Opinion
Laziness: Not so close to godliness
November 15, 2007
In recent months, I have become lazier and lazier in lots of things I do. It’s an interesting experience to analyze, because becoming lazy has saved me dozens of minutes of labor in the last year. Perhaps laziness isn’t the problem—perhaps I’m simply increasing the efficiency of my lifestyle. If you think about it, to live lazily is to live efficiently; important things are taken care of reluctantly, and everything else is tossed out the window. So what if it’s one of the seven deadly sins? My life works better when I cave in to my natural, lazy-dude instincts.
Though my apartment is usually somewhat clean and tidy, it is the first place my laziness shows up. Take, for instance, the way I do dishes. The easy-to-clean cups and plates are usually scrubbed out right away. The bowl I used to cook SpaghettiOs with, however, will undoubtedly sit neglected in the dirty side of the sink for upwards of three or four days. During this span, the biohazard-orange SpaghettiOs sauce on the bottom of the bowl will sit and coagulate into a granite-like enamel with the consistency of depleted uranium. Trust me—you can’t even get that off with Dawn Ultra and steel wool. I usually need to bust out the ice pick to wash those dishes. Maybe I could patent the SpaghettiO stuff and sell it to NASA—it would be perfect for thermal-coating space shuttles.
I’m also unapologetically lazy when it comes to laundry. Though I always make sure to have clean clothes to wear, my wardrobe sometimes comes perilously close to empty. Last week, I turned the public laundry room downstairs into my own personal walk-in closet. I left a load of clean socks in the dryer for four days—I’m such a nuisance, I know. Instead of bringing them all up in one trip, I just made sure to swing by the laundry room on my way to class each morning to pick up a fresh pair of socks. Storing my socks in a public dryer really helped open up some much-needed drawer space in my bedroom, so I’m considering doing it again. It may be a deadly sin, but it’s easy.
Though I sometimes do let my work ethic slide from time to time, I do not condone what I call a “criminally lazy” lifestyle. Criminal laziness is the dark side of living efficiently. These are the people you see at the grocery store that use the electric shopping carts even though they’re not technically disabled. These people will mindlessly watch reality TV because they’re too lazy to follow a real plot. These people make car-buying decisions based on how far off the ground the driver’s seat is. This is why some of the laziest people in the world drive Geo cars—there’s only about a five inch vertical from the pavement to passenger compartment. And while that sounds nice, I don’t advocate sinking to that level—ever.
Doctors and scientists have been raving about the sedentary lifestyles that are slowly killing all of us. In fact, the World Health Organization, which sounds sinisterly similar to the World Trade Organization, reports that sedentary lifestyles lead to approximately 2 million deaths each year. So if you wear Velcro shoes, own several microwaves or Febreze your clothes weekly instead of washing them, you should probably think about working a little harder—unless an early death sounds pleasant to you.
I do plan on becoming a little less lazy in the future, but I’m not really sure when it’ll happen. I’ll let you all know when it does, if I’m feeling up to it.
Joe Hager is a student at UW-River Falls.