{"id":4923,"date":"2019-05-02T22:28:27","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T16:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/?p=4923"},"modified":"2019-05-09T23:34:46","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T17:49:46","slug":"lazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/2019\/05\/02\/lazy\/","title":{"rendered":"LAZY: A MANIFESTO by Tim Krieder"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\">9<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span><h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">Kina &#8211; Get you the moon<\/h1>\n<p><iframe width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WTsmIbNku5g?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I ask. For next <strong>10 minutes<\/strong>, just sit on your forever distracted tight a$$ and for f#$&amp; sake just commit and listen to what I have to share tonight.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 1.7rem; font-weight: 900;\">And, I promise, you can thank me later &#8212; because believe it or not, that <em>few minutes<\/em>\u00a0will most certainly save your\u00a0<strong>l.i.f.e f<\/strong>rom turning it an absolute<em><strong> fiasco<\/strong><\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Long story short, tonight we talk about avoiding and escaping <strong>&#8216;busy&#8217;<\/strong> masochism; tonight we recalibrate our perspective about a dire need to remaster a crelative skill of doing absolutely nothing, about appreciating emptiness and laziness and in the process also cultivate the long lost art of harnessing <strong>boredom<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Tonight we burn this\u00a0 screwed up, forced-upon <em>&#8217;employment&#8217;\u00a0<\/em>capitalist culture and dissect open &#8216;<strong><em>unemployment&#8217;<\/em><\/strong> from a fresh new lenses. Also, please keep in mind an age old adage,<strong>&#8220;No amount of money bought a single second.&#8221;<\/strong>, as you navigate around those lines of a following meaningful, juicy essay called<\/p>\n<h1 id=\"yui_3_17_2_1_1556810982395_396\" class=\"entry-title entry-title-item p-name\" style=\"text-align: center;\" data-content-field=\"title\"><a id=\"yui_3_17_2_1_1556810982395_395\" class=\"u-url\" href=\"http:\/\/www.staystrongsc.com\/blog\/2017\/1\/8\/lazy-a-manifesto\" rel=\"bookmark\">LAZY: A MANIFESTO<\/a>\u00a0by<\/h1>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"background-color: #ffdb00;\">\u00a0Tim Krieder&#8217;s from his essay collection book\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.audible.com\/pd\/We-Learn-Nothing-Audiobook\/B00SNTQU9K?source_code=AUDGBWS1001159F42\">&#8216;We Learn Nothing&#8217;<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n<h1 data-content-field=\"title\"><\/h1>\n<h1 id=\"yui_3_17_2_1_1556810982395_396\" class=\"entry-title entry-title-item p-name\" style=\"text-align: center;\" data-content-field=\"title\">The essay begins&#8230;<\/h1>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p id=\"yui_3_17_2_1_1556810982395_383\">If you live in America in the 21st century you&#8217;ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are.\u00a0It&#8217;s become the default response when you ask anyone how they&#8217;re doing:\u00a0&#8220;Busy!&#8221;\u00a0&#8220;<em>So<\/em>\u00a0busy.&#8221;\u00a0&#8220;<em>Crazy Busy<\/em>.&#8221;\u00a0It is,\u00a0pretty obviously,\u00a0a boast disguised as a complaint.\u00a0And the stock response is a kind of congratulation:\u00a0&#8220;That&#8217;s a good problem to have,&#8221;\u00a0or &#8220;Better than the opposite.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This frantic, self-congratualtory busyness is a distinctly upscale affliction. Notice it isn&#8217;t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the ICU, taking care of their senescent parents, or holding down three minimum-wage jobs they have to commute to by bus who need to tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not\u00a0<em>busy<\/em>\u00a0but\u00a0<em>tired<\/em>.\u00a0<em>Exhausted. Dead on their feet<\/em>. It&#8217;s most often said by people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they&#8217;ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they&#8217;re &#8220;encouraged&#8221; their kids to participate in. They&#8217;re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they are addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.<\/p>\n<p>Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren&#8217;t working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with their friends the way 4.0 students make sure to sign up for some extracurricular activities because they look good on college applications. I recently wrote a friend asking if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn&#8217;t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. My question had not a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation: This\u00a0<em>was<\/em>\u00a0the invitation. I was hereby asking him to do something with me. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he as shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.<\/p>\n<p>I recently learned a neologism that, like\u00a0<em>political correctness<\/em>,\u00a0<em>man cave<\/em>, and\u00a0<em>content-provider<\/em>, I instantly recognized as heralding an ugly new turn in the culture:\u00a0<em>planshopping<\/em>. That is, deferring committing to any one plan for an evening until you know what all your options are, and then picking the one that&#8217;s most likely to be fun\/advance your career\/have the most girls at it &#8212; in other words, treating people like menu options or products in a catalog.