19. 为什么我们总在拖延？从猴子和怪物讲起

BGM|カフェでボサノバを聴く休日（ya-su）封面|拖延症患者的大脑（by Tim）●Tim Urban：文章：Why Procrastinators ProcrastinateTED：Inside the mind of a master procrastinator●本期文本内容较多，原文译文和配图已整理为文字版，欢迎前往wx订阅号（小灰学语言）查看。本期词汇表达（1）procrastination：拖延症procrastinator：拖延症患者（fake procrastinator:伪拖延症患者，non-procrastinator:非拖延者）（2）Rational Decision-Maker：理性决策者（3）Instant Gratification Monkey：及时行乐猴。Instant Gratification: 即时满足。延迟满足 (Delayed Gratification)（4）Panic Monster：恐慌怪物（5）Dark Playground：黑暗游乐场（6）disregard /ˌdɪsrɪˈɡɑːrd/：vt. 忽视（7）put up an effective fight：奋力抵抗（8）berate /bɪˈreɪt/：vt. 苛责，痛斥（9）unearned：不劳而获的，没有付出努力就得到的（10）put one's foot down：坚决要求或坚持某事本期学习语料：Why Procrastinators Procrastinate“Avoid procrastination” is only good advice for fake procrastinators—The same people that will say to a real procrastinator something like, “Just don’t procrastinate and you’ll be fine.”For a real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional—it’s something they don’t know how to not do.The monkey thinks only about the present, ignoring lessons from the past and disregarding the future altogether, and he concerns himself entirely with maximizing the ease and pleasure of the current moment.Meanwhile, the Rational Decision-Maker, who was trained to make rational decisions, not to deal with competition over the controls, doesn’t know how to put up an effective fight—he just feels worse and worse about himself the more he fails and the more the suffering procrastinator whose head he’s in berates him.And with the monkey in charge, the procrastinator finds himself spending a lot of time in a place called the Dark Playground. (A lot of you are probably reading this article while in the Dark Playground.)The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It’s a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn’t actually fun because it’s completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread.Sometimes the Rational Decision-Maker puts his foot down and refuses to let you waste time doing normal leisure things, and since the Instant Gratification Monkey sure as hell isn’t gonna let you work, you find yourself in a bizarre purgatory of weird activities where everyone loses.Given this predicament, how does the procrastinator ever manage to accomplish anything? As it turns out, there’s one thing that scares the shit out of the Instant Gratification Monkey: the Panic Monster.The Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up when a deadline gets too close or when there’s danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster, or some other scary consequence.