Laziness and Efficiency

A friend and I were talking the other day about the word “lazy” and all the baggage it had in our families of origin. We were both from families that equated *doing* something all the time with virtue. We talked about the difference between resting and feeling unmotivated or exhausted. We talked about the difference between being productive and being frantic. We decided that “lazy” is really overused by parents, and by our inner monologue. It replaces self-care and self-stewardship with shame, which might work in the short term but is a crappy long-term solution to the things that *actually* make people feel unmotivated: like illness, mental health needs, trauma, and/or structural poverty.

Sure, there are genuinely lazy people. But they’re by definition privileged—because they can afford, for one reason or another, to shift their share of the work onto someone else. Most of us can’t afford to do that. Most of us aren’t lazy. So, if we don’t feel like doing something, that should be an invitation to inquiry, reflection, and change—not self-loathing.

That being said, I truly do border on being lazy. However, just like there is healthy narcissism, I believe there is healthy laziness, and that’s where I live. I don’t hate work. I hate waste: wasted time, wasted energy, wasted resources. And so my natural…disinclination to hoist myself out of my comfy chair serves as a goad to discover a more efficient solution to the work problem in front of me.

Exhibit A: the stairs in my house. I had never lived in a house with stairs for any length of time before moving here. Sure, it’s work to go up 14 steps every time I forget my phone in my bedroom. But the bigger problem is that my stairs are the Stairs of Danger (just one step below my sister’s Stairs of Death). Within the first week of living in my house, I stubbed my toe so badly slipping off a step that it was swollen for weeks. Not to mention I have two border-collie crosses who feel that the safest way for *them* to make it down the stairs is to use my legs as a braking system. I literally go down the stairs like an 80-year-old lady, with one hand on each banister. No joke.

All of this has prompted me to develop solutions to limit my trips up and down the Stairs of Danger—the two most important being duplicating some things upstairs and down (primarily toiletries) and collecting things that need to go upstairs in a basket to await my next trip up, or vice versa. I suppose having a smart home system that would let me turn off lights, etc., from my phone would be efficient, too, but I just don’t trust the Internet of Things enough to take that extra step (pun intended). I’m not quite that lazy…yet.