A eulogy of laziness

Don’t know if this one will make sense to anybody, but it is one of those articles I perhaps wrote more for myself.?In my defence, I wrote it before having multiple wine glasses with Daria in Marseille.

This is the latest message I received from my mother. The literary translation is “a lazy ass gets a halved fate.” A few months ago, I tried explaining the concept of gentle parenting to my mother, but she just laughed in my face - as usual. One of the key pillars of gentle parenting seems to be not projecting your expectations or judgments onto your child’s character.

Well, well, well I have been walking around with about 20 kilos of my mother’s unmet dreams on my shoulders and with the label “lazy” since I was about 3. Little did it matter, that like any immigrant kid, I was translating legal documents for my parents since age 10. “Lazy” has been the definition my mother has placed on me. I have spent the past 20 years proving to her she wasn’t right. Holding a BSc, an MA, and almost an MBA and working since I was 16 can testify to that. But I was competing against the impossible as my mother is perhaps the reincarnation of John Calvin himself. All work and no play and she’s proud of it.?

Recently, I’ve come to terms with the fact that no matter what I do, “lazy” will always be my trademark. But since I am an overachiever, I not only came to terms with that, but I also have started to embrace it. Laziness is the reason why I am a moral person. It just takes too much effort to be an immoral one. For example. I rarely lie because to be a good liar I’d need to be careful, remember what I said and come up with excuses and scenarios. I am too lazy for that. I never cheated because it is already difficult to balance all the things in the world I want to do and real interest in one person. The idea of handling multiple relationships at the same time, instead of exciting me stresses me out. More than a grandiose seducer, I’d feel like a secretary at a call centre. And I bet I’d mix up names at some point and feel bad because nobody deserves their name to be mistaken. Although some do deserve to be cheated on, to be honest.

Thanks to my dear laziness I also never got anything broken. I have been waiting to see my friend Rebecca for months because she is one of those people who doesn’t hold life dear enough to not try a new sport every month. So she’s now high on painkillers, while I am typing this comfortably from the couch. Sure she’s toned as marble and I am not but that’s another issue. I also never had a fascination for men who attract too much female attention because competition isn’t for the lazy ones. The idea of watching out for women who want to jump on my man as soon as I go to the toilet stresses me out. Ok, perhaps this has much more to do with my ego. Also, I am unable to hold a grudge for more than 24 hours mainly because it would demand too much energy. I am a terrible person like anybody else, but it is laziness that has acted like a barrier to act on my nasty thoughts.?

Embracing laziness has also allowed me to see that most of the people who pride themselves on how productive they are, instead are just too afraid to stop for a second. Because that would mean having a one-to-one meeting with themselves. A meeting where they’d certainly end up asking themselves if all that fuss makes sense if the way they are living life is their own, if the people in their lives love them for who they are or for what they represent, and for what they do. I mean easy-peasy questions like these. So what I thought was disdain for the lazy ones, is masqueraded envy. Truly productive people are so excited by what they are doing they rarely have time to judge others. But most of us are resentfully productive, constantly trying to prove something. Our very opinion of ourselves depends mostly on what we do. I still struggle with this, as you inherit a mentality, and in my house, you are what you do, not what you think, nor what you feel, nor what you say.?

But the more I think about it the more I am convinced that our idea of productivity follows the same reasoning as cancer. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” This phrase has stuck in my mind since my first year at Uni. Only recently I have come to terms with the fact that if I continue to work only with the end goal of increasing the volume of what I produce I’ll never really enjoy the process. Today, I look at who does a job they like as if I’d be staring at someone who attained a miracle because spending 8 hours doing shit you don’t want to do is a slow torture. I think most of the misery our generation feels is because we’ve been sold a narrative of our self-importance that simply doesn’t match most of the bullshit jobs we ended up doing. As such, even being purposefully lazy is a form of rebellion I very much like.?

I want to reconcile with the idea of life and work conceptualized as an artisan or a gardener thinks of his work. That my life is as personal as I can manage to build it. That mind and hands are both in it. That my life isn’t so artificial that is led only by the mind, that I produce produce produce in circles. Like those addicted to measuring the metrics of everything they do: how many calories are eaten, how many km are walked, how many pages are read every day. But I don’t want it to be a product of only my body and my instincts.

Vilma Djala