Allart van Everdingen: Reynard disguises as monk and distracts cock
Series/Book Title: Reynard the Fox [Reinecke Fuchs] (17th century)

"Progress is Procrastinating, finally turning outwards."

Once I admitted to having been seeking Validation when scrolling, I began wondering how it came to be that I needed to seek so much validation. Yes, the damned pandemic had robbed me of some sources of external validation, but it had not stranded me in the middle of some interaction desert. I had long employed social media for much, perhaps the bulk, of my interactions, since my work had taken me far from home and I hadn’t reported to an office in many years. I started working virtually before the internet, before I even acquired a cell phone; hell, before there were even cell phones for me to acquire, so I was well accustomed to being alone much of the time before that damned pandemic visited. What about that event left me suddenly so apparently needy that I sought so damned much social media-sourced validation? This seemed a perfect question until I eventually managed to track down a parallel thread to my story. Something else had emerged around about when that damned pandemic appeared. I had begun writing these series.

As those who have been following my stories already know, I hold myself responsible for writing and posting a fresh story each morning. By the end of every quarter, the accumulated total number of pages usually exceeds three hundred. I’ve created a manuscript. The day after I finish one, I start another, or so has my practice persisted since June 21, 2017. This means that this story is not quite a quarter of the way through my thirty-fifth series I’ve duly created and posted since I started this serious exercise of writing. Each completed manuscript serves as a fresh starting point for a whole other process, one, in ways, much more onerous than the original creation ever seemed. Between a completed set of individual stories and a finished manuscript suitable for publishing lies a vast minefield of mind-numbing effort. Just compiling individual stories into a consistent whole requires hundreds of individual copyings, pastings, and tedious reformattings. Further, once compiled, the whole requires a fresh reading or two to experience the relative absence or presence of intended continuity, not to mention at least one complete copyediting. This author hasn’t even compiled half of the series I’ve produced. This represents an overwhelming backlog well worthy of supporting some serious procrastinating.

The presence of an overwhelming-seeming chore, of which one is actively procrastinating, presents the sure and certain preconditions to support a frantic continuing search for external validation. The higher the pile of uncompiled manuscripts, the greater the probable need for distracting reassurance. Procrastination might not result in anything even remotely resembling idleness. It often appears as rather frantic activity, somehow altogether too desperately seeking satisfaction. That satisfaction needn’t necessarily come from anything terribly tangible. It might be best quenched by the nearly invisible. Scrolling social media makes a near-perfect foil since it successfully distracts from the shame-avoiding truly essential work induces. Hey, it feels like I’m learning something. I’m well-informed. I might even be making progress toward achieving well-informédness. It amounts to largely phony activity. It fails to resolve any of the avoided existential problems. It amounts to a wasting strategy, destined to crumble under its own inertia of avoidance.

I had “lost track” of my stories. In a fit of frustration last year, I’d created an amended story repository because it seemed that working within the master one had grown too cumbersome. Bordering on 4GB of storage, simply saving each additional entry to that master often took a lot of time. Updating crashed my system with some frequency, too, so I created a fresh instance of the master and deleted most of the history from that copy, archiving the old master for future reference. Then I set about actively Procrastinating accessing that archived master. I tried to access it a few months ago, and it appeared at that time that I might have bungled the transfer. I didn’t find the history I’d expected to find there. This left some possibility that I might have lost about five years of production, which gave me further reason to continue Pracrastinating. I didn’t feel as though I could afford to confirm my mistake, so I avoided confirming. What did I do to distract myself from worrying? Yup! Scrolling social media with even greater abandon.

Eventually, most Procrastinating progresses to its later stages. These entail finally facing up to whatever effort was so actively procrastinated. Usually, this results in the dissolution of the great myth that reinforced the distracting effort. A huge sigh of relief gets quickly followed by the fresh realization that the hero has opened a huge can of worms. There were ample reasons for continuing the distractions. Music needing to be faced lurked in there. Am I prepared to slip into my big boy pants now? I’ve just begun the accounting. I can’t rightly say that any but one of those series is finished with all of the steps necessary to turn it into an actual manuscript. If I could manage to transform one manuscript each week, I’d be finished with the currently “completed” manuscripts by about the autumnal equinox, but by then, I will have finished three more series, which will each require a week to finish manuscripting. So, the middle of October could be my target if I can muster turning over a manuscript each week. This seems an unlikely goal.

I face a production problem. It will probably be resolvable with some systems analysis and practice. My frustrations will become the mothers of many inventions. I could, I guess, find someone to write me a script that might automate a portion of the effort, delegating to some semi-intelligent machine the responsibility for compiling my mindful stories. That seems like a contradiction, for it would rob me of perhaps essential time alone with each story as it’s compiled. It’s only work, and less onerous than many available alternatives. It might even prove to be more entertaining and satisfying than scrolling through social media. It will only require discipline until I find the edge that renders it mine. Once I find that edge, I might not be able to avoid engaging any longer. Nothing more or less significant than my legacy lies in this balance. Progress is Procrastinating, finally turning outwards.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz