Productivity and laziness and why we hate life

I aim to be productively lazy. I want to get things done. But I want to get things done that are useful. There is no need or use in being busy simply to be busy. There is no nobility in working just to work.

The desire to seem busy is closely to tied to communal peer pressure and the need to be seen as noble. Goodness and obedience are conflated in the Civilized discourse. This is the morality of the slave, and of the busy parent. A good boy or a good girl is one who doesn't interrupt mommy when she's doing something else.

In the tribe, unity and conformity is necessary for survival. However everyone has an equal say in what unity and conformity must be enforced. In civilization, conformity is enforced by those above upon those below for the benefit of those in power. Civilization enforces conformity to remind you of your place, to preempt any chance of rebellion. And modern religions speak in code talking about the unease we feel with this unwilling bargain. Abrahamic religions speak of trying to redeem our sins, Buddhism talks of relieving are suffering.

And this brings us back to the idea that being busy is virtue. Keep us busy and we can't rebel. We dont have time. But busy with what? We chase an abstract platonic ideal of conformity as productivity as success. We are trained to chase show Home Interiors for houses, radioactive green front Lawns, impossible six pack abs and thigh gaps, ridiculous sitcom perfection in our family lives. We trained to chase an impossible suburban ideal, keeping up with the Jones on steroids.

Do we actually want these things? Or more accurately, will they bring us satisfaction? Or are they illusions? Are they, to steal from Derrick Jensen, toxic mimics which will seem to fill the void but only succeed in making it worse? Daniel Quinn argued that civilisation is dominated by a quest to find a replacement for the sense of satisfaction with life which we lost when we became civilized. And since civilization is the cause of these problems, civilization is unlikely to produce the solution.

I want stop briefly here and stress that civilisation is not the same thing as modern technology and learning and science. Civilisation has accelerated humanity's acquisition of science, technology and so on. Civilisation is a cultural technology, like capitalism and democracy and socialism. And these things can be overlaid and combined. Civilisation is the cultural equivalent of chemical fertilizer, enabling growth while depleting natural fertility.

Tim Ferriss has talked at length about tge difference between efficient and effective. Efficient is doing things right, while effective is doing the right things. By keeping us focused on impossible idealized goals; we are kept busy and efficient, rather than effective and (hopefully) well rested. But we are kept in line with dream that one day we will have a house we don't own with a pointless front lawn and two cars we also don't own and a big screen television and a spouse we rarely see and children we don't raise.

We are borg. resistance is futile