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Why are we like this – self-loathing, self-important, melodramatic, aware of what we’re doing but unwilling to alter our behaviour? Our job is neither hard nor essential; often it is allegedly our dream. If you had forever to write what you’re writing, it would be perfect, but you don’t have forever. (Maybe having forever is actually the dream?) What you have in its place is a more or less arbitrary stopping point that offers an excuse for not being perfect. Deadlines are an insult to philosophy, but an acknowledgment of life. Nevertheless, they aren’t supposed to be “real”. They do not mean what they say they mean. And how else would a writer define reality?

I’m about three weeks late on this essay. There was a day last week when I told the editor I’d send it the next day, and then I didn’t send it the next day, and I regretted giving a specific time instead of saying, “this week”; both because guiltily offering a specific time created another opportunity for me to disappoint him and because if I’d been vaguer I could have gauged his reaction and made an assessment of how much longer I “really” had. Then I didn’t send it “this week”, either. As I write I fear the editor has moved on without telling me and when I finally do finish, as I almost always do, I will be met with an awkward explanation that I was too late. I have this experience every time I have to write something, even though I know my essay isn’t too late and if it is it isn’t the end of the world. I would think this cycle was essential to the process if I believed in things like that. The fact that the editor knew from the beginning that this essay would contain a brief examination of why I am so bad with deadlines – and the fact that I had a self-referential exchange with him about when I would send it in – was, in part, a superstitious attempt to break the cycle. I wondered if I could trick myself into sending the piece in on time, because my resistance to deadlines might be a resistance to authority, and if I think the authority thinks I’ll be late, I wouldn’t want to let him be right. Maybe, in that fantasy, I would have waited until the day after the deadline to send the essay, to demonstrate my control over the regular passing of time, as well as live up to my reputation as a flake. But of course, I didn’t do that. I spent the three weeks between the original deadline and now having increasingly distracting feelings about something that I knew to be made up, when I could have just written the article. I wasn’t busy.

I don’t believe I’m special; I think most people, writers or not, struggle with deadlines. The only people who don’t miss them are the ones you hear from, because they will always say things like, “I can’t talk right now – I’m on deadline!” or “I can’t miss a deadline – it might be pathological!” They’re always smiling a very tiny smile, as if they are secretly evil. When I was in college I wrote 25-page papers the night before they were due, turning them in at 11:59AM because they had to be uploaded to a university website and I assumed I would be locked out at the noon deadline and submissions forms that close at a certain time were real. Later I found out that many of my classmates were sending things late as emails, appended with apologies and excuses.

I was taken aback, and embarrassed. By interpreting my assignments too literally, I’d revealed myself as an outsider. In my defence, a website that locks you out of it at a certain time seems to leave little room for interpretation; it seems “real” because the definite consequences reinforce that it means what it says. The word deadline comes from the name of an interior border established inside a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War: if a prisoner crossed it, he would be shot, the realest experience of all. At the same time, in many places it was “an imaginary line, in many other places marked by insecure and shifting strips of [boards nailed] upon the tops of small and insecure stakes or posts”, as Secretary of War Heinrich Wirz put it in 1865. The power of the original deadline was not that it was a stark, visible line in the sand, but that it represented a superior’s ability to determine, whenever and however he wanted, where the line in the sand was.

In the 20th century, a deadline might also have referred to the limits on a cylindrical printing press that mark where text stops being legible – maybe a little too appropriate for my purposes here. The success of a metaphor depends on a shared reality, of two parties understanding one another enough to interpret the world from the same perspective. Beyond the realm of self-obsessed writers, these days it seems harder and harder to know who shares realities with whom, which might be why missed deadlines seem to be proliferating despite a growing collective insistence that they are real. Scientists’ warnings about the deadline to prevent a climate crisis keep passing, and will continue to pass; the random application of specificity – in five years, eight years, by 2030 – does nothing to drive home the reality that beyond a certain point you will die. Boris Johnson’s promise to “GET BREXIT DONE” resembled the resolved exhaustion of a writer who has finally stopped caring if her essay is good any more and just needs to send it off. The “Brexit deadline” passed so many times – the BBC summarised many of them in a video entitled, “Brexit: All the times Britain had a deadline for leaving the EU but didn’t” – that when the UK finally did leave the European Union, there was little energy left for either fanfare or protest.

Just as deadlines need to be interpreted, they also produce narrative: suspense, drama and the sense of an ending. A failure to meet them amounts to a failure to suspend disbelief, to play along, to partake of the joys and benefits of a contained fiction. The contemporary obsession with the apocalypse, through which a worried writer acts gleefully guilty about all humanity has wrought on the planet, is also a deadline fantasy – a perverse hope that what we have been doing here is real, and it matters.

Do deadlines cause more harm than good? Every time the sense of urgency they are designed to provoke is proven somehow artificial, it detracts from the potential for future urgency. Because of fears that the turn of the century to the year 2000 would crash computers, whose clocks read the last two digits of a given year and so might have malfunctioned at the transition from ’99 to ’00, so many businesses and institutions updated their software in preparation that it’s unclear if catastrophic regression would have actually occurred. A few instances of minor technical difficulties around the world on the night of Y2K – at three nuclear power plants in Japan, at several state-government facilities in North Carolina – may have been coincidental, the result of the turn of the century, or due to the frantic updating of systems that took place before the turn of the century. As mayors like to say when they take annoying precautions before bad storms, if the plan was successful, you’ll never know it. It doesn’t work that way with writing, though. If the work got done, you’re reading it. ◉

Illustrations of the Doomsday Clock, first published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 as a representaiton of the world’s proximity to global catastrophe. Originally set at seven minutes to midnight, it has been maintained and updated each year to reflect growing ecological and technological threats that the world faces. The Clock is currently set to 100 seconds to midnight.

Lauren Oyler’s debut novel Fake Accounts is out with 4th Estate.