Your Bias Towards Action
And why we all need to be lazier
A long long time ago, the entire human population of the world was being lazy. One day, someone stopped being lazy and ruined everything for everyone.
The world is obsessed with productivity, filling every hour of every day by doing stuff, and when you’re not doing, you’re expected to consume. We do this 24/7 since we’re born until we die.
“Don’t think, just do it”
Is a popular way to look at things. However, Socrates once said:
“The unexamined life is not worth living”
If the unexamined life is not worth living, can we say that the unexamined action is not worth doing?
We tend to just do without any examination, this means we do a lot, but we do mostly shitty stuff for no reason other than doing. And we don’t even know why we do it, we never asked.
Except for one case.
When you find yourself doing something for no reason, you’re playing.
But unless you examine your actions, you cannot determine if what you’re doing is play, if it isn’t, I suggest you do less of it.
Society is biased towards action, one could argue that action in an infinitely complex universe leads to a full circle.
Let me explain: people didn’t like doing math, so they figured out how to make even more complicated math in order to make calculators that make math easier. A shorter way to get the same result would have been to think long and hard enough to realize that you don’t need math.
Ok, but what if the person doing that math was playing?
That’s exactly what they were doing, and a system that allows very different people to live in society by playing(with some rules, one of which is “don’t be lazy”) came to be, it’s called capitalism. It has many flaws and creates many new problems, but the problems it solved were worth solving.
I saw this article the other day and it was the catalyzer for finishing this piece:
This is what bias towards action gave us: 500 years of science to come full circle and prescribe what we already had all along, but in the journey to discover it, we put it at risk.
The bigger the problem you’re trying to solve, the more resources you’re gonna need. The earth has limited resources, so if you’re earth-conscious, I suggest you embrace your lazy side and simply do less.
You could say that society’s bias towards action is responsible for the environmental problems we face, the only way to fight that is to carefully examine everything you do and reach a conclusion of what you consider play and can fit into the molds of society.
When you’ve reached that conclusion, play a lot, and when you’re not playing, be lazy. It’s OK to do nothing.
