“I was very very driven and it was like okay after I reach this then I can relax, after I get that done then I can relax and the days just went by and I was hyper focused on my to-do list and they just went by in a blur and all of a sudden a whole decade had gone by”

The 'after I reach this, then I can relax' loop swallows decades

The deferral script — 'I'll relax after the next milestone' — is a perfectionist's loop dressed up as ambition. The milestone moves, the chase compounds, and a decade vanishes into a to-do list. An MIT PhD admitting this out loud is the warning: high cognitive horsepower doesn't protect against it, it accelerates it.