Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

Cooking blogs and YouTube channels have changed food preparation into performance. Twitter can make sharing jokes with your friends feel like a graded comedy class. Sites like Pinterest and Instagram have even turned craft-making competitive.

I really love watching videos of people mixing glitter, paint, and food coloring into clear, glue-based putties and slimes. Something about watching people swirl bright colors and sequins into clear goop is just endlessly soothing to me. Yet the online community devoted to these craft videos (they call themselves “slimers”) is filled with backbiting, drama, and wrath. Popular accounts constantly fight with one another over who deserves credit for inventing a new slime formula or who was the first to film their videos in a particular style. What was meant to be a soothing, kind of silly activity has somehow transformed into a contentious, status-obsessed one.

Facebook and Instagram have tailored their algorithms in order to reward regular, compulsive use of their platforms, and to isolate and silence everyone who isn’t a power user with a good sense of how to game the numbers.

if you don’t open Facebook multiple times per day, the site seems to “punish” you by hiding your posts from many people on your friends list.

The only way to get a ton of likes or follows on these platforms is to spend hours on them liking other people’s posts, leaving comments, and boosting “engagement.”

We act as though the opposite of being depressed is simply being not depressed. But that’s not true! We can do more than just be not depressed; we can study what makes a person truly happy, what makes a person feel like their life is beautiful, that it has meaning. We can maximize the good things, not just downplay the bad.”

Fred tells me that a skilled savorer would not distract themselves from the pizza in his example. They would eat it languidly, planning out each bite, maybe even saving the very best bite for last, so they have something to look forward to all the way to the end.

Even something that ought to be pleasurable, like taking a vacation or winning an award, becomes a new obligation to measure, document, and share with the world via social media.

His only benchmark for whether a joke was any good was if it got a hundred likes within the first hour. If it didn’t hit that mark, it was a failure.

Showing happiness in our behavior: smiling, singing, jumping for joy, flapping our hands excitedly, etc.

if you want to be happy and appreciate your life, you should show your joy when you’re feeling it. As someone who loves to flap my hands frantically when I’m excited and who lives to coo and squeal obnoxiously whenever I see a puppy, this is very good news.

Most of us think of self-care as involving something like getting a massage, buying a new outfit, or taking a warm bubble bath. Those forms of self-care are the easiest to market and to make a profit from, so it’s no wonder they’re the most well-known. However, pampering is just one form self-care can take. Awe is a much deeper and more restorative form of self-care because it has a spiritual component.

Unfamiliar places and experiences take longer for our brains to process, which actually creates the illusion that time is slowing down. This is part of why the drive to a new place always seems to take longer than the drive home.

If you’re a habitual overachiever and trophy hoarder, odds are you absolutely loathe doing things you’re bad at. This is a particularly common problem for people who were “gifted” students in school, or who were constantly told as children that they were smart.

In the book The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam suggests that failing at something that society has told us to do can be a revolutionary act.

I started working at it slowly, three or four days a week.

….thats a lot of time to spend lifting weights.

Alienated Internet nerds all around the world found they could relate to Joan. But Joan didn’t really get anything out of it.

It’s not that quitting the Internet magically caused her to become healthier; rather, when Joan stopped focusing on instant gratification and chasing achievements

Digital tools have made life much easier, but they’ve also left us with an endless array of accounts to maintain and notifications to worry about.

Some research shows that when you take a person’s phone away, they feel unsafe, and may even experience a drop in self-esteem because of it.

Monikah has a second phone with no SIM card in it, which she uses for browsing the Internet at night.

She’s an avid hiker and naturalist, and in the evenings she likes to go online and research local flora and fauna and plan her next hike. In the past, this relaxing experience was ruined by constant notifications and messages.

For other people, switching from a bright screen to a Kindle or other e-ink device can be a great way to remain connected to a wealth of information without...

That Facebook message from your cousin doesn’t have to be answered immediately. The Duolingo owl won’t murder you in your sleep if you forget to practice Spanish vocabulary today.

