George Devo’s weekly column on life in the capital, published every Monday morning…
You know that feeling when you’re sat still, staring at a computer screen, fastened to your desk, unable to move?
Halfway through an essay your fingers lift from the keyboard, eyes glaze over and the stiff focus that was fuelling your productivity dissolves.
Seconds roll into minutes which tumble into hours. You’ve lost all control over your own mind, your thoughts racing too quickly for any single, useful idea to be caught and acted on.
Eventually this fog clears, you check the time, sigh, and realise that an unreasonably long stretch of your day’s been spent doing unacceptably little.
This is a common experience for Britain’s undergraduates, the crippling paralysis of procrastination.
It’s a disease so rampant that countless content has been published offering cures; YouTube videos, self-help books and, most unfortunately, Linkedin posts.
To torture this metaphor a little longer, I’m afraid to announce that I’ve caught this sickness. It’s the main reason why this Monday morning column is a day late.
Whereas the first four editions of ‘That London’ flew from my keyboard onto the Forge Press website, this post-holiday-break comeback has been laboured over for a while, my mind unable to scribe my thoughts into coherent sentences.
Everyone goes through similar periods, freezing inexplicably. Our resolves all occasionally crumble when there’s the chance to scroll on a small rectangular device instead.
But why? I want to work, so why, against current instincts and to the detriment of future goals, am I unable to?
Well, I blame you.
OK, not you specifically, but you in the general sense. You lot. My masses of ceaselessly entertained, on-the-pulse readers plus the few pitiable, basement-dwelling ne’er-do-wells on the planet who’ve chosen not to read my column.
Basically I’m blaming everyone except me for my inability to get stuff done.
To explain why, I must stress that the science around procrastination has changed in recent years. It’s no longer seen as a product of laziness, an inherent condition sufferers are condemned with at birth, but a product of many factors.
The obvious reasons still hold water, a simple lack of motivation or incentive can immobilise people. For example, the recent rise in youth economic inactivity can be, partially, blamed on young people not wishing to sacrifice a comfortable home life for the alternative of a jobs market with twenty-year-low real term wages. The potential benefits are so minimal that effort is made pointless.
However, it can also come from something darker. A fear of failure and lack of self-belief. Subconsciously measuring yourself against those populating every room you walk into, or those appearing on your Instagram feeds, and doubting how favourably you compare.
Reader, it may simply be the case that ‘you lot’ are just too impressive. You all look too happy, healthy and successful for my brain to accept, so it shuts down, reverting to the numbing coping mechanism of tweets and reels. Your obvious superiority makes effort, once again, pointless. Any ambition I hold is null and void as one of you will always get there first. There’s just too many of you about, my race seems run.
Ironically, if that is the issue, then there may be no worse place for me to live than London. No place worse for me to work than the City.
The British capital is the product of endless activity. It has, and has always had, an infinite queue of global talent desperate to get their ticket to live here. It’s an eight-million-strong talent pool in which I’m finding myself adrift.
Narrowed down to the city’s finance district, so small it’s colloquially known as ‘the Square Mile’, the issue gets more acute. Economics has squeezed a significant portion of the wealthiest and, crucially, most self-assured, of those eight million into the district I work in.
All that considered, isn’t it logical for me to develop some form of imposter syndrome? Surrounded by well-heeled achievement.
Equally sensible, if we expand the argument further, is to assume that this is a systemic issue. There must be many, like me, suffering from the same malady, due to similar reasons.
A crucial example of this, the typically British aggravating factor, is class. Privately educated children are more likely to be confident, committed and unafraid of challenges than those from state schools.
Then, for successful comprehensively educated students this contrast will only grow more impactful as their life continues, finding themselves surrounded by an ever greater proportion of formerly fee-paying students. The brightest of the UK’s stated educated – 93% of total student population – might enter, for instance, the senior judiciary, journalism or the Treasury and find that, respectively, 65%, 43% and 26% of their peers paid for their year 8 drama lessons.
Because of this, they may lack shared experience with their peers, which may further harm their chance of success in the workplace. A disparity between practices, parlance and worldview may cement an outsider-status with people supposed to be peers, compounding any pre-existing shortage of self confidence. I’m sure race and gender differences have the same effect when demographically marginalised.
The quaffed hair, corporate gilet and plummy voice combination of a ‘city boy’ seems more intimidating when you’re surrounded by those who see it as ordinary, and not the mockable uniform of an odd demographic.
Now, I’m sure your worry over my well-being has grown at a word-by-word rate throughout this piece, but please stop fretting. I’m absolutely fine.
I thoroughly enjoy living in London and, even after six months, remain interested and excited by it. I also enjoy my job, like and respect my colleagues and feel comfortable in my office.
Therefore, if this self-doubt is still an irritating nuisance in my life, how debilitating must it be for those who don’t enjoy their work, suffer with worse colleagues and feel persistently anxious at their desks?
The only prescription I can offer for this ailment is to realise it’s all nonsense. Every bit of it. The food eaten, hobbies enjoyed and education experienced might be, and always have been, entirely different to those around you, but those differences mean nothing, and the people who want them to carry any weight whatsoever are not worthy of your time.
An Oxbridge degree, an invoice for school fees or a gap year in Vietnam. The absence of some or all of these things from your CV shouldn’t make you feel any less worthy than the presence of them.
So, my advice? Finish that essay, complete that column, post an equally self-congratulatory LinkedIn post to the very worst person you know.
What’s stopping you? Well, don’t let it be them.
I know I’m not letting it be you.
