Is Laziness Necessary For Progress?

Being constantly busy is a way of life to which it is easy to succumb. Being overloaded gives us the illusion of having a meaning to our life while reflecting an image that is in line with social expectations: to be busy is to be fully integrated into the economic fabric. What if this paradigm is wrong? What if thinking this way is wrong? What if laziness is a fundamental element of progress?

Living with a constantly busy mind prevents us from seeing far. It is as if we were moving forward in the fog, paying attention only to the few meters of clarity that are in front of us. We wouldn’t know if we were going in the right direction. Laziness is a different effort: it is much more difficult today to clear one’s head than to have obsessive ideas. Our ideas imprison us and put a veil between us and the outside world and finally even between us and ourselves. Our inability to clear our minds can even turn into a serious disorder that is sometimes called burnout, sometimes mental exhaustion. The impossibility to recharge comes from a form of guilt that is insidiously distilled in our societies. Although leisure is an industry in its own right, even during our rest periods we have to project the image of being active.

Laziness is frowned upon because it is, above all, misunderstood. To understand things with depth and clarity, we need calm and rest, a bit like murky water that becomes clear when it stops being agitated. There are several degrees of work that can be approached in life: the first is the execution of the work itself, the other, deeper, is the planning, improvement and possible creation of this same work. In order to be optimized, one must accept to alternate between these two phases, which implies consciously devoting time in one’s schedule to do things that are not directly related to one’s work. It is when you are “unproductive”, when you rest, meditate, read, and experiment with new things that you can reach new levels of realization. One must be able to let go of the temptation to always appear productive and see in apparent inaction a certain wisdom.

Laziness must be an integral part of our life if we know how to give it back its letters of nobility by not confusing it with recreational hyperactivity (binge watching, etc.) which is another way of keeping the brain in hyperactivity.