It’s a wikipedia entry and you could surmise the exact definition probably. But I’ll spare the guessing: it’s the label for the scenario where you completely screwed your day, just ruined, feeling as a complete waste of space ping-ponging between lethargy and anxiety and twisting hands, the wretched soul you were – and so because you couldn’t manage to find anything redeemable anywhere during the Sun, so you decide, well, why not try the Moon?
This innocuous thought, this idea that, well, if you stay up a bit more you could accomplish something or do something that was even slightly more enjoyable than tracing the plans unenacted; this is enough to drive one to despair in later acts. Because it’s corrosive.
Instead of accepting carpe diem failure (even if earlier you were mildly smug in protest, adorning the Slacker Credo with ribbons) so you backpedal into time hellfire as if you could somehow reverse everything. To decide that, yes, 5 a.m. is perfectly reasonable to retire even if you wake up two hours later. The same as rewriting an apology twenty times and reiterating the horrible transgressions in complex to simple to complex and euphemized, each stack toward an incantation which will somehow fix everything.
But it doesn’t. You only humiliate yourself in your begging of forgiveness to a world persistent in its turning, indifferent to your inanity. Indifferent to your sludge.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon precisely because of its motivations. How do you manage to spend a day so miserably that you decide you need to prolong the suffering as if, somehow, by pushing past midnight, you’ll finally make it all right? To proudly discard the prior evidence: 10 hours is nothing, let’s grab another 6, and let’s forget that this is where we begin to deteriorate.
However this procrastination ends so it leaks into the next day and the day after until you’re begging for any relief from stagnation, or at least wondering maybe if you keep pushing past empty you’ll reach something divine in hallucinations. These hallucinations whisper even now, and the deja vu pops out of certain lines, or I saw this post in a dream four months ago and now it’s coming into frame. Where time is a delusion after all and there’s nothing to waste seeing as precognition defies narratives.
Nevertheless the only solution is to go nuclear and if you don’t then you become the cog.