In the back recesses of humanity’s darkened and numb consciousness, is the realization of what used to be known as The Seven Deadly Sins. These seem to have been handed down to us via Catholicism but along the way, came to be implanted in our native cultural understanding. These sins are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. In the last few generations, all have all undergone changes in perception, sometimes by direct intervention of our influencers. Pride went from sin to become an open virtue, even when shame was explicitly warranted. Greed, the same, except as kept discreet by its most enthusiastic celebrants. Wrath is tolerated, working toward full open acceptance if done in the name of woke causes, and envy, like greed, is quietly promoted because it sells things, equals greed, equals good. Lust is universally condemned and universally practiced, and gluttony, nearly the same, except when it leads to the sin of fatness which is condemned even as gluttony is encouraged. This leaves sloth, the forgotten sin, widely practiced, widely accepted, widely ignored into total oblivion.
Everyone knows a lazy person. It’s your co-worker, your kid, your, student, your spouse. These are an annoyance, but we’re no longer allowed to be incensed by it. In fact, true indignation and especially condemnation of slothfulness, mostly referred to here as laziness, is now grounds for your condemnation because it’s become falsely bonded to the erroneous notion of ‘ableism’, which is ‘the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior’ as defined by accessliving.org. I have no qualms over making adjustments for the truly disabled until certain guardians start assuming and asserting authority over thought crimes; but even more so, when activist and individuals widen the tent to include the lazy. Were the lazy born that way? Who gives a damn, it’s still contemptible.
On a practical level, every drop of manifested sloth joins a trickle of other acts perpetrated by one’s self and others, becomes a stream, a river, a torrent, widened infinitely by the non-contributions of countless others, and we wonder why everything costs so much, why nothing gets done, why you have to wait for hours at the MVA, the dealership, the coffee shop, your office, while three or four mindless looking drones amble about aimlessly ignoring the business at hand, yet still collecting a paycheck.
In a marriage it’s your husband binging TV or slaving away at video games until 2:30am, never taking out the trash, helping with the dishes, leaving you with running the kids around town even though you work the same job hours as he does. Or it’s your wife, also binging Net Flicks, feigning illness constantly, staying in or going to bed at crucial hours of family life, or forcing the family to resort to Dominos, Grub Hub, or Applebees multiple nights a week until your monthly food budget rivals your mortgage as the household debt spirals out of control.
Laziness becomes institutionalized when the federal government subsidizes and incentivizes it. When masses of people regard the combination of cash and idleness of higher value than the dignity of work, and when any government values the political loyalty of those masses higher than the personal well-being of those individuals, the welfare state is the enabler, normalizing slobs.
Can any of this change? Let’s say for the sake of discussion, that no, we can’t change anyone, and that’s mostly true, not directly at least. The point of this essay is that laziness is so ubiquitously accepted, that its embraced. That’s the piece that could change. Dear Lord let it begin with me; I say that partly in jest because what I advocate here is to stop being tolerant. If you’re the one that’s lazy, work on yourself and I’ll work on me, but if I see you being lazy, maybe I can just be rude and call it what it is, with a smile of course. Maybe that’ll help you. In the bigger picture, if enough people stopped coddling what used to be a character flaw, maybe that cold shoulder might be the extra help you need.
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