Why do I sometimes want myself to fail?

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 It is strange that I sometimes want to see myself fail. As if I were taking pleasure at witnessing my downfall. I have a physics exam tomorrow, and could not bring myself to do homework in preparation for the exam. I played chess instead of studying. I procrastinated studying by working on research.

It wasn’t as if I knew that I should likely be spending my time on physics. Why did I not choose to stop myself?  Did I want to experience the displeasure and pressure that I knew would be inevitable if I had not done it? Was I just not in the mood to make myself proud. Was I just not fighting hard enough to free my actions from devilish interference?

I think it’s clear that it’s not always easy to act in the way that one knows to be most beneficial in the long run. Or perhaps a part of me was hoping that the physics exam wasn’t real--that if I could somehow stop thinking about its existence, then it would not plague me and come back to pinch me in the future. An infantile assumption (interestingly, infants do think that if they cover their eyes, that the objects in the world are removed from existence), but I wouldn’t be surprised if a more abstract form of it persisted in our psyche today.

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