The experience of being “tired” and needing a break is one we all eventually reach, a breaking point to our spirits as some may say, but a quote I read from the French writer Jules Renard, “Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.”(why you need a gym bro). I relate to this as a high school student approaching the end of my school year and have a lot to say about it.
I see laziness as an enemy of hardworking students, because, it’s not the ones that don’t work too hard that would experience an increase in laziness, but the ones that work hard that have to fight against it the most. An analogy would be fasting for instance, the person fasting, is the one going against the struggle of hunger in comparison to the person who isn’t. I found throughout my sophomore year, that being lazy becomes addictive, when you succeed once, being lazy, it almost becomes like a physical gamble, that you keep spending your casino chips on. It really made me question my work ethic, and how our mindset is really attached to this, not mainly our physical aspect. Not only does it lower your expectations of yourself, but it wastes one of our most valuable assets, that we can’t retain ‘tick tock’ tick tock’, you got it! Time! Imagine wasting your time, for increments of joy that don’t last, and cause an even worse burnout later on. What I mean by that is, the workload you put on yourself makes it even harder for you to recover. As Anne Frank once said, “Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.”
This laziness I experienced at school, it even appears at home and affects my home. I get lazy to even go wash my own plates because it takes me out of my comfort zone. We know there is the neuro-chemical aspect of this, which is the mass induction of dopamine, and it makes you crave dopamine, and so the easiest way to achieve this… is to do the most comforting thing. This makes me think, like attracts like, if you watch Netflix instead of doing homework, then you won’t stop, because you like your situation, this is where binge-watching “occurs”. During Math class, I would be multiple lessons behind, and it would cause me so much pressure leading up to the test, and you don’t feel this pressure truly until you get really close to that edge. Another example would be the end of this semester for me, I have not shown as much laziness, because I know my life is in jeopardy if I don’t get my grades up.
Finally, about laziness, what I want to make clear, it isn’t always bad, it does teach you to think quality, but not execution. Your environment truly matters, and my biggest achievement towards my chronic condition of procrastination was looking to other people I look up to, in my example, I found my friends at my church extremely successful, and as I started to become webbed to my church even more, I found a better cure to the cycle of extreme hard work, to burnout, to extreme hard work, and that is… balance, simple ain’t it, but even the most simple of definitions could be the hardest of applications. A “healthy environment”, a “positive mindset”, a “plan.” The rules of nature apply.
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