I have a friend who is a hopeless (-ly impractical) intellectual, an incorrigible procrastinator, and an internet addict. Convincing him to get a del.icio.us account was the best thing I’ve ever done.

Case in point: today, in the middle of my 3-year-and-counting hiatus from Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (I was on the 2nd letter when I struck up a game of Starcraft and never looked back), this gem pops up on Dave’s del.icio.us account: Letter to a young procrastinator, from Slate magazine.

If you don’t feel like reading the article yet, head on over to Procrastination Central. Then have a cup of coffee. You’ve earned it.

Moving on. The title is self-explanatory. First a few words of advice, followed by some light self-deprecation, and then the punchline:

While that grind in your econ class is toiling, you’re becoming a more relaxed, quirkier, less-programmed person. You nurture the creative sprouts that take root only in long hours of idleness. You’re open to soulful experiences that lie only beyond the bounded worlds of work and study.

Soulful experiences? Sounds like the writer’s been sitting in on our favorite grumpy Yale professor. More self-back-patting ensues:

Executed correctly, this method is in fact terrific practice for maintaining your cool in stressful work environments. Pressing deadline anxiety can be channeled into an extreme level of focus. If you can train yourself to complete your assignments under pressure, quickly and efficiently, you will always find yourself in demand.

Hallelujah! This is what I’ve been trying to tell my parents/teachers/bosses for ages! This kind of mutually congratulatory writing is a joy to read, not because it uncovers some kind of universal truth about procrastinators (other than they are just lazy), or because it cogently proves any societal good from procrastination (though not for any lack of trying), but because it’s an articulation of a value. Indirectly, these Slate articles–they’re doing an entire issue on procrastination–are a manifesto for a certain type of person, the life philosophy of a creative mind.

I feel great when I read it because it’s my life philosophy. Life as a playground. “Interestingness” over “hardworkingness.” An intellectual, wholesome kind of Fun with a capital F, the idea that you can piss around and do something that will tickle your cerebral cortex and make you laugh with friends, and it is worth your time and society’s money. Does this make sense? Certainly not to my parents. Is it seductive? Probably more than any other Western value.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that my total, utter, abandoning embrace of the Fun value is the one thing that separates me from my parents. Even more so than my shoddy grasp of the mother tongue (“Not bad, for an American boy.”), taste in food (“You put CHEESE in noodles?”), taste in music (“I don’t care if they are the greatest rock band ever, this guy’s voice sounds like a creaky door.”), taste in argyle sweaters (“I could have knit those ugly diamond shapes and saved you $50.”), or any other cultural chasms that open up in a first-generation immigrant’s journey toward assimilation.

It’s in the pursuit of Fun–and the fear of losing Fun as an opportunity cost of making a career decision–that I and many others my age can’t for the life of us figure out what we should do with our lives. We might be in need of some other values to get us out of our quandary. I suggest our “Better Judgment” as a possibility. Or perhaps “Foresight & Fiscal Responsibility.” Maybe even “Filial Piety”?