The Instant Gratification Monkey and Dark Playgrounds
Sweet Bites for February 14, 2025
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
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🍰 Mini Bite
Tim Urban, the writer of the popular blog Wait But Why, is a known procrastinator. For his senior thesis he was required to research and write 90 pages on a topic. He knew he’d have to write it in chunks across the year because unlike anything else he’d done, he couldn’t procrastinate until the last minute.
Rather than writing it in chunks, with 72 hours until the deadline, he sat down and wrote all 90 pages. It was a horrible thesis as he would later say.
But his own procrastination got him thinking about the difference between procrastinators and non-procrastinators.
Each, he realized, has a “Rational Decision-Maker in them, but the procrastinator's brain also has an Instant Gratification Monkey.”
The Instant Gratification Monkey lives in the present moment, constantly ignores the future, and wipes his memory of the past. The Monkey loves to play in the Dark Playground.
“The Dark Playground is a place that all of you procrastinators out there know very well. It's where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn't actually fun, because it's completely unearned, and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred -- all of those good procrastinator feelings.”
But it is not all fun for the Monkey as there is only one thing that scares him, and that’s the Panic Monster.
“Now, the Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up anytime a deadline gets too close or there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster or some other scary consequence. And importantly, he's the only thing the Monkey is terrified of.”
So how does Urban harness the power of procrastination? How does he get all these characters in his head to cooperate and work together?
A life calendar.
He has a calendar for each week of a 90 year lifespan. When one visually sees how many weeks have already been checked off, the Panic Monster comes alive and helps chase the Gratification Monkey back up the tree.
In ancient times, Roman military leaders used the tactic of having a dedicated individual stand by their side and whisper in their ear, “Memento Mori.” This translates roughly to “Remember thou must die.”
This reminder would recenter the military leader and remind them they too were mortal and time was precious.
“Mark off, I tell you,” Seneca wrote, “and review the days of your life: you will see that very few - the useless remnants - have been left to you.”
While we can utilize procrastination to our advantage, it is not always the best path to take. Each situation has its nuances and therefore requires its own tact.
🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation
🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
📚 Wisdom
“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
Seneca
Source: On the Shortness of Life
🛠️ Tactic
If you’re struggling with procrastination and want to overcome it, Dr. Andrew Huberman (Huberman Labs) explains one key thing someone can do in order to quickly overcome it:
Perform a task that is more effortful and hard, for both mind and body, than the one you’re doing to procrastinate.
Checkout the clip below for the science behind how this helps shake us out of procrastination.
And if you enjoyed the above clip, you can watch the entire episode which focuses on dopamine and motivation.
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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