Or, to be more precise, effort. Life is effort. This cannot be avoided.

Nor would you want to.

I go into it further in today’s vid du jour.

You wouldn’t want an effort free life because that would mean doing literally nothing. You’d basically be a plant at that point. Specifically, a vegetable.

That’s the logical outcome of the pathology of toxic laziness. It has nothing to do with some abstract notion of virtue or whether or not you’re “pulling your own weight” and everything to do with whether you feel alive and present and happy.

This is one of those lessons that someone, like a parent or a teacher or other adult, probably tried to teach you at one point but were far too inarticulate to get it across.

Some of us have high interface demands. We can understand a hell of a lot if it’s explained to us or otherwise in an articulated form but we are not going to just “pick up on it” via social intuition or whatever.

In my case, I think it’s what Mister Thompkins, my elementary school phys ed teacher, was trying to explain to me one day but I was too much of a little smartass to listen.

I honestly think that we nerds could learn a thing or two from the jocks of the world and their simple, robust, enthusiastic approach to life.

Chronic, insidious, invidious laziness makes you act like you’re constantly trying to get to sleep. Like any form of physical arousal – yes, even that one – is the enemy.

In the case of depression, it’s not hard to see how one gets this way. It’s that god damned anhedonia. We need a certain amount of reward in order to function and when the numbness of depression blunts our ability to even experience reward and thus makes everything less rewarding, we naturally seek out the activities with the highest effort to reward ratio in an attempt to punch through that resistance.

And the modern world is full of what scientists called “supra-normal stimuli”, incredibly potent sources of reward signals that the reward-starved like myself quickly latch onto like a drowning person grabs on to some floating debris and become addicted to.

If only something could interrupt the anhedonia and make those ice sheets of cruelest numbness retreat, the whole thing would fall apart. Our personal ice age would end and we would be able to feel all the good things in life as they truly are.

But nobody has a pill to specifically target anhedonia yet, I suppose. My Paxil saved my life and my Wellbutrin helps me be awake and alert, but I still live on a icy cold planet far away from the Sun where its warmth can barely reach me at all.

And that’s how depression kills motivation. It’s hard to be motivated to do things when you know in your soul that you won’t find them rewarding. The basic calculus of life as an animal says that you seek the most rewarding stimuli around and with anhedonia draining the fun out of everything, the entire equation of what is “worth the effort” shifts and very few things qualify any more.

So when people with good intentions tell us “do this, do that, it will make you feel so much better”, they might even be right, but from our point of view, trying to imagine how much we’ll get out of the proposed activities, it seems almost impossible.

Whether it’s junk food or video games or risky sex, our addiction of choice provides so much reward for so little effort that anything else, even things that should be more than enough for anybody, cannot possibly compare.

That animal calculus is very clear : do the most rewarding thing.

Even if it’s killing us.

More after the break.

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Do you remember TV dinners?

Well I do, because I am eating one right now.

It’s the classic Salisbury Steak with mashed potatoes and corn and a brownie (which I shouldn’t eat, but will) for dessert.

I was looking through the frozen meals selections as I shopped Real Canadian Superstore online this week and I saw this TV dinner ^[1] there and it was only $5.

And what I was planning to get, one of those President’s Choice frozen entrees, was $5.55! Easy choice.

And it’s pretty good! They got the sauce for the Salisbury Steak right. A lot of places seem to confuse Salisbury Steak with meatloaf and use a tomato sauce, and you end up with something a lot more like a burger with fancy ketchup.

And that’s OK, but it’s not right.

And the mashed potatoes are good. They’re instant mashed potatoes, of course, which means they taste good but don’t have the texture and heft of the real thing, but I’ve had them plenty and they’re pretty good.

But what really has me bowled over is the corn. My word, is it good! It tastes like it just came off the cob! I dunno how they did it but if there’s a way I could get that on its own I would buy it in bulk.

Needless to say, I will be looking to try the other two meals in the product line, a fried chicken dinner and a turkey dinner.

Assuming that the price stays the same and doesn’t go up, those President’s Choice frozen entrees might just be out of a job.

And I must admit, talking about Salisbury Steak, mashed potatoes, corn, and a brownie gives me a most pleasantly old-fashioned feeling, like I’m eating at an old time boarding house or having Sunday dinner with the family.

Whilst I consider myself to be quite open-minded when it comes to food, I will admit that there are times when a good old-fashioned “normal” meal straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting really hits the spot.

Oh, the brownie was pretty good too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.