The New Yorker:

Often, it’s our most obviously necessary tasks that feel the most impossible.

By Joshua Rothman

You have something important to do—something vital. It’s not an item on a list but a burdensome project, urgent and complicated. Your home office must be transformed into a nursery for a baby due next month. Your late father’s house must be sold to pay for your daughter’s college education. You’ve owed your boss a report for a year, and with each passing week it grows more difficult to complete. You have to file this year’s taxes, and last year’s, and the documents you need are lost in your spare room, in nondescript envelopes you’ve never opened.

Why can’t you just deal with it? It’s a question you can ask yourself in bed at night, or in the mirror the next morning. Procrastination is one thing: we’ve all put off writing thank-you notes or responding to e-mails and survived with our dignity intact. Not dealing with it is different. It’s what we experience when a lot is being asked of us and we’re not rising to the occasion. The issue isn’t procrastination—you’re trying!—but defeat.

There’s a lot I’m not dealing with right now, which I won’t get into, so as not to freak myself out. But let’s imagine that a well-meaning hypothetical person—call him J—needs to make a difficult medical decision on behalf of an incapacitated older relative. Should the relative be subjected to an optional, arduous procedure that will be deeply unpleasant but possibly beneficial in the long term? Or should the not-inconsiderable risks of the procedure serve as justification for forgoing it? Having consulted with a number of doctors, J is stuck; there are many possible next steps, including seeking further opinions, or deciding definitively not to proceed. For now, the situation hangs in midair, undealt with, like a bomb that’s soon to land.

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