Yup! Absolutely.
My junior year college roommate was pretty fucking lazy. He slept like 14 hours a day and didn’t do much else. He started in the engineering program and switched majors several times into progressively easier and easier programs. He was elected president of our fraternity where he continued to do jack shit. (contrary to popular belief, running a fraternity house of 35 guys does require some effort). He was a nice and likable guy, but you could never count on him for anything other than sleeping and drinking.
You can do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t affect me. The problem is that people who are unambitious often have trouble finding meaningful work. Without any sort of focus or direction, you can end up forced into whatever sort of job is available and there’s a good chance it will suck.
Our culture sort of idolizes the slacker and the fuckup. How many times have we seen the story about the lovable screwup who ultimately finds success and happiness? The ambitious, driven types are always the villian while our hero undergoes some epihany where he ultimately wins the company, gets the girl and is showered with accolades for basically doing what to a normal person would be the bear minimum amount of effort required.
What’s the difference between laziness and efficiency? If you tell me what you want done and leave me alone for 20 minutes, I guarantee I will come up with the absolutely easiest way to achieve the desired results.
I think I am efficient; my boss says I’m lazy.
Perhaps her TV-watching is an addiction, and not necessarily a sign of laziness. God knows I’ve gone through phases like that in my life, both in and out of school.
This is why I hate the “underdog-sports-team” movie genre, and typically am rooting for the opposing team (typically dressed in black, to show how eeeeevil they are). I think a lack of ambition is morally neutral, but the side effect of this that needs to be accepted is that you will not win the championship. The “evil” team in black that has trained 25 hours a day since they were five years old, and has sacrificed other aspects of their life, is going to win the championship, and they deserve to. The same principles apply to life in general.
I had a similar debate with a friend many years ago, he maintained that laziness was a good characteristic for a programmer, because it led to writing systems that were efficient and eliminated much dreary manual work. I would describe the good characteristic as an aversion to waste rather than laziness. I don’t think someone who writes a program in 20 minutes to avoid 4 hours of manual labor so they can slack off for the rest of the day is a good programmer (they may be naturally talented, but probably aren’t a good addition to your team). But an aversion to waste and the ability to recognize it and come up with creative solutions to eliminate it are definitely positive points. You don’t have to be lazy to dislike inefficiency.
My Boss once told me to email and fax an letter. I typed in the email and then highlighted and copied it. She asked “Why are you doing that?” I said “You’ll see” ad sent the email, and pasted the document onto a Works page.
Her mouth fell open. I informed her I had no intention of typing it twice.
She also gets annoyed when I’m pulling property listings and don’t put in the city codes. Sheesh, if I get seven different listings for 1234 Main Street I think I can figure out which one I’m looking for.
From a friend, “If you want a job done efficiently, give it to a lazy person. A lazy person is motivated to maximize leisure time, they will find the most efficient means to complete a job that stands in the way of their leisure time.”
Based on this definition, lazy = efficient. They are not mutually exclusive.
This reminds me of the efficiency engineer Frank Galbraith from the famous book Cheaper By The Dozen, whose first work was to design a kind of bricklayer’s hod to eliminate the step of continual stooping to get the next brick. His boss told him, “You aren’t smart. You’re just too damned lazy to squat.” The boss did, however, go on to use the hod and found that it sped up the work considerably.
This would mean that a person living on welfare who is happy with that lifestyle and has no intention of ever working is not “lazy”, because their goals and needs are met by the amount of work they do - namely, none.
Seems counter-intuitive to me. But then, to my mind “lazy” as a description of a person’s lifestyle includes a component of “lack of ambition” and “willing to be supported by others”.
The most lazy person I know is a trust fund baby who does quite literally nothing except watch TV, eat junk food, and snort coke … but under your definition he would not be “lazy”.
My definition of lazy is someone who marries a woman that already has children.
Wait, I don’t get it. Did she really intend for you to re-type the same letter? Like, type it out once in email, and then type out the same thing again in a works document?
I’m confused too. Was cut and paste, like, a revelation to her? Did she honestly think that there’s something “lazy” about not typing the exact same letter twice?
Yes, she thought it was lazy. And no, she did not know you could cut-and-paste between different computer programs and the Internet.
We recently wanted to send something to every state governor. She thought I would print out a list of state governors and their addresses, made an Excel spreadsheet and do a mail merge.
I found the list on the Internet, copied and pasted it to a mail labels page, and printed them out. Her way would have taken two hours; my way took about thirty minutes with no proofreading.
The late Walt Kelly’s example, which I’ll quote poorly instead of looking it up, was this:
When a guy snoozes with a fishing pole on the riverbank all afternoon, that might seem lazy. But if he don’t have any bait on his hook, so’s the fish won’t bother him, that’s lazy.
Our next door neighbor works at an elementary school less than two blocks away. She drives to work every day.
That’s lazy.