learn that I’ve actually completed far more of the things I’d previously added to my lists since throwing out the lists. Or that I’ve read more mind-shifting pieces of writing since I stopped collecting them. Because what I’m doing now, however falteringly, isn’t storing up plans for acting later, but letting the actions happen here and now.

I’m guilty when it comes to hoarding tabs, articles, and web pages. I have 497 tabs open on Safari, and for as long as I can remember, it’s always been this way. I have the habit of never exiting out of tabs, and whenever I stop to sort through them to make room for new ones, I nevertheless feel the same desire to hold onto these year-old tabs that are irrelevant to me now. What’s the purpose of all this clutter? Why are these tabs worth saving? What am I saving for later when later never comes?

This question prompted me to look at what I currently have saved: My oldest tabs are Google searches of cafes in Houston, a Reddit post on Tim Walz being an A+ candidate for public transit, an In-N-Out menu, an illustrated guide to coffee drinks, a 90 Day Fiancé clip on YouTube, two job listings, the House of Dragon genealogy chart, an article about California’s plan to clear out homeless camps, the definition of ‘gravitas’, and the ideal diet for a Pitta Dosha type in Ayurvedic medicine.

Most of these things are either egregiously irrelevant or served me once and nothing more, yet I still felt the need to hold onto them. It’s become a habit at this point: I think about something I want to do, or figure out, and feel antsy to get to that thing later, not now — which almost always means never getting around to the hundreds of tabs I stashed for a later that never comes.

All of this brings me to the question that Burkeman comes to answer: How does one create more immediacy? Or, maybe I’m framing the question incorrectly — how does one act on immediacy more often? “These days I’m trying to cultivate a strong bias toward either acting on the sense of inspiration and aliveness when it arises, or letting it go, rather than hoarding it for later,” Burkeman writes. “My new scrolling rule is that if I encounter an interesting post, I’ll either read it there and then, making a note of any thoughts it triggers, or I’ll move on.” Simple enough. The idea of acting on a sense of inspiration when it arises or letting it go is not new to me, as it’s how I get around to writing these posts. That initial propulsion of energy is necessary to get me writing and is much more satisfying than forcing myself to write.

But there must still be a balance between the two, as energy and inspiration may not always be there. That’s where immediacy comes into place. Acting upon those first sparks of inspiration is the first step in getting an idea on its way to its fully developed form, which after the inspiration has dissolved, takes patience, discipline, and a constant reworking until what you’re working on is mostly if not fully realized.

Another way to think about immediacy is to practice cultivating an awareness for when you’re in the middle of making a decision and turning what would ordinarily be a “no” into a “yes” — more specifically, saying yes to things that you say yes to somatically (think pangs of excitement, energy wanting to burst out of your body), but have gotten used to overthinking and toss into an endless stockpile of “for later”. It could be as simple as deciding to go somewhere special instead of waiting for an occasion to arise, or gathering the ingredients for a meal you bookmarked instead of letting the excitement wither. You can sign up for that class, go to that gathering or retreat, text a friend you haven’t spoken to in months, etc.

I practiced this recently, and although it may seem insignificant on the surface, it felt damn good to do: in the middle of grocery shopping, I decided I decided to pull up the recipe for a meal I wanted to make, and rewatched the associated YouTube short to elicit that same intrigue I had when I first saw it. Should I do this? I thought. At first, I was hesitant, convincing myself that there was food at home and not to waste money, but then I thought: How long have I been telling myself the same exact thing over and over again? There is always going to be something I could make at home. There’s always going to be a reason not to do it — which doesn’t only apply to dinner but to everything — there’s always a reason not to do something, and your excitement or interest is renounced in the name of making “smarter” choices, and what dictates other major life decisions trickles down to daily life, making it more difficult for us to give ourselves permission to what we want now. We say yes when we have more money, and yes when we have more time. And once we do have the time and the money, we nevertheless continue with the same act.

The point is: later never comes. If you have the opportunity to act on immediacy, then by all means, act. Notice any discomfort, hesitation, or irritability that comes from turning a no into a yes. Notice how good it feels to say yes.

If you are compelled to procrastinate, ask yourself why: are you waiting for the perfect time? What does acting now entail, and how do you feel about it? How long have you been telling yourself that you would do said thing? You will come to realize how silly your responses are, and how they are all derived from the same core element: fear. Once that fear is realized and moved from the unconscious to the conscious, it becomes easier to act on immediacy. There is no wrong way to begin. Just begin.

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