How Laziness can improve your life

Ooh, controversial topic here! What with the big proverbs that you learn in school like “Hard work is the key to success” and being socially conditioned to work hard at all times…but in truth, we don’t really like work. When you hear people tell you “I like my job a lot”, it’s mostly because they don’t really work that much, and end up spending their time in the office on Facebook or Twitter. And who wouldn’t want that job? No wonder people end up in front of computers in IT companies, with unlimited internet access…

But let’s leave the “workers” to their work, and get back to the topic. Now, laziness is something which comes under a list of “frown-upons”, the other frown-upons being eating too much, playing loud music, not answering your eager mother’s questions after a tiring day, and so on. And so, a lazy person is berated in society for being…well…lazy! I mean, look at the lazy guy, he wouldn’t dare to go out to a shop and buy vegetables, instead, he’d order them online! And lazy people would not do things unless they were really necessary. Like, a lazy guy wouldn’t care to defuse a bomb, till there were only 5 seconds for detonation. And to be honest, I’m a lazy person. And that’s why I’m very much able to make you understand what lazy people would do.

Yes, yes you were. Just like me ;)

However, I want to blog about how laziness can improve your life. So, I (hopefully) won’t criticise laziness myself. And since I’m too lazy to think of various uses for laziness, I will just list a few defining traits of lazy people, and explain how useful these characteristics are to society at large.

The “Due tomorrow, do tomorrow” mentality

“It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday, everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend.” – Rebecca Black

(Yes, I just quoted Rebecca Black.No, I don’t like her. And no, I don’t like Justin Beiber either. Just making things clear here…)

That was added just in case you still didn't believe me...

So, it’s Friday, and you have a long weekend to “chillax” (I used to love that word, till it got used in a song in a Vijay movie. Jeez, why am I mentioning a lot of hated people in this post?). However, there’s a tiny little thing that gets in the way of your chillaxing, and that’s a little Math homework. No issue, just 5 sums. So, why start early? Wake up on Saturday and do it! And the day you actually open your book to do it will be Monday morning, exactly five minutes before your teacher enters the classroom. And hopefully, I’m not the one experiencing déjà vu here.

Now, what’s so good about this? Research says that the brain needs stress to perform better and exhibit more creativity at times. And what better stress than an extremely strict Math teacher about to walk in any minute? And it also gets bragging rights! The nerd who says “I took the whole week to finish my Math homework!” is bested by the lazy guy who says “Well, they all know how lazy I am, and I could finish it in five minutes!” Awesome, isn’t it? This makes me think. If lazy people know how to do things more quickly than others, this would mean they would have more time on their hands! As Corey Ford says “I put off things, and that’s how I get those things done!” And maybe you would doubt whether the quote is correct, but I hope you are too lazy to check. ;)

I love this guy.

The question “How do I do lesser work for more results?”

Yes, work takes time. If your mom told you to buy eggs and milk, you don’t go to the store, buy the eggs, come back, then go to the store again, buy the milk, and come back again. You do both at the same time, to avoid the stress of going a second time to the store. That is basically how a lazy man’s mind works. “How do I do it more easily?”, “How can I reduce my workload”, and “What are the unnecessary things I’m doing?” are few of the questions that run through a lazy person’s mind.  And so, the lazy man is less tired than the active fools who do truckloads of work just to achieve the same results. For example, my mom gives me some clothes to place on a table while I watch TV. The walk from the TV to the table is a strenuous length: four feet. So, what do I do to avoid the walk? With my perfect aim, it just takes one good throw, and the clothes are on the table, and I don’t even have to take my eyes off from what I’m watching for more than a second!

Did I mention how much I love this guy?

The graciousness to “give others a chance”

My favourite one, here! Imagine that your younger sister is into drawing. What better way to cultivate her drawing habit, than to let her draw the diagrams in your biology classwork! Maybe that’s what the people in the 19^th century were thinking: “Who cares about light bulbs? Let Edison make them!” And poor Edison slogged hard, experimenting with different materials, failing thousands of times, while these people enjoyed candlelight dinners till he finally succeeded! Well, Edison got the credit, and maybe some monetary rewards. But what did he do? Other research! And so he slogged hard at the gramophone while other people entertained themselves with live bands, and then slogged hard at the television while other people watched plays. In essence, Edison got the credit while the other people got…everything else. Well, that’s exactly what you get from being lazy and letting other people do it. “Work hard, and reap the rewards. Be lazy, and reap everyone else’s rewards.” - Me (Yes, I quote myself, not because I’m a wise guy, but more because I’m a wisecrack.)

And add a caption to this pic as well, please?

The wisdom to “put off things till the right time”

Well, a lot of things in life depend upon timing. For example, if the examiner gave you the answer paper at the stroke of the bell instead of a good five minutes later, you would have finished the paper by the stroke of the final bell instead of being unable to complete it. Well, a lazy person’s life depends so much on timing, and for those of you who mutter “That’s preposterous!” hold your horses because I haven’t explained this one yet. There is a difference however, between a normal person’s sense of timing, and a lazy person’s. A normal person will estimate how long it would take to finish the job, while a lazy person will estimate how long he could POSTPONE the job till…someone else does it (or helps him do it, so he can make that someone “take over”), or till it never really needs to be done.  For example, if you are too lazy to rearrange the files on your computer into neat and ordered folders, you put it off till you actually remember where everything is, so that you can navigate things easily even when it seems cluttered and disorganized to someone else. I know a lot of people who have extremely messed up desktops, and I assume that one fine day, they would have thought of rearranging their desktop to look a bit more presentable, but, they were too lazy to do it, and now, they are much more able to figure out where is what on their PC, than me and my super-efficient-highly-organized-classified-and-stored desktop! And I also mentioned that things could be put off till they could be done with help from others (and by “help from others”, you must know what I really mean). How, you ask? Well, if I leave my room untidy, and I’m frequently asked to clean it, and I don’t, there will surely come a time when a guest would decide to give only half-an-hours’ notice before dropping by. Then, my mom, for fear of becoming a social outcast because her son has a room that looked like the Bhopal gas tragedy had started in it, would be sure to concentrate her efforts on my room, and within 29 ½ minutes, the room would be so spic and span, you’d think you were in the furniture section of Big Bazaar instead of my room. And I didn’t even raise a finger!

Wish my mom would take that for an excuse...

Laziness has its perks, but to tell you the truth, it isn’t a good habit. Though it might be fun to be lazy, in the end chronic laziness will only be your downfall. Yes, I painstakingly wrote this article because I admit, I’m not exactly the type of person you’d see with Adidas© shoes and an iPod© jogging the whole length of the Marina beach and back, and I purely meant it as a tongue-in-cheek endeavour, just to make you read and relate and have fun. My request to you is not to take this seriously, and then be lazy and quote from my article when you are apprehended for your laziness, because I’ll end up in trouble! Oh, and I also wrote this article just to test my limits, whether I can write the boons of a subject which has a lot of banes. Well, it was going extremely well until this last paragraph…

True story bro...or sis.

Nevertheless, hope you enjoyed this article! Thanks for listening to my begging on Facebook, and reading this blog. I’ve been held back from writing because I was too lazy to write. ;) But I’m back in form (that is, if I had any form in the first place), and will keep updating, so you’d better keep reading, awright? J