Lazy Afternoon

Im often amazed at the amount of effort we put in to avoid doing anything. It seems to be increasing too! What am I talking about? Prem Rawat recently described technology as "finding new ways to do old things", and I like that. It seems to me that the inventiveness of human beings is always aimed at the same thig: how to do the least amount possible.

 Imagine one of our early ancestor as a caveman, who's job it was to fetch the water for cooking or drinking. How many times did that person thin."there's got to be easier way than schlepping this stuff all that long way": And eventually we started to have water in a well instead of just the streams, then we started to pipe it into our homes - the Romans were very good at that, bringing water for very long ways via their aqueducts. And so it goes on. First we crap wherever we happen to be, then we start to pile it into specific areas, so we don't constantly walk in it, then we maybe even bury it to avoid the stink, etc. I remember going to the outhouse at the bottom of the yard. But laziness drives us on. Whenever we do things, we automatically start to find ways round it to do what we would rather do. That's why there's criminals - they are people finding ways to do the wanted thing but avoiding the rules. Anything to avoid effort. 

I suspect that we would like to do nothing at all, just lie in a comfortable bed and let life happen around us. But do we do that? No. True, we have to make some effort every day, go to the toilet, eat, breathe, drink. So movement is necessary, but as little as possible please. So we don't walk if we can ride, we like someone else to do the cooking and washing and cleaning, these days, since the pandemic started, we also let others bring us whatever we like, so we don't have to gout shopping or worse, carry stuff home.

But for all these things to happen, someone has to do something. So we invent distribution systems, we invent ways of storing stuff, we invent ways of growing food we like, we make stuff to play with - toys or games, etc. Why do we have games? It passes the time. Basically it's actually doing something that appears to preclude laziness. On the other hand, most people at a game, let others do the work and just watch. 

Think about it: most of our inventions are for labour-saving devices or to let a machine do what a human being does otherwise. In order to achieve more leisure time, we work like crazy to build this stuff and then we can relax, except you can't relax because all these people want the labour-saving stuff you build. So what starts as labour-saving ends up creating ever more work. At the same time, the stress of living in this crazy world is what stops us relaxing and enjoying life. No time for enjoyment - gotta work. And all we ever wanted was to do nothing! What we really want, of course, is to be happy, but that is almost impossible in world that runs after laziness and uses all it's energies to make life easier, so there's no time to be happy and just enjyo that.

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