Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow
Authors: Richard Smith
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2008)

Idly eating my porridge and drinking my coffee on a Sunday morning, I’m suddenly pitched into terror by discovering from the papers that my wife, asleep in bed upstairs, is suffering from ‘an affliction that ruins the lives of millions’.

Evidently ‘one person in five now suffers from the problem so badly that their careers, relationships and health are threatened.’ A Professor Joseph Ferrari from DePaul University in Chicago says, ‘The social and economic implications are huge. These people need therapy.’

Not only is my wife a near-terminal case, but my 17-year-old daughter probably has it too. Indeed, I could have a touch myself. The condition must be genetic. How quickly will Ferrari and his team be able to identify the gene that causes this horrible problem? Will my daughter be able to have genetic testing during pregnancy? How long will it take to develop a cure?

The condition is ‘chronic procrastination’. ‘It needs to be recognized by clinicians,’ says Ferrari. It’s evidently more common than depression or phobias and ‘encourages depression, lowers self-esteem, [and] causes insomnia.’ Victims may also suffer accidents at home from unmended appliances. I think immediately of our electric kettle that works only intermittently.

Should I pull my wife out of bed and get her down to the hospital? Perhaps I should call my daughter on holiday in France and tell her to come home immediately. But what will they say in St Thomas’s A&E when I tell them that my wife has a bad case of chronic procrastination? I fear they will laugh at me. That intrepid pioneer Ferrari has the same fear: ‘The subject is seen as a joke,’ he says.

So maybe I won’t get my wife down to St Thomas’s right now. I’ll leave it until tomorrow – or even later in the week.

Does anybody take this stuff seriously? I suppose somebody must – presumably at least Michael Day, who wrote the piece. But I can’t imagine many people being scared. People are generally too sensible. Chronic procrastination joins a whole other list of the diseases de nos jours. Soon ugliness, stupidity, inarticulacy, tactlessness (I’m a bad case), smelly feet, crooked noses, not having a sense of humour, boredom and countless other shocks that flesh is heir to will become diseases.

We must resist. Turning life’s experiences into diseases is bad for everybody – apart from the people who make money treating them. If we see our problem as a disease we become victims and consumers of professional help. We should be actors, not consumers. Women fought back against the medicalization of birth, and there’s a battle on now around death. Interestingly, some people (not patients) diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome insist that their condition is a way of life, not a disease.

It strikes me as particularly sad that Ferrari and his sidekicks should try to medicalize procrastination, because people whom I greatly admire argue for much more procrastination – or shall we call it reflection?

WH Davies asked ‘What is this life if, so full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?’ The author Kurt Vonnegut went further. After describing a ‘wasted’ morning that might make him a near-terminal case of chronic procrastination he writes: ‘And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.’ A bit more procrastination and we might have avoided the tragedy of Iraq.