Barriers to Progress

I commonly think of myself as, in many contexts, a lazy man. There are things that need to be done in my life that I consistantly don't attend to even when then begin to cause me inconvenience. A persistently appearing example of this is doing laundry. This morning, it became clear to me, as it had for the past few days, that I needed to do some laundry. So dire was this need, that I actually resolved to do it.

When I began to do this I was confronted by the mismatch between the way that I categorized the dirty clothes in my room, and the way that "doing the laundry" demanded the clothes to be categorized. I see the clothes scattered about my room to be in various places along the spectrum between clean and dirty, whereas doing laundry involves the cloths being either clean or dirty. Although in this case the mismatch was between a digital and an analog system of representation, this doesn't have to be the case. A mismatch can also occur between two systems of discrete categories that simply don't match up-such as if I had 4 different levels of cleanliness.

What led me to this state of affairs? I believe that it's my tendency to create categories for things based not on how they must be used, but on certain characteristics of the things themselves. With regards to the clothes, I made categories based on how dirty the clothes were without regard to the fact that the clothes would eventually have to be seen as either clean or dirty.

The merits of this tendency in other areas is a subject for another post.