The best teacher I've ever had in my life was my college advisor, Joshua Mitchell. He wrote this book about Alexis de Tocqueville and I was lucky enough to take a class with him on Tocqueville's master work Democracy in America. Of the many mind altering thoughts put in my head during that class, one of the most important is the concept of limited freedom. The basic thesis of this argument is that if you give a person unlimited freedom they will be paralyzed by indecision. I'm big on mental imagery to understand difficult concepts so here's the image:
Imagine a person on an infinitely large grid who is told they need to reach the end of the grid in order to receive a reward. They can take any path they want, but the goal is to reach the end. If put in that situation most people would have no idea which way to go. All directions seem equally vast, empty and pointless. If instead you were to say go through door one or door two, the individual would have far fewer choices, and so would be able to reach a conclusion more readily. Infinite freedom is the first case, limited freedom the second.
The conclusion to this argument is that only when a person is free to chose from a discrete set of options will that person be able to exercise his/her free will. Hence - freedom isn't free, rather, you need to limit a persons freedom in order for that person to be able to use their freedom. Hopefully that made a modicum of sense. More hopefully, seeing why I'm talking about it will make things make more sense.
Right now I'm feeling like the person on the blank grid who's being told to "find the other side". I have no idea where to go, and the enormity of my task is freezing me into inaction. Sure, you'd think, "ok, Billy's going to Law School. His choices are pretty limited, what's he obsessing about? Jeeze GROW UP!" Absent for a moment the fact that I, like the Lost Boys and the kids in the Toys 'R Us song don't ever want to grow up, there's actually a surprisingly large amount on my plate right now. I need to get a loan for school, find a place to live, figure out my insurance situation for the summer (really? insurance? apparently...), register my gaming organization as a charity/non-profit (government bureaucracies are fun), coordinate with the charities our organization selected for our season ending tournament, coordinate with the tournament location, write up a script for a SGi podcast, go to the gym (I'll have soo many more clothes to wear if I could just fit into all of them), eat, sleep, shower, have fun. Sure, towards the end of that list there were things that are more long term/general upkeep, but it all takes time.
So, to tackle that mess I'm picking things and randomly doing them. For example, today I got all of the initial charity registration done that I can do without getting other's signatures. That's a big step forward and let me cross something off the list. I'm also making an appointment to go to my bank on Monday and talk to a loan officer about getting deeply into debt for school. Those two are the biggies, and once they're done the rest kinda sorta fall into place - I'll have dropped my total options of "things to do" from 20 down to 5, at which point it all seems more manageble.
Why am I writing this blog post? Well, first, many of the naggers read this blog, so I figured it would help them to realize that not only do I have a plan, but I'm making progress on that plan. If various naggers see that theirs is not the only nag on the list, they might all be nicer in their nagging (although anyone who knows me knows that nagging is necessary, gah the vicious cycle!). Second, it's cathartic to write about one's worries. Third, another item on the list of "things to do" is blog. By whining about all the things to do on my blog I am able to check off one of those things (yes, that sentence tortures the rules of grammar, but 1) I don't care, 2) you get the point). Fourth, um, oh, right, fourth, by sharing a deeply philosophical understanding of why people procrastinate I achieve two aims. One, everyone gets better insight into the black box that is Billy's brain, and two I get to look really smart while being really lazy.
Anyway, that's all for now, hopefully you've learned a little something, or at the very least wasted some time (and now you know that by wasting time you're not being lazy, rather you're falling victim to a Tocquevillian crisis!). Blog to you later!
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