They say - Curiosity killed the cat.
Well, I still see a lot of curious cats spying on me here…
My say? - Laziness kills progress.
On an individual level and on a macro level, which we will get to, later on in this piece.
This article is written out of my personal perspective, trying to make myself, and you, if you care to know, more useful, by avoiding the usual pitfalls of mankind.
Am I lazy?
You bet I am - sometimes, and so are you, which is why we have survived as a species thus far, without even considering just yet the aspect of life quality.
But I tend to keep my laziness in sound proportions, knowing timing is paramount.
How much or how often and WHEN may I let myself get lazy? Well, sprinkle it on certain areas of life, like a spice, guessing no one would like sprinkling a bucket of salt on a dish, let alone EVERY dish.
We humans are known to have some characteristics, or traits, that vary quite a bit on an individual level but also culturally, if I apply some human-style-statistics, which might be wrong to some, but hey, I am human and I don’t have any way, or the energy for that matter (meaning, I won’t walk the extra mile for it), to check whether, or to what extent, my statement is true. But this is where being pedantic is just not worth the hassle.
We could argue that cultures are made of individuals and some group dynamics (plus some mind control, too, by means you might not be aware of... but we don’t go there now…), so in general, cultures behave a bit like statistically significant individuals.
On an individual level, we have several traits, which - applied in various degrees, they all are just traits that might be advantageous, or not so much so, which depends highly on the application and, yet again - timing.
These traits are (not exclusively):
- laziness
- greed
- ambition
- selfishness
- impatience
- vanity
- ignorance
I got the list from listening to Brian Tracy, a long time ago, upon “saddling my horse” on a (much more deliberate then previously, that is) journey of self discovery and personal development.
Laziness is, at least arguably, one of the most significant factors that hinders human potential, both on personal level and on a group level, even society level.
Again, Brian Tracy, has mentioned the Expediency Factor, the E-Factor, that has in my opinion an immence influence on people, and as far as I see - not just humans.
The E-factor has to do with the will to save up energy for something more worthwhile, I could deduct.
The king, the E-Factor, and the beloved princess, laziness, are so prevalent in behavior that it prescribes almost everything we do outside of the clear, Golden Path of adhering to what we truly want in our lives and what we need to keep our eyes on.
Everything else in our lives, other than keeping our eyes on our goals, with the energy, light and clarity it brings, is essentially the desert land where expediency,laziness and the other components of misachievement roam.
Viktor Frankl said that the way to appreciate life, with everything in it, is to be subject to extreme danger of losing everything, including life itself. This is at least what I have learned from his book “A Man’s Search for Meaning”.
The way to lose yourself is similar, IMHO, and that is:
Unless you have something to live for a meaningful struggle, if you will, it is all mundane and the focusless void will lead life into expediency and just spinning the wheels.
That’s why people, without the courage and the will to set some significant goals in life, alternatively, the ones who have goals thrown upon them from their peers, partners, parents, preachers, professors, bosses… They all feel like they need lots of will power (which comes in small packages every day, like a hormone being secreted from a tiny gland) to just do what they need to be doing and accomplish anything at all.
It is the acute lack of worthy goal that leaves so many people in the miserable, energy draining no-mans-land of the E-Factor, with its magnetic power to suck almost anyone into spinning their wheels, pushing water, so to speak, delivering chunks of life into oblivion.
How do I know?
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
I have been there myself along periods in my life, when my goals were not as clear, and/or when other factors have influenced me, due to lack of energy - which of course stems from the same - lack of clarity of why I do what I need to do (according to my slave master, my parents or any significant-at-the-time authority).
Since I was a child, I ran into these times, when I thought I can just go in idle mode, space out or do the “Italian strike” (meaning: do everything, only painstakingly inefficient), let myself time off somewhere I should be, in class (school) or in the early days of starting to work (in the kibbutz in the mid-80s). I can only say that I am not a different species than you or another.