I decided a few months ago to delete the Fitbit app, because I realized that monitoring my sleep, daily steps, and exercise levels just made me feel anxious.

Life has become so intensely gamified that it’s easy to think of every activity as a competition. Did today’s selfie get more likes than yesterday’s? Did I review more books on Goodreads this year than last year? Am I using my free time more virtuously than all my friends are?

The phrase is ‘stop and smell the roses,’ not ‘run through the field trying to smell as many roses as you can, as quickly as possible.’ ”

Noah has a to-read list that is staggeringly long.

When he visits people’s homes, Noah scans the hosts’ bookshelves looking for enticing titles to add to his list. No matter the topic of conversation, he always has at least one or two books to recommend on the subject, sometimes titles he’s actually gotten around to reading, sometimes not.

He knows a ton about neuroscience for someone who’s never taken a class on the subject.

Noah’s computer used to regularly crash from the burden of keeping all his browser tabs open.

news articles, op-eds, scientific reports, essays, Reddit threads, e-mail chains, and more, some of which Noah’s been meaning to read

I suspect that even if he did find the time, he’d spend half of it reading and half of it finding piles and piles of new sites to add to his list.

A few years ago, I had to ban myself from a Facebook group Noah had created, because he was constantly sharing articles with everyone in the group, often multiple times per day. It annoyed me and stressed me out. I think it probably hurt Noah’s feelings that I did that, or maybe it gave him the impression that I don’t care about the world as deeply as he did. But I just had to do it. I was already drowning in information. I couldn’t let another information addict pull me down even deeper.

It’s hard to know how much Noah’s reading has enriched his life, and how much it’s detracted

The Laziness Lie tells us that we should take full advantage of the privileges of the Internet by forever learning more and more.

we treat being well-read as an obligation that can’t be escaped.

Before the 1800s, there was no such thing as a college major. Back then, all students were expected to take courses in all topics. A college degree meant you were very well-educated in all the “liberal arts”: writing, philosophy, music, math, astronomy, and more.

there was simply too much information available for that to be a reasonable expectation anymore. So, the idea of “majoring” was developed.

as human knowledge has expanded even more, many subjects have gotten too dense for a person to fully comprehend them in just four years of study. Now if you want to study a subject such as psychology deeply, you need a master’s degree or a PhD, not a bachelor’s degree.

In academia, we often say “a master’s is the new bachelor’s.”

When it comes to information overload, college is just one piece of the puzzle. Data- and knowledge-sharing has permeated every waking hour of our lives, whether we’re in school or not. Each of us is absolutely inundated with facts, opinions, and meaningless Internet fights every single time we unlock our phones.

I never would have realized I was transgender if it weren’t for online communities where trans people shared their experiences. Hell, if it weren’t for the Internet and online writing platforms like WordPress and Medium, I wouldn’t ever have become an author. I understand how the Internet can change lives for the better.

much of the data that gets posted each day is “junk data”—random musings, bad jokes, advertisements, self-promotions, and complicated reactions to and critiques of other posts that make no sense without proper context.

Am I providing enough context on what that fact means, so a person knows what to do with the information? Or am I just freaking people out?

“I’m pants-shittingly nervous,” I wrote to him in an e-mail after Betsy DeVos was named secretary of education. “I literally keep having nervous shits.” “I’ve also been stress-pooping a lot,” Noah wrote back after Trump’s travel ban was announced.

As infections rose exponentially and local and national governments scrambled to respond, staying online for updates no longer felt optional—it was essential if you wanted to know what your risks were and whether you were legally permitted

If you’re a person of color, a sexual-assault survivor, an LGBTQ+ person, or an immigrant, you probably haven’t been able to escape worrisome news for years at this point. It’s hard to disengage, because each frightening development has a palpable impact on your life.

Watching the news shifted from something you did for maybe an hour per day after dinner to something you could do constantly, even as a primary source of entertainment.

Public health research shows that when the news presents health-related information in a pessimistic way, people are actually less likely to take steps to protect themselves from illness as a result.