We look at the world and the way it is running things, and we mimic its dangerous velocity, forgetting an anomaly of things along the way. Negligent behaviour, or the ability to neglect any responsibility or obligation which is not immediately necessary, is our antidote to everyday overwhelmedness.
This article will look at:
- Personal Experience: January
- Blissful Ignorance
- Negligent Behaviour
- Royal Behaviour
- What Does This Mean for Us?
- Make Your Achilles Heel Your Secret Weapon
Personal Experience: January
January has always been a difficult month. The world is still in hibernation, and hence, the mind and our motivations are, too. Still, the ordinary processes of life continue as per usual. It is a paradox: the new year has begun, goals have been set, projects have been started. I look at them from the comfort of my warm and lazy winter den, with no intention of doing anything about them just yet. It’s January, for God’s sake! The only habit of a bear in hibernation is the hibernation itself.
I make the metaphor of bears in winter to introduce my subject in all the glory of the subtle gravity with which it began - my realisation of Royal Negligence, which I hope to bring to the very short (no offence) attention spans I share with my readers today.
In January, I was assigned a comprehensive marketing report to develop strategies for a new entrant performed through a twenty-five step rigorous simulation. I was warned of the project’s magnitude, and that, for its successful completion and the optimisation of a healthy work schedule, it was advised to complete one to two steps per week, knowing that the deadline would be April the first, three months away.
My initial response was so beautiful and innocent. I wish I could hear myself say it at the end of March. This is due in three months. I don’t need to do it now.
Blissful Ignorance
... is so easy at the beginning of any major project deadline, and we all know it.
In January, I completed one single step out of twenty-five steps for the project. In February, I completed two steps. I had a three-week holiday from my university studies which I had set aside to work on ten more steps.
That did not happen.
I went into the month of March having completed a grand total of three steps out of twenty-five, and now there was only a month left to complete the project. Still, I was not truly worried about the gravity of this realisation, and my drive to begin diligent work had not kicked in yet. I reasoned to myself with the same logic as before, just ever-more troubling now:
This is due in a month. I don’t need to do it now.
Negligent Behaviour
It is the blood running through the body of this generation, a survival mechanism in a high-speed environment. We look at the world and the way it is running things, and we mimic its dangerous velocity, forgetting an anomaly of things along the way. Negligent behaviour, or the ability to neglect any responsibility or obligation which is not immediately necessary, is our antidote to everyday overwhelmedness. It’s not that we don’t know what it is we have to do, it’s that we cannot seem to comprehend just how we will begin to do that thing, and when to start.
For people with GAD for instance (read more here), negligent behaviour is a common response to when one’s anxiety about a problem leads to worrying (awareness of the problem), but because one is overwhelmed by all this worrying, there is no mental space left to solve the problem (action against the problem).
Therefore, short-term thinking becomes the motor of negligent behaviour. When the mind is foggy, it will make its decisions on what is just ahead, and nothing else.
What is just ahead? Instant gratification! Never before made so readily available than by the hyperstimulated, hyperconnected communities of which we are members today. Perfect food for our nine-second attention spans.
But who am I to stand here and criticise? I lived out my January, February, and even March saying yes to a quick scroll through Instagram, parties on free nights that I could have spent working, and Netflix shows that all helped me royally neglect my market study to absolute perfection.
Royal Behaviour
In practising such glorious procrastination all throughout the process of my marketing project, I had begun to wonder, where does my audacity to neglect such seemingly large responsibilities come from? Royal behaviour.
I think that we, better than any young generation before us, know how to escape our realities. Come the wake of COVID-19, we became experts at something we were already good at: finding outlets for our anxieties and overwhelmedness via alternate realities. As Gen Z, we have thus accelerated ourselves into digital and youth escapism.
As a young person, acting royal is precisely this ability to escape into a responsibility-free world. We may feel we are entitled to such behaviour, because we no longer necessarily derive our importance and value from our work but rather from the world into which we can escape to.
As Moore and Tumin put it back in 1949, “all social groups require some quotient of Ignorance to preserve Esprit de corps.” So, let’s say you’re living in a rather stable socioeconomic context and you feel overwhelmed with the world’s problems. Barrier-free, you can make the escape into your royal bubble. Hence, the negligence of problems, especially those which do not directly affect us, and similarly, of responsibility, is made easier by a privileged status in society.
If you put the king in his castle, he will forget who suffers beyond his walls. Do you use and have access to the internet and social media? In this case, you can assume privileged ignorance. It really doesn’t take much anymore for us to pretend that things don’t concern us. Should we still want to harness the powers of humanity for change and reform, then we must inevitably consider this sort of royal behaviour a problem when it comes to tackling the greatest divisions and inequalities experienced on a global and local scale.
What Does This Mean for Us?
The way the world is evolving, procrastination is finding its space in normalcy. Everyone is overwhelmed, it’s not just you; and it’s not just young individuals, although this is certainly the demographic most affected.
While we feel more lost and overwhelmed in an instant society, we also have more command and control at our fingertips than ever before. It makes for a see-saw kind of world, where some days we feel like everything is in our hands, and on others, we feel entirely powerless.
