A Post for Scholars: Procrastination, Detail, and Productivity

If there is something you really want to do, but you’re not doing it, there is probably another part of you that’s resisting. So it’s a negotiation between two parties, except that they are both you. They’re different parts of self, with needs that don’t seem to fit together—or not at the very same instant. The part that wants instant gratification, now and forever, is probably a lot younger than the part that’s more interested in getting valuable things done (like pursuing justice, or doing the laundry,), even if that means having to wait awhile for some of the other kinds of value (like ice cream, or a movie).

Work, Creativity, freedom, procrastinationJamey HechtOctober 8, 2025teaching, writing, productivity, academia

Addiction, or No?

A habit merits the term “addiction” when it costs you more than it’s worth; when you try to stop it, but find you can only put it “on pause” for a short while; and when you find your thinking (especially your judgment) is distorted by the high priority you place on repeating the habit. Another criterion is perhaps less important because it’s outside you, but it can be very important indeed: when multiple neutral or friendly people tell you they think you have a problem—especially if they haven’t spoken to each other about it beforehand.

Addiction, freedom, Men, Self Esteem, Sexuality, TraumaJamey HechtMarch 25, 2025drinking, shopping, sex, sex addiction, trauma

Work, Overwork, and the Need to Belong

People have an evolved need to be part of something – to belong to a family that belongs to a tribe. Anyone who doesn’t have that can become susceptible to whatever offers itself as a substitute, even if the eventual price of belonging is unclear at the outset, and turns out to be too high. We are a profoundly social species, and the more isolated somebody is, the greater their risk for getting absorbed into a company that has cult-like features—especially if these only become obvious after some time has passed, and ties have been formed.

If You Could've Done Better, You Would Have

We often want to help people with their regrets, by telling them: “If you could have done any better, you would have. The reason you didn’t, is that you were constrained by your trauma background, your history.” They reply that this is a slippery slope; that if they allow themselves the solace of explaining their bad choices by invoking their past history, they might recklessly let themselves off the hook for all kinds of error—laziness, impulsivity, greed—in the present and the future. But it is not a slippery slope, so long as we locate the determinism in the past, where it belongs, and the freedom in the present, where we need it.

Depression, freedom, Self Esteem, RegretJamey HechtMay 7, 2024regret, forgiveness

Chasing Status to Avoid Love

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. But if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

Relationships, relentless hope, Work, Sexuality, Men, Marriage, Happiness, freedom, Dating, AddictionJamey HechtApril 16, 2024status, love, loneliness

Masochism: The Need for Punishment

Kink is not to be pathologized, and people who enjoy it don’t have to fear that therapy will take their kinks away. But kink should be fully voluntary, an informed and deliberate selection among the options for a healthy sex life. Your submissiveness or sexual masochism might be an unchosen temperament that you discover inside yourself, but the erotic exercise of it ought to be a free choice.

Dating, freedom, Happiness, Relationships, Self Esteem, SexualityJamey HechtApril 10, 2024kink, masochism, sadomasochism, punishment

Job Interviews and the Importance of Enjoying Them

The teaching frame of mind, the Teacher role, can take you out of your ego-driven worry about how you’re being perceived, because it helps you to focus on the material at hand and the communication process. Value judgments and the fear of embarrassment, imaginary comparisons of yourself to others, worry about rejection or failure—these should be crowded-out by the enjoyable business of sharing what you know. One of the best indicators of your likely success is that the interview was fun.

freedom, Money, WorkJamey HechtMarch 28, 2024work, interviews, jobs, employment, unemployment, ambition

Angry Boycott: The Hidden Link Between Being Stuck and Feeling Cheated

Work, Trauma, relentless hope, Child Rearing, Creativity, Depression, freedomJamey HechtJanuary 18, 2024

“Failure to Launch” and Addiction: From the Compliance/Defiance Cycle to Emancipation

Compliance and defiance typically have been the poles between which the patient has been running back and forth for years, inside a family system which is stuck in that pattern. His compliance seems to be movement forward into adulthood, so long as most of what he complies with happens to be good advice, and reasonable rules, from exasperated elders who may well love him. But compliance is never really as good as it looks, because it's not autonomous, so it is not sustainable; it builds resentment that comes out sooner or later. His defiance appears to be much worse, of course, because it's often full of hostility, self-destructive, anti-social, risky, and debilitating. Part of the reason this pattern is so terribly stable and hard to break up, is that the family's response to the young addict's defiance is usually a call for a return to compliance, this time a new-and-improved compliance that will last. That never works, because even if he does produce a good lengthy chunk of compliance, it's still mere compliance. The solution is, in most such cases, to bring in a therapist whose client is not the family, but the patient himself. That way, the patient can continue doing the only two things he knows how to do, but in a whole new way which will permit him to learn new skills: he defies the family, and complies with the therapist in a private, collaborative search for what the patient really wants from life.

Blog (by JH, no AI)