lazy workaholic

All my life I have known I am lazy. And a fair few people have told me too! One teacher of mine- Fat Frank- told me I was mentally lazy but physically less so. He meant I think that I was happy enough walking 30 miles but I wouldn't get out of bed for a job entering data into a spreadsheet- however important it was. To the lazy man nothing is that important... Whatever the nuances, I am something of a connoiseur of laziness and I can spot it in others and it's...commoner than you'd think. One form I am interested in is the kind where you do lots and lots of work that YOU WANT TO DO but actually isn't fit for purpose. So let's say you are fixing up a boat and you spend hours painting it (done that) when it really needs it's bottom fixing. But the painting is so much more fun...and the continuous activity cons you into thinking 'I'm not lazy'. But whether you are toiling like a madman or sitting on the loo reading Aescalus* the test of whether you are lazy or not is in the result. If toiling continuously is wilfully avoiding the pain of stop-start work then it is laziness.

A definition is beginning to emerge here- being lazy is avoiding real work. And we all know what real work is- it's stuff that needs to be done rather than what we want to do. Oh yeah, I know, all those people who just do their 'passion'- be it cooking, photography, gardening- haven't we heard enough about that already? But all these people use the MOMENTUM of doing the thing they love to power over the real work, the in-between bits that just aren't much fun but have to be done. Obvioulsy you want to make these road humps on the path of sweet living as low and undisruptive as possible but they will always be there and you have to face up to them one way or another. That's when you cease being lazy. So laziness is really a refusal to see what is right in front of your face. Why? Because you are scared you might just have to take the harder of two paths. There is a crazy old samurai saying which is; "In a 50/50 life or death situation the samurai chooses death". I think this is just a way of saying, get used to taking the hard option. Since in most situations you know what you have to do (deep down), by being mentally prepared to take the hard option you take the distorting pressure off the decision; you certainly take away that classic lazy response; "I just don't know what to do!"

Laziness is about taking the easy option, not necessarily the most painfree option (quite a few lazy masochists) but the one that is least disruptive to our comfortable way of thinking. I have been comfortable under a boulder in a rainstorm- comfort is not about physical conditions really, it is about that good old mental nest we have in our heads. The lazy person just wants to lounge around in that nest and 'do stuff', maybe lots of stuff, as long as it doesn't mean getting out of the nest.

What I am saying is that the lazy panacea is 'as long as I work really really hard and do loads of stuff everything will be alright'. Well, maybe not.

Are there ways to outwit laziness? I think momentum is one way. A designated 'shit hour' or 'shit day' is another, a time when you do all the hard stuff. But is there a nirvana triple bells in a line lazy solution to laziness? Can one use one's own laziness to be less lazy? Well you can spend hours writing about and observing laziness in self and others, become an expert on it, become more aware of it in different cultures and situations (any one size fits all 'efficient' solution is often a mask for laziness). You can shift yourself out of the lazy nest by using 'I am lazy' as a way of becoming more aware of that nest in the first place...

* I am aware that this is not the usual spelling..indeed all variations on the conventional letter order in a word, punctuation and capitalisation are ways to loosen that leash that chains you to the machine...or I am just too lazy to check...