Lincoln understood that avoidance doesn't buy us time—it compounds our debt. Most people read this as a simple moral scolding, but he's actually describing something mechanical: every decision we skip today doesn't disappear; it accrues interest and returns tomorrow in a harder form. Consider someone who avoids a difficult conversation with a spouse or colleague; the underlying problem doesn't soften with time, it metastasizes into resentment or miscommunication that becomes exponentially harder to untangle later. What makes this different from "do the right thing" is that Lincoln is speaking to the arithmetic of procrastination itself—the math always works against us.