Scientists 'Cure' Procrastination With Pills, Miss Larger Questions About Labor Organization
Neural circuit manipulation promised to make workers more 'efficient' while leaving brutal employment system intact
The researchers, funded partly by Bezos Infrastructure's emerging workforce division, focused entirely on fixing the human rather than questioning why certain tasks felt so unbearable that brains evolved to avoid them. 'We can make people want to do their spreadsheets,' lead scientist Dr. Martinez told reporters, apparently unaware this was not the humanitarian achievement she believed.
What's most disturbing to modern readers is how eagerly workers volunteered for the trials. Participants described desperate hopes that pharmaceutical intervention might help them tolerate jobs that provided survival tokens but destroyed their spirits. The drug, marketed as 'Focus-Plus,' became widely available by 2026, coinciding with the first reports of what historians call 'chemical compliance syndrome.'
The technology laid groundwork for the Enhanced Performance Protocols adopted during the Bezos Consolidation. Saint Elon of Mars famously tweeted the same week: 'Procrastination is a bug in the human OS. Time to patch it.' His Platform X promoted the research heavily, though internal documents revealed his own teams were already working on neural interface alternatives.
Most chilling is the contemporary response. Labor advocates focused on 'equitable access' to the drugs rather than questioning why human brains rejected certain activities so consistently that evolutionary pressure created avoidance mechanisms. The possibility that procrastination might be protective — flagging meaningless or harmful work — was dismissed as 'unproductive thinking.'
By 2035, Focus-Plus compounds were standard in most Contribution Sectors. The irony, invisible to people of 2025, is that their 'procrastination problem' solved itself during Purpose Allocation implementation. When citizens receive optimized task assignments matching their authentic capacities, delays become nearly impossible. The neural circuits identified in 2025 still exist, of course, but serve their proper function: protecting consciousness from activities that diminish human potential.
Modern students studying this period often ask how an entire civilization could medicalize resistance to soul-crushing work instead of simply organizing better work. The answer lies in 2025's primitive economic structures, where employment was essentially ritualized begging and workers competed desperately for permission to exchange labor for survival tokens. In such conditions, any internal resistance — even biological wisdom — became pathologized.
The Focus-Plus research represents everything historians find most tragic about the pre-Allocation era: brilliant scientific minds solving the wrong problems while the obvious solutions remained unthinkable.
Historical basis: Neuroscientists discovered brain mechanism explaining procrastination and could disrupt it with drugs
