Laziness Does Not Exist
My friend J gave me the book "Laziness Does Not Exist" for a wedding present.
I'm more ready for that book now, than I would have been ten years ago. To illustrate this, let me tell you an anecdote. At some point in college, I had a website idea for an "ideal human website". On this website you could put in all the traits you thought an ideal human might have as a kind of aspirational goal.
NOTE: Let me rule out one fear, it was not an racial eugenicist project. On my list were things like "speak multiple languages, swim well, be handy with power tools, be resilient". That said, it wasn't a healthy idea. In fact even typing this is giving me real 😳🙈🤮 vibes.(Sometimes I have to laugh at the whole Silicon Valley of myself. Was everyone was secretly like this as a child or was it in that Hetch Hetchy water?)
But let me actually be curious about what would drive little 19 year old me to have that idea at that time in my life. I was a little lonely. I had a solid and beloved crew of college friends, but they were less generative and learning oriented than I was. What I missed was the feeling of making and learning with people (a lack which would eventually lead me to SFPC). The heart-kernel of the idea was to be inspired by what other people wanted to learn and share motivation to do hard things. This idea stayed just a notebook scribble, for what it's worth.
Wanting to learn and grow is a fine desire, where it gets so totally unhealthy is the idea of anchoring on some kind of mythic and impossible ideal. Woof.
In the book Laziness Does Not Exist, Devon Price talks about "societal shoulds". I "should have more saved for retired", "should have a higher paying job", "should spend more time with my family"
I've used that terminology with my therapist for a long time. Specifically, reframing my "shoulds" to "wants"*
Ex: Not "I should write a blog post because it's been like a month and a half" but "I want to write this blog post because I want more practice writing and it will feel good to re-invigorate this project for myself."
*Many of my shoulds are wants, but not all. Often when examined carefully with space for dissent "shoulds" become "won'ts"
The should vs. want distinction helps me understand what feels so wrong about the way I thought at 19. There were wants inside of my impossible set of tasks, but they were strangled and suffocating inside a mountain of "should". The unspoken second half of an "I should" is of course "so that I can have worth". I never sat down to figure out which of those things I wanted, which of those things I thought I should want, and which of those things were actually achievable. The weight of all the things I wasn't doing were constantly sitting over my head and all things I was doing went unacknowledged.
I'm a little better now. There are lots of things I want to do but it doesn't mean I will do all of them. Certainly not at this moment. And I'm mostly okay with that.
I will possibly have more thoughts on the book again later. This was sort of a side tangent.