My name is Missy, and I Procrastinate.

Gasp, shock and awe!

I knew this was going to happen, it always does. As of writing this opening paragraph, I have no idea why I do this. I will start a project, and unless it’s simple enough to finish within a few hours, I’ll quit, and I typically won’t “find the time” to pick it back up. Am I really that busy? Why can’t I seem to finish what I start, or keep a routine, or remember to take my medicine every single morning? Is there something wrong with me? I even let this blog sit here over the winter, unused and stagnating. Let’s take to the internet and see if we can treat this illness.

So first, let us make the distinction between a real procrastinator, and a fake one. A fake procrastinator would say something like this: “I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I’m such a procrastinator!”  While a real procrastinator wouldn’t, because for him, there is no option — “it’s something they don’t know how to not do.” (I even got distracted looking at and reading about the distractions of another author. Gorillas, lions, and tigers, oh my!) [1]

Procrastination at its root is a form of resistance which is a form of fear. So we can say that procrastination is really just a symptom of a larger disease. Several fears that cause procrastination are the fear of failure, the fear of unknown, the fear of uncomfortable, and the fear of doing things the wrong way. The most common, and the one that I know I fall prey to, is fearing failure. I have considered myself to be a screw-up for most of my young life. And why not? I never finish things, I always mess things up, I’m always forgetful, and I never ever get anything right. Right? [2]

This fear can be defeated in three small steps, as long as great conscious effort is made. Identify the fear, run small tests to disprove the fear, and beat it with information and proof that it’s wrong. To run a small “test”, to prove that these things are false, choose an unknown skill. For me, I chose to try spinning poi, and I bought colorful tube socks at the-big-blue-box-store and stuffed the ends with yarn balls. Then I found some nice music, (even though I let myself take half an hour to choose something) and I tried some basic poi moves. It was hard at first, but every once in a while I would do something right and it would feel fantastic! (I quit over the winter, but plan to try again this spring when nice weather gets here.) Positive reinforcement here is your friend, so find something you think you may enjoy doing, and try bite-sized versions to prove to your fear that you CAN do it. Using this information, this data, over time can help you ground out groundless, irrational fears.

But what if the fear won’t move aside very easily? In my case, my fears are so formless, irrational, and habitual, that even knowing so doesn’t seem to cause much of a dent in my procrastinating behaviors. This is a phobia. Phobias aren’t always the overly caricatured emotions of ‘fainting at the sight of spiders’ or ‘becoming sick at the thought of being in crowded places’, even though this does happen. Some phobias are quiet and unnoticed little parasites. Your life is changed, altered to avoid the stimulus, diverted away from the thing that causes you anxiety. Avoidance, resistance, procrastination. Now we’re getting somewhere! [4]

And I know that my fear is a phobia because I’ve had mild anxiety attacks when met with certain failure. At least once that I can remember, two of my bosses came up to me at work, in the middle of my shift, and handed me a write-up sheet to sign. I don’t even remember what for now. Once my mind realized what was going on, my lungs began to stop operating normally and my heart pounded in my ears. I couldn’t think straight, and told them to go away and not say anything else about it until after my shift was over. They weren’t very happy about it but by that point I was beginning to cry. Puzzled, they waited until after the shift to ask me why I had freaked out. I’m sure they didn’t believe me.

This phobia has a name. Atychiphobia. This sentence from the Wikipedia page for this phobia sums up how this fear is most often contracted, and also, ironically, how it can inevitably be treated. “When a developing brain is raised in a home where approval or the feeling of being loved is linked to performance it becomes difficult to separate the two. Such a person comes to believe that such feelings must be earned, and that they can be withdrawn if failure occurs.” Therefore, the person develops a habitual tendency to only love themselves when they succeed, and to hate themselves when they fail. This is a cyclical disease that can only be reversed when love is applied to the equation. [5]

Do this for yourself, you, me, whoever you are. Apply some love.

1) http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html

2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/giuliana-cortese/the-root-of-procrastinati_b_5910548.html

3) http://zenhabits.net/procrastination-fears/

4) http://www.calmclinic.com/phobia

5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atychiphobia#cite_ref-Bauers_1-0

 

 

Which came first, Knowledge or Experience?

Beware the story which starts out as follows: “So I got into an argument with my coworker,”… The “debate” (which is what we were trying to have) explored questions about knowledge and experience, and were they come from. My lady-coworker and friend, “Mary”, whom is also the girlfriend of the dude we got to arguing with, was trying to persuade him to agree that experience comes first. Essentially, her argument was thus: If we dropped him, “Tom”, off in the woods, without any tools or reference books, he would die from either starvation or poisoning. (i.e. “Hey those look like raspberries!”)  Tom’s argument was that all knowledge comes from prior generations, and that since he knows a little something about survival he assumes he would survive, albeit uncomfortably. My point was simple enough, that their argument had degraded into something similar to “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, and that both of them were right in some aspects. My summary on the topic was that you can read the manual for the video game from front to back, but until you pick it up and play it, you won’t gain any experience. Zing!