I might procrastinate for a bit, until my watchdog throws an interrupt request (here’s the engineering brain damage speaking again…) and I kick myself in my virtual butt and move on. Since we are all children of nature (except perhaps for clones and such), we all share this “feature” of our programming. As pointed earlier, this is a feature that all natural organic beings possess.
In hindsight, sometimes I could have conducted myself responsibly, could have been declaring I was avoiding doing something less than useful, while doing the stuff anyway, or any other trick to ward myself off of any criticism.
In actuality, I did tell people (the responsible way) that what I was doing (or the lack thereof) was an act of truthfulness to myself and to my own standards, instead of doing something that was a complete waste of time. Hence, sometimes I just took my lazy hat on and went “normal and mediocre” who “may be lazy from time to time”, instead of keeping a good mental hygiene.
Psychological, or Mental Hygiene - what’s that?
This is a term I coined in my family for doing what needs to be done in a “clean” fashion.
In our family, being the family custodian is taken seriously, which encompasses upbringing of my children, and supporting my wife on her journey too. One important principle is the applied art of “if something is worth doing, then it is worth doing it well”. And vice versa too: If something isn’t worth doing, it doesn’t make sense doing it at all, let alone being pedantic about it.
Accomplishing something wholeheartedly is what it boils down to, and avoiding being dispersed into multi-tasking and doing anything else or everything at the same time as something important.
This mental hygiene in our home can be for instance speaking one language at a time, not a sallad of all languages we speak at home (German, Hebrew, Swedish and some crumbles of Polish and English) into one sentence, and shooting from the heap in a haphazard manner, as if there was a fire to fight at home.
Another example might be having the mobile phone in front of you while talking to someone else, or having a phone call during family meetings/meals.
For all of you who tend to multitask - News flash:
you miss the mark in a similar fashion as procrastinators. Only at the other end of the spectrum.
Multitasking, i.e. when you do several things at once, is only possible with tasks that do not need your full attention, or any attention at all. You can only do one thing with your full attention. Multitasking is a way for people to run several tasks simultaneously in order to maximize productivity, which is more often than not - like shooting oneself in the foot.
Essentially, when people multitask, very often they aim at allowing lazy time, i.e. they want to minimize effort by condensing brain uptime into smaller portions, so they achieve more, but also some time off. “I work my ass off so I get to have spare time for me” - a very well meant idea per se, but many behave like amateurs about it and lack the skills and the clarity to attain higher productivity.
It is true that some people have (developed) the ability of flexible shifting attention successfully from one task to another, WITHOUT losing information in between, in a fluid manner, and it might be the case that it has a gender bias to it (I’ve heard it all my life from women that they can divide their attention much better than any man, which has failed to show consistent results thus far). However, in most cases, it is far more useful to minimize performing tasks in parallel, so that each and every task is done purposefully and masterfully, with enough attention on it to achieve a “good enough” result.
And while one individual might immediately get dispersed by more than one task at a time, someone else can handle multitudes unhindered, but it only has to do with the fluidity of shifting attention from automatic performance or semi automatic (like driving and navigation, to small talk) to something that requires more attention, or even full attention.
Do something worthwhile single mindedly and performance will spike.
I tell it to myself too. Mostly it works…
Psychological, mental hygiene is also how you use your mind and thoughts, and keeping your mind from wandering from one thing to another uncontrolled. Some people don’t seem to have so much brain activity at all, while others are so fluid in their brains that their thought process is working at a high speed almost all the time. It is seen very often with children, especially younger kids, but also people who are highly creative and curious.
Sometimes we label people Hyperactive or even coin this with a (false) medical term “disorder”, which it might be - a disorder. And who says everything needs to be ordered or slow? From what I’ve gathered, for these people, the world as we know it runs far too slowly. They have difficulty adjusting themselves to this 3-dimensional prison of sorts. This hyperactivity used to be drugged to death (of brain cells first) - hopefully not too long anymore, since children learn to adjust and become super-intelligent, super-achiever when time comes.