<\/p>\n<p>Even\u00a0<em>children<\/em>\u00a0are busy now,\u00a0scheduled down to the half hour with enrichment classes,\u00a0tutorials,\u00a0and extracurricular activities.\u00a0At the end of the day they come home as tired as grownups,\u00a0which seems not just sad but hateful.\u00a0I was a member of the latchkey generation,\u00a0and had three hours of totally unstructured,\u00a0largely unsupervised time every afternoon,\u00a0time I used to do everything from scouring<em>\u00a0The World Book Encyclopedia<\/em>\u00a0to making animated movies to convening with friends in the woods in order to chuck dirt clods directly into one another&#8217;s eyes,\u00a0all of which afforded me knowledge,\u00a0skills,\u00a0and insights that remain valuable to this day.<\/p>\n<p>The busyness is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it\u2019s something we\u2019ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. I recently Skyped with a friend who had been driven out of New York City by the rents and now has an artist\u2019s residency in a small town in the South of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn\u2019t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college \u2014 she has a circle of friends there who all go out to the cafe or watch TV together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (Sh once ruefully summarized dating in New York:\u00a0\u201cEveryone is too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.\u201d) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality \u2014 driven, cranky, anxious, and sad \u2014 turned out to be a reformative effect of her environment, of the crushing atmospheric pressure of ambition and competitiveness. It\u2019s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school; it\u2019s something we collectively force one another to do. It may not be a problem that\u2019s soluble through any social reform or self-help regimen; maybe it\u2019s just how things are.\u00a0<strong>Zoologist Konrade Lorenz calls \u201cthe rushed existence into which industrialized, commercialized man has precipitated himself\u201d and all its attendant afflictions \u2014 ulcers, hypertension, neuroses, etc.\u00a0\u2014 an \u201cinexpedient development,\u201d or evolutionary maladaptation, brought on by our ferocious intraspecies competition. He likens us to birds whose alluringly long plumage has rendered them flightless, easy prey.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>I can\u2019t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn\u2019t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn\u2019t matter. I once dated a woman that interned at a magazine where she wan\u2019t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison\u00a0<\/strong><strong>d\u2019etre had been obviated when Menu buttons appeared on remotes, so it\u2019s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. Based on the volume of my email correspondence and the amount of Internet ephemera I am forwarded on a daily basis, I suspect that most people with office jobs are doing as little as I am. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn\u2019t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor or a worm in a Tyrollean hat in a Richard Scarry book I\u2019m not convinced it\u2019s necessary. Yes, I know we\u2019re all very busy, but what, exactly, is getting done? Are all those people running late for meetings and yelling on their cell phones stopping the spread of malaria or developing feasible alternatives to fossil fuels or making anything beautiful?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>The\u00a0<\/strong><strong>busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness: Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are\u00a0<em>so busy<\/em>, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. All this noise and rush and stress seem contrived to drown out or over up some fear at the center of our lives. I know that after I\u2019ve spent a whole day working for running errands or answering emails or watching movies, keeping my brain busy and distracted, as soon as I lie down to sleep all the niggling quotidian worries and Big Picture questions I\u2019ve successfully kept at bay come crowding into my brain like monsters swarming out of the closet the instant you turn off the nightlight. When you ty to meditate, your brain suddenly comes up with a list of a thousand urgent items you should be obsessing about rather than simply sit still. One of my correspondents suggests that what we\u2019re all so afraid of is being left alone with ourselves.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll say it: I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel like 4 or 5 hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and see friends, read or watch a movie in the evening. The very best days of my life are given over to uninterrupted debauchery, but these are, alas, undependable and increasingly difficult to arrange.\u00a0This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won\u2019t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say,\u00a0\u201cWhat time?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But just recently, I insidiously started, because of professional obligation to become busy.