In the recent Tangentially Speaking
with Dr. Chris Ryan (the author of the popular Sex at Dawn) there is a
lot of talk about laziness and why we should embrace it. Why spend
our time working hard simply for the sake of working hard? This could
be one of the biggest problems of society today, and it's driven by
an economy that without ethics. I don't mean ethics as in BP oil
spills, predatory loans, and the raping of the landscape for cheap
knick-knacks (though that kind of ethic is definitely important).
This time I mean ethics as in the morality of rigidity in thinking
and in action.
Too
much of the way we work is stuck in the days of Ford's assembly line.
For example, take any job (an investor, a teacher, a sewage worker,
or a doctor) and there is bound to be protocol to follow. Be here
this many of hours. If X goes wrong always do
Y. Sacrifice quality for the bottom line. Things like that.
Politics are the
same. A liberal is expected to make only liberal decisions. No room
for fluctuation. Bigger government is always good. Strict gun laws
everywhere. Abortions for all. Things like that.
In fact, the
politician and the CEO are no different. The politician has to worry
about his own stock holders called voters. He can't support legal
weed because on the whole it might hurt the value of his brand,
otherwise known as his party.
To end the ramble
and bring it back to the issue at hand, there's really no escaping
the fact that we spend our time not on what's best for us and the
people around us, but instead on trying to keep our image elevated
and our status in "our party" respected (whether that's the group of
scotch drinking investor buddies, the teaching staff you have nothing
in common with, the sewage workers labor union, or the head surgeon).
When we engage in this attitude we do nobody favors. Not the world at
large, not the individuals on the receiving end of our skills, and
especially not ourselves.
So what can we
learn from this? Simple. Learn to shift gears. Learn to put it into
fifth only when necessary. But please also learn to be intelligently lazy. Learn to love the slow hum of first, too,
for when we're in first gear we can relax, we can look off into the
distance and appreciate the world around us. We can come up with the
next big idea that went buzzing by the folks locked into high gear,
nothing more than a blur.
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