In support of Laziness

Here’s an extract from a conversation I recently had with a friend over chat
…
Friend: Hey, you haven’t written anything on your blog since a while.
Jay: Well, ya I was bored to write. Just being lazy :)
F: :) Well seriously, why haven’t you written anything?
J: Well seriously, I haven’t written only because I just felt lazy to write anything new.
F: Is everything all right? Any problems?
J: No problems at all. Everything is just fine.
F: Then why haven’t you written anything?
J: :) because I was bored to write. I was just being lazy.
F: Hmmm, okay. Write something soon.
J: Ok :) will do.
…
The conversation made me think; think about ‘Boredom’ or rather ‘Laziness’. We all fall victim to boredom, we all get pangs of laziness, and we all procrastinate. Yet, we never appreciate someone else’s laziness. ‘I may be the laziest bum on this planet, but I will not tolerate your laziness’ – is a credo that we all follow very religiously. Somehow ‘laziness’ does not qualify as a legitimate excuse. In fact, most of us won’t even accept it as an excuse at all. It is indeed a pity that in all these years of human existence, laziness hasn’t gained its due appreciation.

Since laziness is not an acceptable excuse, we camouflage it with other excuses: “I was not well”, “I had some important family issues to attend to”, “Something important came up”, “I had a meeting”, “I had prior commitments” and many other excuses that we come up with, all of which mean nothing but “I was just lazy and I was bored to do whatever I was supposed to do. So I just didn’t do it”. And most of the times we do a really sloppy job with these excuses. But we never admit that we were just being lazy. It’s like those bald men who try to cover up their baldness with wigs. They think nobody would ever figure out that it’s a wig, but it doesn’t take a second glance for others to make out that it’s a fake. But these men still go about flaunting their toupees, assuming that the whole world is dumb enough to believe that the synthetic looking strands of black fiber on their head is nothing but real hair. That’s the way we try hard to cover up our laziness with these fake excuses. At times we try harder. We do it by using the word ‘really’ in our excuses. “I was Really not well”, “Something Really important came up” and so on. All that means is that I was ‘Really Lazy’.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of all inventions. Since ‘lazy’ did not manage to find its place in the list of acceptable excuses, we had to invent something that was close enough to ‘lazy’ and yet would sound legitimate enough to be acceptable. That’s when we came up with ‘busy’. ‘Busy’ is the new ‘Lazy’. “I am/was busy” is now a perfectly acceptable excuse. It’s an excuse that fits almost everywhere (except on the leave note of my kid’s school calendar book), and nobody questions it much. And because it can be used in almost any situation, we have started using it all the time. So much so that many have even started believing in it as well; many actually believe that they really are ‘busy’ :)

I still prefer to cherish my laziness. I practice it, and trust me it’s worth every moment of it. Try it out, and if you don’t know how, then here are some simple ways to practice laziness. Whenever you have a not so interesting task to complete, the first thing you do is delegate – that’s nothing but simply passing on the work to someone else. That way you can enjoy your laziness till at least the other person comes up with a legitimate sounding excuse for not completing the work. Then you ‘Automate’. That’s nothing but spending the next few days lazing around hoping that work would get done ‘Automatically’. In case it does, just be happy about it and do not try to investigate on how the automation happened. Now just in case the ‘automate’ option didn’t work either, then try to ‘Eliminate’. That’s like pretending that the task never existed. You can easily kill a few more days this way. By now it’s quite likely that the work you were supposed to do is either completed, or outdated, or forgotten. If not, just wait till ‘urgency’ kicks in. Whoever needs that work to be done will come yelling at you and trust me, it’s a great driver. You will do it then. So the trick is to just be lazy and wait till the absolute last minute when the urgency of the situation will super motivate you to get things done. Go try it out.

‘Laziness’ is a virtue. Nurture it. It has its own advantages. I would have listed them down for you here, but you know what, I am just too lazy to type all that. So go figure it out yourself. Be lazy. Spend time doing things you like or just doing nothing at all. Don’t be too busy. Just enjoy your lazy life.