I keep a strict morning routine. Waking up at 3:53 a.m. to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” I roll out of bed into an ice bath, then burpee my way into the kitchen, where a breakfast of raw eggs and lemon juice awaits me, but not before I make a few trades on the New York Stock Exchange and review my Google Calendar for the day. Fortunately, today is light — six classes, eight club meetings, three secret society blood drinking rituals and four nonchalant Instagram photo dumps to post.
I have to admit, I do not really do any of that. In fact, over the summer I spend most of my day doing nothing in particular — maybe reading a book, yelling at my TV about sports or eating potato chips. But in today’s late-stage-capitalist-artificial-intelligence-Larry-Ellison-influencer slopverse, time not dedicated to chewing through to-do lists like you might chew through a bag of Peanut M&M’s after a bad breakup is seen as a total waste when you could have been increasing shareholder value.
This hyper-productivity culture is only amplified by a factor of 500 LinkedIn connections in the overcompetitive haze of an elite university. While us students cannot yet help line the pockets of the ultra-wealthy, we can surely build our resume so that we one day can. Reaching absurd levels of productivity is billed as the path to success, especially to bright-eyed college students with big goals, but adopting those unrealistic expectations usually just leads to a toxic cycle of stress, burnout and unfulfillment. The good news is there is a brave, age-old way to resist this oppressive matrix — being lazy.
What does it mean to be lazy? As high-achieving University students, we have been conditioned to hear it as a pejorative, inspiring the same defensiveness as being called ugly or “the worst opinion writer ever” might, but this is a mistake. I subscribe to a simpler, kinder definition of the word — choosing to do what you want over social expectations to do otherwise. This is a definition of laziness that pays respect to our innate interests and motivations, rather than dismissing them as hindering our progress towards a narrow notion of success. Laziness disentangles our humanity from a web of economic tentacles that seek to reduce it.
Often, being lazy under my definition aligns with the traditional view of laziness — doomscrolling on TikTok instead of starting your homework — but other times, it actually looks quite different. It could be, if you are like me, lazily drifting away from your law school dreams and falling in love with reading — a passion you probably would have never discovered if you had not been lazy. The point is not that you should always blow off work, but that by listening to your own compulsions, you learn something important about yourself. This is especially relevant for students, who, being in a period meant for self-discovery, can and should surrender to laziness and travel to unexpected, enlightening places.
The simplest reason to be lazy is that it is in our DNA. We all come encoded with an instinct to conserve energy by taking the easiest possible path in any situation, accurately called the law of least effort. Why climb over a mountain when you can walk around it? This is the kind of mental arithmetic that has kept us alive for millennia. Even today, where, admittedly, we usually do not have to worry about such paleolithic headaches as being impaled by a woolly mammoth, following the path of least resistance yields dividends. Taking time off for relaxation can help reduce burnout, a condition that well over half of American workers and students alike face. Ultimately, that decrease in stress actually can add years back to your life — alas, maybe not doing that summer internship will, like the caveman, save you from an early death. Plainly, we should not interfere with our biological imperative to laze around any more than we should interfere with our eyeballs looking or lungs breathing.
Our society is not in a great place right now. It feels like we are in a never-ending nationwide opposite day, where the worst of us are reaping the greatest rewards while the rest of us are struggling to even make ends meet. This is the same economic order that has met an unprecedented increase in worker productivity with lagging wages and soaring C-suite compensation. It turns out that even if you do achieve the supposed nirvana of maximum productivity, you likely will not reap the full reward. Luckily, laziness is the purest rejection of authority that exists. By refusing to give in to expectations — not trudging over to an unfulfilling career fair in your wrinkliest button-up, for example — you subvert the powers that be, chiseling out a small slice of humanity for yourself. In other words, laziness reminds us and the world that we are individuals whose worth is not tied to what we produce, but to who we are. We ought to all buy a “Don’t Tread on Me” blanket to sleep past our alarms under.
As I learned the hard way with those Peanut M&M’s, too much of a good thing turns quickly into a bad thing. Being a functional human, and especially a college student, on this planet means sometimes doing things you do not want to do — like sitting through the Engagements. So though laziness is a beautiful part of life, it cannot be the only part of life. But how does one decide which things are worthwhile and which are superfluous? Well, my friend, laziness can help with that too. By relentlessly pursuing what feels organically important to you, no matter if it lines up with social expectations or not, you build a life shaped around you. Weirdly, it would be a rejection of laziness to force yourself to do nothing when you feel naturally compelled to act — a kind of self-imposed straitjacket. True laziness means trusting yourself to lead your own life.
Beckett Anderson is an opinion columnist who writes about politics for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.
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