We all have the lazy gene, but some just love to embrace it
Published:
AS A GENERAL rule, I can’t abide laziness, and don’t think it’s one of the vices I possess – at least not the physical side of it. But that’s mainly driven by the responsibility of two children under the age of eight, and two pets, none of which could be trusted with a Hoover.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I live for my household chores. Indeed, if I could find someone with time on their hands I would show no shame in offering all forms of bribery, just to get them to do the chores for me.
However, despite my general dislike of playing the role of “tidy-upper”, I couldn’t bear the alternative – I simply can’t function in confusion and chaos – and working from home means that I can’t escape to another world of order and calm, unless I’m the architect.
One of the problems with this approach is the time that it takes to restore an air of peace and tranquillity to the house, once the children have escaped to school. Before I can log on, I have to wash up – which I suppose in essence must simply be down to an innate reluctance to get on with the real work. Prevarication at its best.
But in truth, I don’t know many people who’d readily own up to being idle. Apart from the fact that it’s one of the seven deadly sins, it’s really still considered to be a bit of a taboo subject.
The whole work ethic was instilled into my generation, at least, from a very young age, and since we had fewer distractions then to provide an excuse for dodging all sorts of errands asked of us, we had no alternative but to muck in.
Nowadays, if you ask the kids to come out for their meals, they’ll offer you excuses such as “we’re watching television”. Hello? We wouldn’t be allowed to lounge around in front of the telly (we didn’t have one), especially if it was daylight outside. No, there were fields of potatoes to be dug up, or an entire haystack to be carted into the barn. No shirking if there was anything that we could gain suitable employment from, and consequently keep out of trouble.
No wonder we didn’t go big on the accepted forms of exercise; we were too knackered to move. Our staples were peat-cutting and all the subsequent add-ons. This was a job that was performed in instalments, and we were expected – actually, make that forced – to participate in all of them.
These were tasks that took up most of our daylight hours, so you’ll understand why my reading list was rather bare until I left home.
In fact, maybe that’s why I found reading huge tomes by Dickens such a chore, and why Shakespeare was beyond my comprehension. I’m sure the pragmatic side of me was judging these lauded men of letters unfairly, accusing them of wasting far too much time writing and not enough time “doing something useful”.
Of course, I’ve completely changed my tune now, thanks to the fact that we have an oil-fired stove (although we might have been better off with the peat-cutting option), and that our favourite cultural pursuits are the non-agricultural ones.
But the lazy gene – which is present in all of us, it just seems to be more prevalent in some than others – isn’t always a bad thing. If we didn’t have that internal switch that automatically shuts down when it must, then the workaholics among us wouldn’t be able to function at all. And before you think that I don’t rate people whose sole focus is beavering away every hour of the day, that’s most definitely not the case. In fact, they are generally the least judgmental members of society, probably because they’re too busy to concern themselves with the trivial pursuits of others.
This bout of navel-gazing has been brought about by the last few days, which have been unprecedented in terms of weather: we’ve had the kind of temperatures that stop you in your tracks, begging you to sit down and do nothing, or very little. It’s the association with holidays, I think. The sun only shines when we’re away from home, therefore we can take it easy.
I could not believe how easy it was to make excuses for not doing certain tasks that in themselves were important, but clearly no competition for a temperature of 24C. On that basis, it’s a good job my family don’t live abroad, or we’d be homeless. Maybe I was a drifter in a previous existence, moving from place to place looking for the sun.
But what do people mean when they say they “did nothing”? I think that’s what is meant by sitting staring into space. We set ourselves so many goals; we make unrealistic demands of ourselves, and then feel complete failures and totally inadequate when we fail to deliver.
Now, if everyone stopped pretending that all that mattered was achieving straight-A results in terms of profession and pleasure, we might actually discover that nothing bad is going to happen to us.
How urgent is urgent? Society has shifted the goalposts so many times that the majority of us think there will be global meltdown, just because we get someone’s voicemail instead of their own voice when we call.
Twenty years ago, all you got were “call-backs” – messages promising to return your call later in the day – no one dealt with a problem the minute it occurred, well not unless you were in the medical profession, and nothing desperately awful happened.
Now it has gone the other way, and our collective blood pressure has gone through the roof.
I think our lack of patience at not being seen immediately, either by medical professionals or cosmetic practitioners, stems partly from this obsession with getting everything done straight away – it’s now or never, nothing can wait, or so it would appear.
It’s only when you step back and calculate why exactly your query has to be dealt with there and then that you start to see the insanity of it all, and you can only do that if you’re relaxed and composed.
I’m working up a big case for being lazy, for sometimes acknowledging that just because we put something off for another day, it won’t kill us. In fact, it might very well extend our lives.
I think we should make a bid for National Do Nothing Day.
Readers' Comments