\u00a0For the first time in my life I was able to tell people,\u00a0with a straight face, that I was \u201ctoo busy\u201d to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint: It makes you feel important, sough-after, and put-upon. It\u2019s also an unassailable excuse for declining boring invitations,\u00a0shirking unwelcome projects, and avoiding human interaction. Except that I hated actually being busy. Every morning my inbox was full of emails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I had to solve. It got more and more intolerable, until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I\u2019m writing this.<\/p>\n<p>Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I\u2019ve remembered about buttercups, stinkbugs, and the stars. I read a lot. And I\u2019m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months.\u00a0<strong>It\u2019s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it\u2019s also just about impossible to figure out what that might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again. I know not everyone has an isolated cabin to flee to. But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice: It is an indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration \u2014 it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.\u00a0\u201cIdle dreaming is often the essence of what we do,\u201d writes Thomas Pynchon in his essay on Sloth. Archimedes\u2019\u00a0\u201cEureka\u201d in the bath, Newton\u2019s apple, Jekyll and Hyde, the benzine ring: history is full of stories of inspiration that came in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbrickers, and no-accounts aren\u2019t responsible for more of the world\u2019s great ideas, inventions, and masterpieces than the hardworking.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;The goal of the future is full\u00a0<\/strong><strong>unemployment, so we can play. That\u2019s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.\u201d This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was in fact Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write\u00a0<em>Childhood\u2019s End<\/em>\u00a0and think up communications satellites. Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income form work, giving each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that\u2019ll be a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage, and 8-hour workdays. I know how heretical it sound in America, but there\u2019s really no reason we shouldn\u2019t regard drudgery as an evil to rid the world of if possible, like polio. It was the Puritans who perverted work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment. Now that the old taskmaster is out of office, maybe we could all take a long smoke break.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I suppose the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved like me.\u00a0But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world\u2019s endless frenetic hustle. My own life has admittedly been absurdly cushy. But my privileged position outside the hive may have given me a unique perspective on it. It\u2019s like being the designated driver at a bar:\u00a0When you\u2019re not drinking, ou can see drunkenness more clearly than those actually experiencing it. Unfortunately the only advice I have to offer the Busy is as unwelcome as the advice you\u2019d give to the Drunk. I\u2019m not suggesting everyone quit their jobs \u2014 just maybe take the rest of the day off. Go play some see-ball. Fuck in the middle of the afternoon. Take your daughter to a matinee. My role in life is to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once to make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play.<\/p>\n<p id=\"yui_3_17_2_1_1556810982395_377\">Even though my own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money. And I\u2019ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth is to spend it with people I love. I suppose it\u2019s possible I\u2019ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn\u2019t work harder, write more, and say everything I had to say, but I think what I\u2019ll really wish is that I could have one more round of Delanceys with Nick, another long late-night talk with Lauren, one last hard laugh with Harold. <strong>Life is too short to be busy.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>p.s. Honorable mention: Thanks\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.mixcloud.com\/TheTimFerrissShow\/lazy-a-manifesto-15-min\/\">Timothy Ferris.<\/a>\u00a0for the audio version of the essay. And if you did find any value in this post, please share shamelessly!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\">9<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span> Kina &#8211; Get you the moon I ask. For next 10 minutes, just sit on your forever distracted tight a$$ and for f#$&amp; sake just&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/2019\/05\/02\/lazy\/\">Continue Reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">LAZY: A MANIFESTO by Tim Krieder<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[48,49,50],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4923"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4952,"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923\/revisions\/4952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bijays.com.np\/musicpervs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}