Repeat until believed.

In a sense, I have always been lazy. ^[1] I think it’s just one of those basic settings in our temperaments, like introversion or curiosity. Some people are born full of verve and ready to take on the world and some of us are born to, shall we say, conserve energy.

And it’s not a depression thing. Not entirely, anyway. Even if I imagine myself to be very happy in my dream life, I would still be someone who avoids what seems like work to me if I possibly can.

And if I can’t, I will devote a lot of my copious mental energies to figuring out a clever way to get the work done with the least amount of effort possible.

That’s not just a part of being lazy. For me, it’s also a point of pride. I love exercising my own cleverness and basking in its glow. Any job becomes easier if I feel like I am doing it in a cooler, cleverer, more awesome way than the default.

In fact, thay’s more important than the actual effort involved.

And it’s not like I am incapable of putting in the work when I feel like that’s the only solution. My deep pragmatism takes care of that. If it’s got to be done and I am the only one who can do it, I do it.

But still, I am a man who enjoys his lassitude. My ideal world would be one where all I have to do is provide the vision, leadership, ideas, and the writing, and all the actual “work” would be done by others.

It’s the same dream I have had since I was a little kid : a life is which all I had to do was be brilliant all day,

Now, from a certain point of view, that’s still work. But it’s a matter of your personal resources. I have an abundance of mental resources like imagination, ideas, problem solving skills, curiosity, enthusiasm, and so on.

So for me, this hypothetical cleverness based lifestyle would not really be work at all. It would be getting paid to do what comes naturally to me anyway.

And isn’t that the dream we were all raised on? The job that isn’t work? The career that suits your natural abilities so well that it’s like getting paid to have fun?

The reality is, of course, a lot more complicated than that, but that’s still the idea.

Anyhow, back to laziness and effort and work. I define “work” as “doing things you do not want to do. ”

You have to define it that way instead of by effort because people do all kinds of effort intensive things of their own free will because they find them fun. People go hang gliding, hike nature trails, play sports, or read up on their favorite topics without ever having to be paid.

In fact, they pay for the privilege. The difference between work and play can be (crudely) defined as the difference between that which they have to pay you to do and that which you would pay them to do.

Even my beloved video games involve a great deal of mental effort. And I am certainly willing to pay to do it. In fact, I have, many times.

Sometimes I think about how long it hs been since I pirated a game, and I feel a mixture of pride at living honestly and shame at being so lame at the same time.

But what about my being a l33t h@x0rz stealing from the Man and justifying it by the fact that I had no money and therefore was not depriving the creators of the game of any money by getting their shit for free?

Seems like a pretty threadbare rationalization to me. But whatever.

My point is that I voluntarily put both money and effort into my video game hobby because it is something I find inherently rewarding.

So perhaps the real difference is a matter not of laziness as it is traditionally defined and simply having a philosophical objection to the idea of work.

Or maybe it’s a matter of a preferred default state. Like some people are set to prefer a state of leisure by default and need a reason to leave that state, whereas others default to a state of action.

Man, just thinking about that makes me tired.

I sometimes think of myself as being like a big lazy predator, like a lion or a tiger or a bear (oh my), happy to bask in the sun or sleep most of the time and only invest effort when I grow hungry and need to hunt.

Except I don’t need to hunt to eat. I am, after all, a modern pampered predator. So I end up just doing the lazy part.

But I know that part of me is not happy with that. Part of me knows there is a lot more to life than what fits in my little cage. It also knows that the need to hunt operates on a lot more levels than mere feeding and that therefore I will not be a happy predator unless I leave the comkfort of my cramped cage and go prowl the savannah,.

But the fear holds me back like a radio shock collar. Whenever I think of walking out that cage door, the fear wells up in me and freezes me in my tracks.

Not for very much longer, though. I am building a fire to burn down the walls of my cage and let me go wander and experience things and learn the way a normal person does, by experiencing life instead of always being outside it.

I don’t know when the final breakthrough will happen. I feel like I have been making the wall between me and the world thinner and thinner for a very long time but the fear keeps it intact…. for now.

But some day soon I am going to break through into the light.

And once I get there, I am there to stay,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s go a few more rounds with this topic.

Ready? Let’s begin.

I have been in a podcast-listening mood lately and the Cracked podcast only comes out once a week or so and so I have been in the market for something similarly stimulating to listen to while I kill stuff in Elder Scrolls Online, also known as ESO.

