Laziness = Good

Laziness is a good thing.  Laziness leads to greatness.  Laziness is necessity's cousin when it comes to fostering inventions, and goes by the well known alias, 'convenience'.  We should embrace our natural drive to lay around and have machines do things for us that we don't want to do.

Some of society's most beneficial gadgets were conceived by somebody lazy.  Some lazy soul asked, "Why beat your rags on a rock when a machine can thrash them about?"  Why do we cook on a stove?  Because lazy people got sick of spending hours picking up sticks, digging out coal, and cutting peat.  I don't want to carry around six pounds of coins, jangling with a limp in search of a public telephone.  I want to carry a phone with me.

Personally, I work hard at being lazy.  I continually try to figure out ways to shorten any menial task I hate so I can get back to doing menial tasks I like.  What is the most efficient way I can fold laundry?  Can I shave off two minutes cutting the lawn if I run the mower at new angles?  Is it shorter if I take highway 16 north?  Being lazy is hard work.  It takes hours, days, even years to come up with and perfect new ways to get out of working harder than one needs.  Hopefully, we keep track of how long these new forms of sloth take to devise so we can make sure we get that time back.  

Unfortunately, some people think all these ways to take care of life's chores with less effort means they are supposed to do more.  Why do these people wreck it for the rest of us?  Do you really think 'soccer moms' would shuttle their kids all over town, to violin, ballet, Thai Chi, swim, and Chinese classes, if they had to use a horse?  After Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he took it easy for a while.  He got married and spent a year on his honeymoon before going back to work.  Johannes Gutenberg, after inventing the moveable type printing press, spent most of his life associated with printing, repaying loans, and getting sued.  Did he try inventing the Dewey decimal library system, paperbacks, or e-books?  No.  He knew he'd done enough.  Let's calm down here.

While we've become lazy enough that our bodies no longer have to labor in the ways for which they were built, and obesity will soon overtake smallpox as history's most ubiquitous agent of death, we still have room to improve.  The President, in his State of the Union address, asked for Americans to find new ways to get lazier than we are already.  What I heard him say was, "We need to win the future by inventing new ways to get out of working."

I say let's take up the President's challenge in finding the most creative ways to be lazier.  Who among us will invent '30-second Rice'?