Ever since forever (which is to say, as long as I can remember remembering) people (which is to say, the people around me who believe themselves to have some sort of influence on me) have told me how lazy I am. “Work harder,” they said “and you can be something someday.” Be something… someday…
Consequently, being young, innocent, and stupid, I have spent most of my life (which is to say, my life up until this point in time, as I haven’t experienced what comes afterwards as of yet, though I am sure I will) believing this. My entire sub-adult life has been one large attempt to overcome this laziness. Finding ways to become more productive, scheduling work and play, using all manner of tools, trying to give myself some kind of mystical thing the ancient space priests of Zjingoblarf call “discipline…” All kinds of shit, basically, to try and counter-act this horrible curse put upon me by a mysterious island on which time stands still (which is to say, Aruba, where laziness shines brightly onto your face from 7 in the morning until 7 at night. There is also a powerful and irrational smoke monster which is a threat to any living thing with even some brain activity, its name is “Parliament”).
I tried for years, and for years I believed myself a failure. “You will never succeed in your studies if you don’t work hard! How can you ever maintain a healthy relationship if you slack off so much? Stop looking at totally hilarious internet memes and get to work!” Any system, method, or program I attempted to use did not take. It’s 2011, and I am still the same lazy bastard I always was, completing work right before the deadline, and suffering for it.
Wait, hold on, am I suffering? It’s 2011, and life is fucking good! I’m living in my own little house (which is to say, renting, but not an apartment, so not sharing the building with anyone else, which gives me bragging rights, especially in the city) with this amazing girl with whom I’ve had a strong, healthy, relationship for almost 6 years, and after many years of stumbling I’m kicking ass on the academic field, with the end actually being in sight. I’m also very confident about my future career, which involves me making my own money and not being subservient to some manager whose IQ is in the single digits. I have a solid basis for this future with extensive, self-taught, knowledge on one of the world’s most widely used website platforms (WordPress) and with completely self-made and self-managed websites which aren’t (yet) bringing in a fortune, but are most definitely profitable. So no, I guess I’m not suffering.
Does this mean that all those anti-laziness techniques have worked?! Have I finally become an adult, have I finally become something, and is this day someday? Have I overcome the chronic laziness that has plagued me for so long?
Nope.
Read that? It says nope.
Revelations are funny things. They show how your self-image throughout your own history is pretty much just a constructed reality. They allow you to see the matrix, basically, for those of you who prefer your philosophical notions to be filtered through action movies. And just like all those silly little humans in The Matrix, seeing it allows you to reconstruct it. So BOOM, time to reconfigure my self-image:
All those times that people have called me lazy, they omitted something incredibly important, or they did see it but labeled it as bad: Even with my laziness, I always succeeded. I always got away with things no matter how little work I did. I now believe that this is an important superpower which those who called me lazy might have been afraid of. They saw it as me being lazy, BUT being able to get away with things. Now I see it differently.
I get things done, which allows me to be lazy.
I get good, nay, fantastic grades for essays written the night before the deadline. I do my best website designing when I have many other things to do. In short, I work well under pressure, so maybe I am not lazy, maybe I just delay and procrastinate in order to better work. You can call me lazy all you want, but I bring results.
This is not a new phenomenon. Sure, being 24, I am quite a bit more grown up than I was before, but it didn’t fix my laziness. There was never any laziness to fix. I brought results in high school. I didn’t do shit, barely ever made homework, was on the edge of failing many times. But I never did fail, I graduated without any issues, getting a piece of paper with the exact same worth as that of those people who worked extra hard to become best-in-class.
I’m happy with the amount of work I do. It gets me where I want to be. It makes me who I want to be. I am proud of where I am, who I am, and how I got here.
Could I work harder sometimes? Sure. Can you tell me about anybody normal who doesn’t have those problems? Could I plan my day a little better, and stress myself out a little less as I approach deadlines? Maybe, maybe… But what if it is that very stress which makes me do such good work in the first place, what if I don’t do good work without a deadline?
Interesting questions for me to think about, for sure, and as a rational being I will think about them a lot. I’ve always tried to define my life in terms of self improvement. But sometimes that self improvement is not so much improvement of my actions, as it is an improvement of my self-image. I work hard enough to get what I want. Always will, and more importantly, always have.
So I’d like to kindly invite anybody who has ever called me lazy, and could not see that I was getting things done regardless, to royally kiss my ass (which is to say, I would like them to place their lips on my buttocks as I let out a great big fart to show them who’s boss).
