Let's face it, humans are pathetic creatures.
It is not that we have to be, it is just that we tend to be, because we are wired with some eccentricities that put us in the way of ourselves. Many of these circuits are both feature and flaw, where in one context they can empower us, and another crush us. A simple example of this is our desire for sweet food, where it was a signal that food was okay to eat and rich in nutrients, and the sugars helped our brains grow. But now we can have it whenever we want and in any volume, the feature has become a flaw that sees us with spiralling health issues like obesity, depression and ironically, reduction in thought ability.
We are also lazy.
Lazy is a feature.
It helps us because being lazy has encouraged us to develop and innovate, finding ever-easier ways to accomplish what we need to do. Whether it was sharping a stick to a point to help us hunt, or creating a robot vacuum cleaner so we didn't have to do the strenuous task of walking around our own home for ten minutes. Laziness creates a desire to avoid and when there is also a need attached, we are pretty good at developing technologies to help.
However, it is also a flaw, because one of the other circuits we have as humans is the weighting we put on how we feel right now in this moment, or in a close future. This means that our laziness feature optimizes for now, even if we are going to be heavily negatively impacted in the future. Similar to eating what we shouldn't eat too often, our laziness combines with our desires means that we end up optimising our choices in ways that do not support our wellbeing, our growth, our financial health, and every other part of life a person might find important.
While I am no expert at doing this myself and probably in the bottom 50% of success rate, I think that we should use the optimisation feature readily, but intentionally. We should investigate and choose where we are going to set our defaults and then create systems that keep us aligned. For instance, with how we eat, how we move, how we rest, how we invest and how we socialise. These key areas impact heavily on our daily life and entire life experience, so they shouldn't be left up to unintentional chance, but intentional decision making.
Once we have worked out what kind of experience we want to have, then we can go about optimising and automating the process to make it easier, but with an intentional feedback and review process, to ensure that we continue to be aligned, or if we want to adjust and change the direction of any part of our experience. However to do this requires us to invest energy into thought, discovery, planning and practice. We have to be open to some failure, some readjustment, some walk-backs. But do this for key areas, and I believe we would have a much more rewarding daily experience.
But optimisation is only useful in some areas and when we are looking to grow our experience, optimisation can move from feature to flaw, where we keep doing the same without exploring alternatives. Optimisation means we can get stuck in our ways, rather than expanding. So what we need to bake into our experience is randomisation so that we can expose ourselves to disruption. Disruption is what we try to avoid with our optimisation, but without it we will become stale and stagnate. In nature and the universe, disruption is a constant, but because we have got so good at optimising, we feel that we can secure some level of stability, until it breaks. And human rules always break, nothing we create can last in an environment we don't have complete control over.
So we should also consider what parts of our life can remain unoptimised and where we can accept disruption, risk and uncertainty. One area not to optimise is our creative self, so that we can be free to think, to move, to act as freely as we can - where we can be a bit messy, and non-judgemental of the outcome, immersing ourselves into the process. Another is our education, our learning - we can be open to new ideas and thoughts and be prepared to make mistakes to learn and dive deep, not quickly. Another part we might not want to over-optimise are our hobbies - if you enjoy it, savour the experience rather than force it and if it doesn't happen, that is okay.
And lastly for now, while I said we should optimise how we socialise, I do not mean to make every relationship into a business transaction with an expected ROI. I mean that we ensure that we have created space in our lives where we routinely put ourselves in social situations that support our growth, even if uncomfortable. And the time spent with people that inspire, encourage, or help our development in any way, isn't an inefficient use of time - it is part of being human.
Our optimisation abilities have lead to a great deal of technological innovation, however the desire to constantly make things more efficient has made us increasingly robotic in the way we behave. We are increasingly predictable, increasingly thinking more narrowly as a species, and increasingly hitting up against disruption from the universe warning us that attachment to the structures we have built, is a fool's game.
Life isn't convenient, nor should it be. Life is a challenge and the goal isn't to survive for as long as possible, but to do as much as possible with the life we have. That doesn't mean travel and see the world, it means to use our senses to experience the world and explore our capabilities to create connections with others. At the end of the day, the relationships we have are all we have in this world and optimising them for profit is costing us everything we value.
People are messy. You and I are too.
Don't be lazy in a way you don't live.
Be lazy so you live more.
Taraz
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The concept of 'reframing' is interesting because it removes the moral judgment from laziness and turns it into feedback. If someone consistently avoids a task, it probably says more about the structure, incentives, motiveas or meaning behind it than the person themselves. So in that sense, laziness becomes a diagnostic tool rather than a flaw.
And yes, vacuum cleaners are the only invention where success is measured by how much they suck. Peak innovation isn't it? Making sucking sound like a good, not an insult :)
And it then could be a design issue, or a personnel issue. Manty people want to do things for a reason, but they aren't the right person for it.
I have an old Dyson and it still sucks hard!
You'd be shocked just how much I sweat when I get finished vacuuming the house. It surprises me every time! I think a lot of it is the cord, I hate that damn cord. Our next vacuum will be cordless. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of suction power for not having to deal with the cord.
We have one of the older Dyson Balls - it is a "ball and chain" system and lugging it up the stairs sucks. Still, it isn't that hard. I sweat too. :D
We have a Shark and I swear about as much as I sweat when using the thing!