Addressing this mind wandering and putting a flexible leash on how the thoughts are replaced within the reach of your beam-of-attention is essential for achieving more of what you want to be achieved and more control of what you want your thought process to be engaged with, as opposed to just addressing and engaging any and every junk that comes to your mind, and this is what psychological hygiene can deliver - clean thought process that will serve you better than a mind that goes rogue any moment.
You can observe things, without immersing yourself in them or engaging. You can help it by keeping your eyes on the ball, letting your goals never get out of your sight, aka attention beam, and if some rest is a good idea right now - then let yourself rest.
You can also partner yourself and have a conference with your (physical) peers and/or with a (virtual) reference group inside your mind, and ask the questions: what should I be doing and thinking right now and in my life in general. And if the content of my thought is not efficiently serving my goals, then by all means - stop them. Let your mobile phone out of your reach for a while and/or take a “diet” of incoming information, which serves usually just as a distraction from what your heart is telling you and what needs to be done right now.
And sometimes it is simply going to sleep and have a good night sleep.
People are so sleep-deprived and distracted nowadays that they just crumble, both physically and mentally. And all because they cannot leave the information flood alone for a moment.
Make yourself useful.
All this digression about the e-factor and the diligence with which we need to operate our thought process, including the mental hygiene part, has the sole purpose of being very good at expending resources, and making yourself more useful, by understanding that we have limited mental resources and the very few things that we need to be controlling at any given moment must be limited, since there are never enough resources for everything, and often enough resources for doing something important in a purposeful fashion.
And this is the way of not falling into to the pit getting lazy, just because we don’t see how important something is right now, or we are depleted of energy and need to replenish, or our priorities are just all screwed up, so we rest when we need to struggle and struggle when we can and should rest.
This is the whole point of this article - making sure you understand this thinking model:
Knowing you and I are lazy at times (because we need to replenish our energy) - we can get lazy when all the high priority tasks are done and the boat is at the other end, docked safely. But not when we need to row the boat as if our lives depended on that (which it could).
Laziness has this powerful magnetism to it, and exactly because it is nature’s way to save energy, which is crucial to life. As long as it comes at the right time and the appropriate quantity, it pays its dividends and should give you a well deserved time off, which is exactly what the purpose of laziness is: to be well deserved of a time out. Paying in advance for rest.
And unless laziness is well deserved, it makes us feel rotten inside, which leads to losing self-respect.
Being lazy with organizing brain and mental activity leads to mental fussiness that hampers progress. Thus, I rest my case with regard to mental hygiene. This is what it boils down to.
The macro perspective.
At a macro scale, being lazy has hampered human progress profoundly, and still does.
Dependence on technology and gadgets to run our lives, which stems from being lazy and convenient on a species level, has been a double edged sword which we have failed to be cautious about. It turns out that we are literally on the brink of losing humanity in favor of machines, gadgets, artificial intelligence and stuff we cannot control and clearly do not understand the full context or consequences of.
If we ever live long enough to see a better future, it will have to be a future where humankind puts a leash on its laziness, along with the other components of the expedient traits of humans (remember? Greed, selfishness, impatience, vanity, ignorance, greed), and learn - together, how to live purposefully, without getting weak and easily manipulated in the process. This is where we need some colossal work to be done, on ourselves by ourselves, and take the leap to become an adult race that can become the proud custodian of this planet.
Or else… What?
We don’t just stay enslaved. We parish. In other words - it is not a viable option.
Even though I am aware of the inherent lazy trait we have as humans, I am amazed by, and honestly - also fed up with - how easy people revert to the convenient way of thinking and living, doing only what they have used to be doing and attempting nothing outside the mundane and ordinary, so “their little bit of cheese won’t be misplaced” - meaning, that they don't lose the little stuff the still have in place, avoiding the pursuit of something more significant.
Again, the way out is to realize that the majority of people usually just sit and “wait and see” what will happen, even when the virtual brick is clearly on the way to smash their faces.
As soon as you observe that, this is a wake up call, that you’ve probably missed until now and it is time to help, do your own share, so we might some day harvest the results and get the prosperity we have dreamed of.
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