The Politics of Procrastination

Who profits when we stay stuck.

Procrastination isn’t just mine. It isn’t just yours. It’s systemic. Not merely a side effect of a fast-paced tech-saturated world, but a tool for the structures that profit when we are too busy, too distracted, to look up and notice one another.

When I’ve put off the small, necessary tasks – the bills, the e-mail, the unpaid parking ticket – I don’t just feel scattered. I feel like I can’t breathe. My body slips into triage mode. And in triage mode, empathy doesn’t stand a chance.

Which is ironic, because empathy is one of our strongest survival tools as a species. Our ability to understand each other’s needs is what allowed us to cooperate, to form bonds essential to survival with our big-headed babies who can’t feed themselves for a year and our bodies prone to falling apart at every joint. But stress narrows the frame. My whole world shrinks down to the size of my own problems.

In Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir call this phenomenon scarcity mindset: when you don’t have enough — time, money, energy — your brain funnels its attention into the immediate. It’s adaptive when survival really is at stake. If you haven’t eaten in two days, you don’t spend the afternoon painting in watercolor or watching a neighbor’s kid because they can’t afford regular childcare. You look for food. You protect yourself. And for people whose lives are marked by war, poverty, or illness, that narrowed focus can stretch out for years — survival mode becoming not just a reflex, but the atmosphere of daily life.

But when scarcity itself is temporary, and the mindset lingers, the perception of scarcity becomes its own trap. That short-term reflex warps into something else. Narcissism, in its original evolutionary sense, is just the brain drawing boundaries: conserve, self-protect, stop worrying about others until you’re safe. But in a culture that keeps us in permanent survival mode, those boundaries harden. They stop being a temporary adaptation and start calcifying into personality. This is why narcissism — beyond the TikTok buzzword — is a clinical diagnosis: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It’s a biologically adapted trauma response that only becomes pathological when it persists beyond the immediate threat. But if we drive ourselves into constant stress, constant triage, then the threat persists. And so does the adaptive self-absorption. This is how it plays out in lives like mine, lives padded by relative comfort but still ruled by scarcity’s shadow.

Suddenly your plate is so full that you don’t have time to ask if your neighbor has food on theirs. Because with a higher-paying job comes an inbox that never empties. With a car in the garage comes insurance, oil changes, the registration renewal you keep forgetting about. With a mortgage comes interest rates, property taxes, gutters that need cleaning. More comfort doesn’t erase scarcity; it just repackages it. The more we have, the more afraid we become of losing it. That’s what I call the illusion of scarcity mindset — the sense that no matter how much we accumulate, it could all slip away, so we grip it tighter.

I know a woman whose boyfriend — a man fifteen years her senior and with considerable assets — insists on splitting the bill every time. A colleague once admitted, with some embarrassment, that his siblings were fighting bitterly over portions of wealth they couldn’t possibly spend in ten lifetimes. Fear doesn’t vanish with abundance; it mutates into protectionism. It teaches us to guard, to hoard, to see generosity as a liability.

Which is why abundance so often fails to translate into freedom. Instead of opening us up, it reinforces the very boundaries we built in survival mode. Scarcity stops being about what we truly lack and starts being about what we fear we might lose.

Of course, there are exceptions – proof that humans can choose differently. Artists, aid workers, volunteers who give even when they themselves are starving. Journalists in Gaza who report from the rubble while mourning the loss of their own young children so the rest of the world might not look away. The White Helmets in Syria pulling neighbors from toppled buildings, knowing their apartment could be next. AIDS workers who fought tirelessly for their communities even as they were dying. Inmates at San Quentin recording albums so their voices can travel beyond prison walls. Scarcity doesn’t always collapse us inward.

Meanwhile, those of us in privilege bubbles — insulated from war, with jobs, cars, Costco memberships — are undone by unopened mail, unscheduled appointments, unanswered emails. Comfort, paradoxically, breeds procrastination. Every bill unpaid, every email unopened, every task pushed down the road becomes another weight keeping us locked in survival mode. And with that stress, which can feel so permanent and so crushing, the reach is automatic: distraction. A dopamine hit. A swipe, a purchase, a snack. It works, for a minute. Until it doesn’t. Until each distracted moment adds another task to the to-do list. The vision narrows. The generosity is gone.

And it’s hard not to notice how convenient this is for the systems we live in. Capitalism doesn’t want me knocking on my neighbor’s door to organize a tenants’ meeting. The two-party system, built on fear of the other side, doesn’t want the cashier who votes Republican breaking bread with the undocumented family who lives upstairs. The patriarchy doesn’t want the tech startup CEO to have so much time on his hands that he starts to notice – and care about – inequality in his own workplace. It would be very inconvenient if we were all well-rested and clear-headed enough to not simply notice injustice, but to resist it.

So maybe procrastination isn’t just about perfectionism, fear of failure, the exhaustion of trying to fit the entire modern experience into twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Maybe it’s also a political condition. A way to keep us circling our own undone tasks, shrinking our timelines smaller and smaller, until we forget that we could be part of something larger than ourselves.