(Try to use this as an excuse as to why you’re late getting back from break… it gets you the weirdest looks.) xD

But this conversation bothered me… I felt right, the answer felt right, but was it? I had to find out now, and since I had just started this… thing… here, I think it’d be the perfect question to start with. Which came first, Knowledge or Experience?

So I googled the question, but wasn’t thrilled by the results I got. Posts about enlightenment, forum pages, a TED post about imagination, a couple of Christian sites… and a few Wiki pages. I don’t like to start out with Wiki information, but I guess it will have to do. The first one I came across was about something called “Empiricism”, which sounds nothing like what it actually is. A little more digging led me to a page from Stanford called Rationalism vs. Empiricism. [1] 

Rationalism is defined in several ways, but basically describes “a belief or theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.”  In philosophy, it means that one believes reason, over experience, is the foundation for certainty of knowledge. It is also practiced in theology, but we won’t be going into that.

Empiricism is the philosophical theory that all knowledge derives from experience. This would be where I stand on the matter. I believe knowledge must come from some form of experience, in one way or another, either from personal experience, or from someone else’s past experience. As it turns out, these types of knowledge have names…

A priori “knowledge or justification is independent of experience.” Galen Strawson says an a priori argument is one in which “you can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don’t have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don’t have to do any science.” Then the example (“All bachelors are unmarried.“) is given. [2] Here’s my thinking though, how do you, lying there on your couch, know what a bachelor is? You may have went to school, where someone taught you, or someone you know may have told you at some point in your life. If no one ever taught you, how would you know to think this thought? Sure, simply the knowledge itself requires no further exploration, it simply is, but how did you know that? You had to learn the knowledge at some point, and if you didn’t, than it isn’t knowledge known. It would be unknown knowledge, which has to be gained through some sort of experience.

A posteriori “knowledge or justification is dependent on experience or empirical evidence.” (For example “Some bachelors I have met are very happy”). This is obviously knowledge that must be tested to be known for sure. In this example, you’d most likely want to conduct a poll of bachelors, to find out if they consider themselves to be happy or not.

A priori knowledge is basically a tautology yet to be confirmed. A tautology is a repetitive quirk in grammar, for example “they came one after the other in succession”. We already know they came “in succession” because you told us they came “one after the other”, therefore it is a priori. It doesn’t need to be proved because we have already proved it to ourselves, either because you told us so, or because we saw it for ourselves. 

This argument is also apparently as old as dirt, as it originates from the early days of modern philosophy, and will most likely continue on for as long as philosophy will, as a practice. To me, this argument has a cyclical appearance, never ending, always progressing, always circling each other, forever and ever. (Whisper: This is where you get to see inside my brain.) This is why this question is so similar to the “Chicken or the Egg” question, otherwise known as the Causality Dilemma. This dilemma is even older than “Rationalism VS Empiricism” AND “A priori VS A posteriori“:

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was puzzled by the idea that there could be a first bird or egg and concluded that both the bird and egg must have always existed: “If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother – which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg.” [3]

The furthest you can seem to go back with this question is the point at which life first appears on this planet. At this point I’d like to introduce the microcosm and the macrocosm, where the smallest mirrors the largest, and so on, forever. So if the Causality Dilemma mirrors itself through chickens, man, all of life, knowledge, time, and everything, then it must mirror on the origins of life, matter, energy… and everything. Which makes finding the answer to anything seem very futile, until you realize it works both ways. This is the cyclical nature, the forever and ever, upwards, outwards, expanding and contracting, breathing, being born and dying, weather cycles, spirals in all directions…

Butnoseriously… There is no definite answer… So I’m just going to believe I’m right. Which I obviously am, because I’m so awesome and epic. ;D

(In the beginning, there was the word, and it spake and said “Get off the couch.”)

Sources:

1) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori

3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_or_the_egg

A Blog for your thought?

Heya internet! ;D

My name is Missy, and this little doohicker here is what is going to suffice as my introductory post. You’ll learn more about me as an individual as we go along, but here’s what you’re going to see from this blog: Research and Learning.

I learn a lot of things from a multitude of sources on my journey across the internet… In fact, this is my only source for post high-school knowledge. These posts will be based off of my everyday questions about all sorts of topics, and the answers I find for them. (What does jewel-weed look like? Alternatives to pesticides? Who were the non-Jewish Holocaust victims? Deep-clean my hairbrush? Contrail VS a Chemtrail? Bunny behavior?) These are just from within the last month, off of the top of my head. This blog will serve as a sort of notebook for this information, as well as something to share with the people I talk to across the web. That’s why I named this “Gettin’it”, a play on “getting it?”. I’m just the kind of person who has to keep going with a question until I “get it”, I don’t stop until the craving to understand it has been satisfied. I can’t accept “it just is” as an answer, ever. >;]

This should be considered the work of a student, and not that of an expert, professional, or teacher. However, I will always try to answer any questions honestly and to the best of my ability. Also, there will be some of my personal opinion mixed in here, but I will try to make sure it’s blatantly obvious. In the comments, constructive criticism, supplemental resources, and opposing opinions are always welcome, so long as the debate stays civil. I won’t have a timetable for new post to begin with, but I may adapt one later on. I expect to upload around one post per week starting out.

That’s all I have for you guys now, but keep an eye out for my first post!