To simplify the complex, we tend to look at things in a black-and-white kind of way, because we are challenged by long-term thinking. Just look at world politics: an ever-growing polarisation in the United States with an us vs. them mentality where impulsive chaos prevents slow progress, climate summits making long-term goals that are largely not being reached, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, with its unplanned detrimental effects on the Russian economy which is seeing its own downfall based on what we can call a rather short-sighted strategy by Mr. Putin.
What are you going to do with that information? I bet you read that sentence and wanted to shut down the part of your brain that is there to deconstruct these kinds of complex questions. You feel responsible in some strange, interconnected way, but you don’t even know where to start in terms of tackling all of it.
So, you don’t.
Let’s leave it to the leaders of our governments and the crazy activists that stunningly still have the energy to challenge the tendency to govern with the same royal negligence we are living our lives with. The way I handled my marketing assignment this semester -- the forest fire is reaching your door, and you are not doing anything about it.
Perhaps it is a rare approach. Unreasonable. Problematic.
No, it is the way in which most people are handling things.
Is that a problem? Yes, and we’re losing our ability to solve it.
How can we operate only on short-term thinking? Well, the short answer is that we can’t, but we’re going to have to learn how to better use it to our advantage, because frankly, our ability to long-term think in a clear and coherent way is being chipped away at every day in a world that says it can’t think about the future yet because there’s too much going on right
here and now in the present. Whether this is a liability for our academic, professional, or personal responsibilities, we have got to find a way to adapt.
I am actually quite optimistic that we will -- we are intelligent creatures capable of streamlining our skills.
The solution is not complex (thank God, we already have enough of that in our lives). If we are constantly surrounded by chaos, then we’re going to need to block time and space to absorb whatever parts of that chaos we want to work on.
No need to apply a formula, no need to start now, or to immediately forget about it, just be present in your life, and reflect on what’s happening around you. That’s it. It will bring you more knowledge and clarity than you could have ever hoped for.
Albert Einstein’s quote comes to mind,
If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.
Just like the roots of a big tree, you won’t see the first phases of progress and growth. They are below the surface: unconscious or subconscious thought-processing that occurs when you are integrating the idea of a responsibility into your personal reflection space. It doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily making progress on paper, but you’re doing something far more important which many people forget about: those fifty-five minutes in Einstein’s hour.
Make Your Achilles Heel Your Secret Weapon
So, what about those fifty-five minutes?
We try to get to the last five minutes of problem-solving immediately; we want the solution without being willing to commit to the timely process of thinking about the problem.
In his TED Talk, “The surprising habits of original thinkers,” speaker Adam Grant says procrastination is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity. In this way, you can make your achilles heel your secret weapon.
There are contexts in which we are all less likely to neglect our responsibilities. These are the same contexts in which we can use our short attention spans and limited-time thinking to our advantage: pockets of inspiration.
Active acknowledgement of a problem, task, and/or responsibility allows for passive yet highly critical progress. The roots beneath your tree of results begin with this idea you have now integrated into your subconscious thought system. They’re sitting in the soil, waiting to grow. Now, all you’ve got to do is be a conscious observer, taking those pockets of inspiration whenever they come to you, and reflect on them.
Through the motor of reflection, you have created a long-term agenda. Whatever present event or thought you choose to process is inevitably linked to how this plays into your past and your imagination of the future. It’s not an extra responsibility when you think about it this way, it’s just a switch you have to flip: face your reality, take time to reflect, and action-oriented progress will come.
Royal Negligence is not one for chasing away. It’s a symptom of our current reality; and the way societies are evolving, the digitised branch of life will only grow stronger. Political, environmental, and economic unrest will only multiply in frequency. But it’s not bad news if we flip that switch. It is foolish to feel we should take full responsibility; simultaneously it is foolish to feel we should do nothing at all.
The answer is never simple, and nothing is black-and-white. And yet, it should not scare us if we know what powerful a tool we have living within us:
Critical and conscious thought. May we never royally neglect it!
Citation List:
- [Available in French] Patino, Bruno. “La Civilisation du Poisson Rouge: Petit traité sur le marché d’attention.” Grasset, 2019.
- Fernandes, Blossom, et. al. “The impact of COVID-19 lockdown on internet use and escapism in adolescents.” Revista de Psicologia Clínica con Ninos e Adolescentes. Vol. 7 No.3. September 2020, pp. 59-65.
- Moore, Wilbert E. and Tumin, Melvin M. “Some Social Functions of Ignorance.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 14, No. 6 (Dec. 1949), pp. 787-795).
- Heltzel, Gordon, and Laurin, Kristin. “Polarization in America: two possible futures.” Current Opinion in Behavioural Sciences. 2020, 34: 179-184.
- Franzen, Jonathan. “What if We Stopped Pretending?” The New Yorker, 2019.
- Gould-Davies, Nigel. “Putin’s Strategic Failure.” Survival, 64:27-16. April 2022.
- https://youtu.be/fxbCHn6gE3U