In Bed by Federico Zandomeneghi via Galleria dell’Arte Moderna

Chloe Bercovitz

Managing Editor

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived,” writes Kafka in his letter to a friend.

I, too, like to wonder why we aren’t less scared of dying, and are more worried about never beginning – never having lived a life with the proper risks, love, and ambition. I also like to think that my query is rather universal. That a shared part of the human experience is to dwell amid our also-human quest for meaning. 

But then again, we spend hours on end on our phones. We doomscroll. We’re anxious. We put ourselves down. We let ourselves down. We are our biggest obstacle.

The ‘ego’ is a term almost affectionately tossed around in psychology, yet is insulting to the common tongue. It manifests itself in our souls in a myriad of ways. As Sigmund Freud describes it, the ego serves as the mind’s mediation between one’s realistic needs and primal desires. So, our ego can begin to feel synonymous with our sense of self. It’s the voice in our head, reassuring us that we’re being realistic; it’s the very part of us that yearns for some sort of certainty before action. But let’s face it: that’s not ‘realistic.’ 

The ego permeates our boundless excuses and preparation. It clips our wings. It would rather keep us in a cocoon than risk metamorphosis, all by disguising fear as prudence. In doing so, our desires become redirected away from the uncertain, inward pursuit of meaning, and toward the measurable, outward markers of success.

This then, has me posing the question of whether or not meaning is interchangeable with success. I mean certainly not, right?

The people I surround myself with are all, arguably, rich in success and accomplishment. So, success is external; I can measure it.

But then, meaning is what we do with our successes. How we interpret it; how we let it fuel our lives. Not only is it internal, but surely, it also requires a sense of vulnerability.

That means that the human quest for meaning requires losing the stable, successful life that we have created for ourselves.

And I think that is why we procrastinate: it is our ego. 

Amid a new culture of social media, short attention spans, and a hard-to-ignore mental health crisis, procrastination has held the fascination of psychologists. And with that, a striking conclusion came about: this is not a question of laziness.

Why we procrastinate lies in our emotional regulation, which is rooted in stress, low self-esteem, and a fear of failure. At more severe levels, all of these traits become linked to mental disorders, such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, and OCD.

Our brains undergo a battle called Short-Term Mood Repair. Every day, we are faced with tasks that stretch beyond our comfort zone. Threatening our self-esteem, they trigger the amygdala, which is responsible for our fight or flight responses. In order to soothe such spikes of anxiety, we put off our tasks. According to a study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, this is the phenomenon of Temporal Myopia: a nearsightedness in which our future selves are treated as if they are strangers – forced to carry what we refuse to face. We prioritise short-term comfort over the long-term pursuit of meaning.

The same study points to a feedback loop that is attributed to self-criticism.

” We procrastinate to avoid feeling bad about our dreams and ambitions that seem too out of reach, which culminates into guilt, and lowers our self-esteem drastically more, each time.”

But when this drops, our ego needs to be protected even more. We retreat into avoidant behaviours that keep our desires at bay.

Overcoming the ego, then, seems to be the price one ought to pay for a meaningful life. With emotional regulation, self-compassion tends to follow. Anxieties are part of our humanity. Meaning does not always lie with successes, and it definitely doesn’t reside with perfection. It is likewise hard to find in passivity – in waiting. 
To become who you have dreamed of becoming, a cliché might just be true: to betray the person you thought you had to be. I think that the question of whether you are ready or not has been rendered obsolete. Be kinder to yourself. Embrace humility.