Chronic Postponement — Why Your Plans Never Materialize & What to Do About It!

Boom! You send a message to your friend — asking for a time to mend.

You agree on a time, but it never meets the dime. Rather, the plan remains on chronic postponement, never coming to fruition. This is the nature that haunts all of our plans — both big and small, both business and sentimental.

In the said nature, one member promises to meet, and the other member accepts the offer. However, once they part ways, neither party puts effort into making the plan work — and the once agreed upon plan never becomes reality. A common explanation for the phenomenon can be found in that both parties have other priorities, which leaves neither party interested in proceeding with the plan. But this logic is insincere in nature, since this implies that the agreement is not a priority for either party. People may appear kind on the outside, but in reality, they are not people who genuinely care.

So then, the solution is obvious, right? Just find people that do care, and call it a day!

If it were only as easy as that. Unfortunately, while humans evolved to come in packs and work as a team for survival, we only do so out of bettering ourselves, never for the betterment of other people. Some people may want to start a relationship with another person, whether it be official or personal, but it is never a relationship of mutual service. Therefore, the vast majority of people that a person will ever encounter throughout the course of their lifetime will be people that “do not care”, as per that definition. One cannot simply wait for a miracle to happen and for a person that seeks for the betterment of others to meet their path in life. They must themselves simply put the effort, and never wait for the other person.

Taking the first steps:

Before any tips on action are given within this post, I would like to clarify that what I write here is merely my philosophy, not the fact. There is no direct evidence to verify any claims I make in this post. I simply post what feels right based on common sense. So as per opinion, the best first step that any human can take is putting the initial effort. When a plan is created, it is created. We must not see the other person as a foreign entity, but rather as a person that is somehow related to us. This is difficult for most humans to visualize, since we are not used to seeing the world this way. Think of it like this — let’s start with parents. Your most direct relatives, the things that most likely created you. Then come your siblings, the things created alongside you. Then, your grandparents, and then, branching out, we have your aunties and uncles, and their children, your cousins. We are getting more and more distant, but your cousins are still just as much “related” to you as your parents are, thought they may be more distant than parents are. You care about them as much, although you would not do the same things to your cousin as you would to your parents. The friendship and acquaintance world is similar. You may not be related directly, but you are related emotionally. A common counterargument for this analogy is that you cannot do things you can to your friends as you can to your parents or spouse, but this argument is invalid. A friend and your family are two different kinds of relationships, but you must think about your friends and care about them too.

Notice how I have hit a key word here — CARE.

The way to overcome the natural human urge is to treat the relationship as your own, and not as something foreign.

We can also extend this claim outside of the personal world.

Relationships cannot only be personal, they must also be material.

“Material” includes all of your goals and plans. It is a common saying to just do the work, but that is easier said than done, as we are all painfully aware of. We must take every job and task we need to complete as our own. We must accept it into our lives, rather than separate the task at hand from “living the rest of your life”. Once this is done, doing the task will become part of living a life. Slowly, by doing this, you will begin to befriend accomplishment. And as such, this is the key to creating motivation. Once the task is part of living life, the motivation to do the task will come from within, from the very concept of being alive — it will no longer be external. While external motivation surely helps, we must not be dependent on it, and by making a task part of us, we can no longer use a lack of motivation to justify a lack of productivity. This is the secret to all successful people. They are not dependent on some system to operate, they themselves are the system of motivation and achievement. Just as we do not require a system to indulge in distractions to the point that even negative motivation cannot stop the indulgence, they cannot quit their relationship with their material goal, even if they are feeling less motivated than usual.

In short, a lack of motivation is not an excuse for giving up — and doing a task is often far easier than it seems to be at first.