I really like thinking of ways to do good things with bad intentions, to use what might be considered bad intentions and to channel them into doing good things.
And so of course, one of the best ones is laziness.
We naturally see laziness generally as a bad thing.
We want to do things, and then we feel lazy, so we don’t do them.
So laziness is bad.
But what if we can apply laziness to help us not do things that we don’t want to do? Then we can turn laziness into a positive, perhaps.
Now, I might be going too far to think that we can turn all our bad intentions into good but it seems like there is a possibility to channel them.
And I talked before about using laziness as a disincentive to lying, using laziness to drive honesty, because lying is just so much work.
And it seems like it also applies in another field, which is worrying.
Anxiety, worrying about the future, trying to sort everything out because everything just seems so disorganized and uncertain and chaotic, unclear, and possibly dangerous, possibly bad.
And so we’re worrying so much about the future.
But really, when you think about it anxiety is so much work.
It’s really, really hard work.
You see people that are very anxious often are just very tired all the time, because it’s just such an effort to be reviewing all these scenarios in our mind and trying to find ways to make ourselves safe against every possible thing that might happen.
But because the future is so unknown, trying to make the future into some kind of a clearly workable shape, it’s like trying to build with water.
It just always just washes down again.
So we can try so hard, and it doesn’t seem to lead to too much of a useful result.
You think of all the hard work that goes into anxiety, into worrying about the future, and what is there to show for it? Then the future comes, it’s the next day, it’s the tomorrow that was worried about, and now we’re just in a state of being tired and having used our energy in this worrying.
So imagine applying laziness to the concept of anxiety, and just starting to worry about the future, starting to have some concerns, you know, oh, there’s potential bad things that could happen, there’s all these possible problems, and what am I going to do about them? How am I going to prepare for the future? And then imagine just saying well, I don’t feel like it.
I don’t feel like preparing for the future.
I’m too lazy.
I’m so lazy that I’m just going to let the future happen and not even try to prepare for it in advance.
Of course, we can always take it too far, and you know, just not take care of things that need to be taken care of.
But when we have anxiety, that’s not really the problem.
Not thinking enough about the future is not the problem of an anxious person.
It’s too much thinking about the future.
So whatever we do too much of, it seems like we can apply laziness to that.
We all have some kind of natural laziness – at least I think most people and certainly I do – and we can kind of possibly channel that laziness towards things that we think we shouldn’t do, towards things we don’t want to do, or things that we think it would be better not to do.
We can take that laziness, that drive to not do things and not do any work, to just put the work aside and say “Nope, I don’t care about it.
Not doing it.” And apply that to bad things.
So we can apply that to lying.
“Yeah, lying’s too much work.” And we can also apply it to worrying.
“Worrying is just too much work.
I’m just too lazy to worry.
So whatever happens will happen.”
#anxiety #laziness #toolazytoworry