Then I remembered that the CBC has all their radio shows available online as podcasts, so I decided to get caught up on one of my fave CBC shows, namely Ideas.

I mean, talk about the perfect show for me. I am all about ideas. I am a highly ideological person and there have been times when ideas seem more real to me than reality. I am a creature of idea-space and ideas are what really get my attention.

So it’s like the show was made for me. More or less. I love the show so much that I don’t even find its occasional lapse of preposteriously ponderoud pretentiousness and stuffed shirt earnestness to be particularly offensive.

In fact,. I think of them more as endearing flaws.

But sometimes has become clear to me as I have been listening to these shows and it’s something I have always known but never quite consciously articulated before now :

There are areas in which I am one cranky, angry, curmudeonly motherfucker.

I mean, at least half the episodes I have listened to lately have made me super angry. The exact reasons vary, but it can all be boiled down to my frustrations with what I think of as sloppy, myopic, hopelessly limited and illogical thinking on the part of people claiming to be some kind of expert on something.

Well you’re not an expert, you’re a fucking dingbat, I cry out.

This is the sort of thing that used to get me in trouble in philosophy courses because we would be reading the thoughts of some Very Famous Philosopher and I would see the obvious flaws in their argument and their thinking and in what we will call my “passion” I would get upset and express my opinion in my usual, um, “unfiltered” way,

Now imagine being my poor philosophy professor. You are trying to teach the material and get the students engaged in the material. Usually, this is not a problem. But now you have this big dude with zero respect for authority and tradition getting agitated and tearing apart the very arguments you are trying to teach as well as expressing disdain for the philosophers associated with said arguments.

And the thing is, they can’t do anything about it, because philosophy class is all about open inquiry and challenging existing paradigms and all of that good stuff and so you can’t very well tell me, “stop thinking about those things!”.

Luckily, I did figure this out eventually and did my best to compromise between my white hot burning need to express myself and the nerves of my professors.

But listening to a podcast by myself means I have no such need for restaint. And so I get quite sore over petty stupid limited thinking that, to my mind, obviously makes no sense whatsoever and is absurd on the face of it.

Like this episode I listened to about AI and the future of world. It sounded pretty interesting from the description. But in retrospect, I could have spared myself the rage if I had realized that could mean they were going to talk about automation, and people are saying some incredibly dumb shit about automation these days.

And sure enough, one of the experts had written a book about the (get this) “jobless future”. Oh right, because of automation, nobody in the future will have a job because machines do all the work – for free, apparently, seeing as with universal unemployment, nobody will be able to to afford to buy anything and there will be no money to pay for the care and upkeep on all the automated factories as well as nobody to run them and nobody even deciding what they make and….

It’s a stupid fucking idea and I am ashamed that the CBC gives it credibility by having not one but two experts balther on about it for most of an hour. The only thing necessary to insure that jobs will exist in the future is for it to continue to make money by hiring people to do things.

And I don’t see that changing any time soon, do you?

If a businessman buys a machine hat can do the work of ten men, he doesn’t fire nine people. He keeps the same number of employees and does ten times as much.

And so forth and so on. I have talked about this stuff here before. My point is that when I listen to crap like that, I get really mad and worked up over it.

It’s not hard to see why. I have a lot of latent anger to start with, and like I said before I am very much a man of ideas, and a radio show can’t argue back or be hurt by what I say, so it’s like a perfect triifecta of rage release when I listen to a show like Ideas.

I mean, people are just so fucking stupid!

I focus on this aspect of my persobnality tonight because it illustrates how I am not quite the super friendly mellow happy dude I think I am. And I want to face that, and give myself permission to be a cranky, angry dude some of the time,.

Specifically, when that is how I am actually feeling. It’s not healthy the way I smother all but the most acceptable emotions in myself. It’s okay for me to be in a bad mood. Other people, more healthy people, get cranky sometimes and it’s not the end of the world for them. Why should I be any different?

So maybe I need to loosen my iron grip on myself a little bit. Maybe I would be a lot healthier if I let my inner hothead out for exercise now and then. maybe there are worse things in the world than being short with people now and then.

All I know is that my contents are under too much pressure and something, somewhere has to give before I explode.

Now is the time to make sure what gives is not my sanity.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.