I wanted to try and get some more opinions on the discussion we had two Tuesdays ago. We discussed whether or not we believed it was in people's nature to be lazy. The question is 'will most people take the easy option when they are given a choice between something easy and something hard?' My opinion in class and on here is the same. I believe most people would rather go down the easy path without question. You might even be able to say that most people are naturally lazy, but this might be taking it a step too far. I believe people have just disguised their accepted norm of laziness and just called it a pursuit for comfort. Is that not what most Americans are trying to achieve in their lives, happiness and comfort?
We live our lives day after day striving for something. Most people get up and go to work to make money so they can buy themselves nice things and make their standard of living higher. People want things, things that can make their lives easier, more comfortable. But why? I believe people want nice things because society puts a high value on nice things. I think another problem with society is the given belief that most people want this dream of being rich and not having to work hard ever again. With the craze that hit Americans over the $640 million Mega Millions lotto I support my argument. The American Dream is to be stinking rich without any effort and never have to lift a finger for the rest of their lives.
However, somewhere along the line the word and idea of laziness gained a negative connotation. Even though it is the thing most Americans strive for everyday people still want to hide behind the idea of happiness and comfort.
Your thoughts or angry rebuttal to my potentially bone-head argument?
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I would argue that the overwhelming number of technological advances that have been developed in recent years, as a means to simplify our lives, are in turn contributing to the laziness of a great portion of society. Some people claim that these are improvements that increase their level of comfort and decrease the amount of time that they have to devote to certain tasks. But what do most people do with the saved time other than waste it in another manner? Other people set their expectations of these products too high and end up complaining that they aren't as helpful as they expected. More than laziness this portrays greed. There are, however, some people who don't always try to take the easy route. For example, a number of people who win the lottery and could get by without working the rest of their lives still keep their jobs because they don't know how they would spend their time otherwise. They choose to use the money as more of a security and only splurge a little. These are the two extremes and more attention seems to be devoted to the former than the latter. So it's not much of a surprise that people's perceptions of society display a correlation to this. It's hard to for sure whether or not one extreme is far more common than the other.
ReplyDeleteThis is ripe for a Q study, as you'd expect that I'd say. There will not likely ever be anything close to a consensus on an issue of such breadth as human nature's propensity for laziness. It may be, as Kira notes, that the technological conveniences fairly commonplace in this culture are conducive to a sense of laziness or, at a minimum, lack of patience and perseverence. But in countries where survival is a challenge, the basics of a healthy life are scarce, I'd be inclined to say that survival trumps the quest for laziness or perhaps even comfort. So we're talking about a phenomenon that falls short of cultural universality. Some people seem predisposed to be questioners, even prickly ones, not content at all with conventional wisdom on a myriad of issues. They hardly seem motivated by a quest for comfort; rather, they seem driven to find out how things work. And they do not seem lazy at all; but neither do they seem obsessive or driven. Most such people that I know seem blissfully undaunted by life's setbacks; indeed, they seem to playfully go about the business of what many would call hard work -- enjoying life as a never-ending learning opportunity. For me, as an educator, the question raised by these people is, how do we cultivate and disseminate what seems to come naturally to them?
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