:D
Maybe vacuuming is a chance to practice patience, kindness, and mindfulness?
My wife would probably appreciate that! :)
Okay so if laziness and optimisation are both double-edged tools, what objective standard are you using to decide when they’re serving you versus quietly degrading you?
And more importantly how do you prevent your intentional systems from becoming just another optimized comfort zone that kills the very disruption necessary for growth?
To answer both questions at once, it comes back to ensuring a decent feedback and review process. Once an action isn't serving its intended purpose, time to change the action or change the purpose. We don't have to automate in a set and forget way, we can do it in a set and constantly review process too. And then having the space for random, building lifestyle to include a lot more chance encounters for instance, greatly increases the opportunity for disruption.
Death comes quickly when sitting behind a screen too often, living on desired content.
I think most of the inventions were driven not by desire to optimize our life and make it easier, but by profit motive. That is why you saw such a technology acceleration in USA...
That has only been in recent times. We have been walking as humans for 2M years now and the majority of that had no tokenisation to gather.
Oh. Also I will add that it is the laziness of the consumer that drives the profit.
Right, I could do the roof on my house myself, but I am too lazy to buy the tools and spend a week up there, so I hire a professional to do it, I am one lazy dude :)
It is everything though. Not just the professional needs stuff. Gadgets and pills, clothes and food. All centred around convenience.
I've always said it: great inventors weren't hardworking people, but rather a bunch of lazy folks who wanted to make life easier and find ways to do things using the law of least effort. And that's how we have so much development today, thanks to those lazy people. So, the next time you see an innovation, it wasn't an intelligent person who made it... it was a lazy one
Precisely. The most intelligent are the laziest? ;D
Laziness tends to be the default setting on the human machine. Most choose to idle as close to stalling as possible. However, every now and again, you meet someone who rejects the setting. This is super inspiring, especially to those who want to achieve more and are not looking to the back door.
With the cost of fuel, I can understand why ;D
🤣🤣🤣
I think we need to be deliberate with our decisions to make sure we are not only focusing on comfort, but also creating opportunities for growth and discovery.
Lazyness is a big problem, the more technology we have the more people get lazy, like look at the kids, now they use ai to solve homeworks, how can they learn to use their brain like this?
Or food delivery at home because people are too lazy to walk or drive and that has brought workers exploitation with the riders
I the future people will just live in the couch in a virtual reality, eating like pigs...
I wish this were easy programming to break. I spent the better part of my teens and 20s optimizing for minimal responsibility and maximum enjoyment. Other parts of my life have definitely suffered because of this.
Despite my laziness, I never really liked getting into a schedule. I enjoy the randomness of things, and the lack of monotony. I've lived in lots of different places, I've had several different careers, I've even had a handful of long-term partners over the years. The only constant I like IS CHANGE itself! Keeps me on my toes and offers new challenges. New discoveries! So if that's what it takes to feel human, I'm all for it!
This is very true in life, especially here on Hive. Systems and ideas work well until they don't. Optimization is an ongoing process, so it's best to enjoy the ride!
It is the wise nature. Spring is coming. The dry branches of winter make a slow life, of productive and slowed down leisure and for example they are filled with promises of suckers, evidently for a full life in spring and summer... No one intervenes, the earth is renewed. It is life itself, it flows, there is no resistance to changes. That's the key to living...
i say travel is overrated. in fact, i kinda hate it.. what a hassle. :P
doggy doesn't look too upset that some might call him laze. hey, as long as thats what works for u and u are enjoying life.. :)
This can be a bit of a two-edged sword; sometimes, we try to spread ourselves too thin. I think it requires a fair amount of wisdom to decide how far out the tent pegs go.
This piece really got me thinking, especially the idea that laziness is not just a weakness but also something that has helped humans evolve. I’ve always seen laziness as something negative like something I need to completely eliminate, but the way you explained it makes more sense it’s not about removing it, it’s about directing it.
The little stumpy legs in the air is so freaking cute aaaahhhhhh XD
What are dogs seriously, I snapped this one of ours sleeping yesterday:
I kind of have one of these in the pseudorganiser and it's one of those things that's awesome fun times if you love planning and logistics and one of those things you will probably avoid at any and all cost with every excuse under the sun of why you will never need to bother if you don't.
The something will blow up and you will cry your way through setting something up with a lot of false starts trying out different things til you find something that works even though your brain desperately doesn't want it to and then be really really mad at yourself for not doing it ages ago.
And then you'll try to tell your kids to start the process earlier but they know much better than you ever will anbd they know for sure that they will never need anything like that and it's some hard work to set up and they have better things to do.
I'm not speaking from experience at all XD
and it's also just Youngest, Middle has always been very decently organised and has been playing around with planners and bullet journals since childhood and Eldest has been keeping thoughts in a very disorganised notebook collection since I advised him to start writing down roleplaying notes when he was somewhere between 9 and 11, and loses them less now that he has a "bag notebook" too, Youngest however is very sure that he has an impeccable memory and actively refuses to learn how to/use a calendar or planner
Wow this is so thought provoking! Definitely made sense to me, also reminded me a little about the debate between time vs money, and which is more important in life.
How do modern processed sugars differ from natural ones in triggering that same brain response?