(image courtesy of blackeri)
Sloth is… laziness, inactivity, idleness, restlessness, ennui, boredom, indifference. Everything that I’m personally quite guilty of from time to time. Here’s a description from Wikipedia, that I find terrifyingly familiar:
Ridiculously indolent and lover of sleep, the lazy man sees lions all over the street (overestimating the difficulty of getting a job or working);
his desires ″kill″ him because ″his hands refuse to labour″, and his path becomes a ″hedge of thorns″ … while he is wiser than seven sensible men in his own eyes. ….
His household becomes a real ruin and he falls prey to his ″want″ (scarcity) coming like an armed man and in the end to poverty, coming upon him like a robber.
The sluggard (lazy man) will share this fate with the talkative persons, with dreamers that ″watch the wind″ or ″regard the clouds″ and with those who ″chase fantasies″ (follow worthless pursuits).
–
Sluggard, talkative persons and dreamers- good God, that sounds exactly like me! Since this is so rings so true for me, I think I’ll approach this one from my personal perspective.
Sloth is very context-specific. A boy who’s absolutely listless, apathetic and unconcerned in school might be incredibly proactive, prudent, hardworking and motivated in World of Warcraft. A person who goes to work every day before everyone else and goes home after everyone else could still qualify as slothful, and I think this applies to a disturbingly vast majority of most people stuck in the rat race today.
It’s very easy to convince ourselves that we’re not slothful by looking at it from another perspective- I’m not doing my work in school because I’m busy with something else.
This is how some people “waste their time”.
Sloth is a lack of mindfulness. As Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” We become slothful and acedic when we disengage from reality, choosing to succumb to inertia rather than to make a conscious effort to assess it.
Sloth is inertia. An object at rest tends to remain at rest unless a force acts upon it. Inertia is “easy”, in the sense that it’s easy to keep doing what we’ve always been doing. It’s comfortable and familiar and incredibly easy to succumb to. Even if it’s not necessarily the easiest way of doing things.
Hacking Sloth
The secret lies in the realization that slothfulness often isn’t the easiest way to do things. I think most sluggards, including myself, have a substantial taste for ease and comfort. We like to do things in the simplest, quickest and most efficient ways, and if such a methodology is not immediately apparent, we choose to put it off. The inertia kicks in. It seems easier NOT to do your homework than to do it. But it actually isn’t. This will only become clear to you, however, if you…
Develop a long term perspective. Cramming before a test can seem immediate and fulfilling, but the sheer number of hours you’ll have to put in is actually disproportionately higher. An hour of study every weekday for a month adds up to about 20 hours. If you squeeze in those 20 hours into about 3 days before your test, you’re only going to understand and remember a fraction of what you would have if you simply studied an hour a day instead.
So I’m guessing you’d have to cram about 40-60 (or perhaps even 80-100!) hours into the last week if you want to get the same results. And even then, that additional workload will be incredibly taxing on your system- it will be exhausting, frustrating, tiring. You won’t be able to rest or relax. You might fall sick, and your social life may suffer. The enlightened sloth with the long term perspective gets a lot more done in far less time, and has a lot more time to enjoy the pleasure of idleness.
Focus on being excited, not happy. People tend to say “I want to be happy. That’s an incredibly ineffective way of doing things. ” Happiness is a weasel word that we use when we don’t want to take the effort to really figure out what we really want. It’s a vague concept that often simply means “I don’t want to feel the way I’m feeling right now.”
Excitement, on the other hand, is powerful stuff, and relatively much more straightforward. It allows you to transcend listlessness by focusing on something that you care about. I think it’s best to focus on something greater than yourself. I’m a lazy bugger, yet I manage to (barely) sustain this blog by reminding myself that I want to provoke and inspire other people to think harder, make better decisions and craft a better world. The idea of it excites me, and that pushes me towards doing what I know I must do. I’ve never met a person who said “I’m really excited, but I’m also kind of bored, listless and unhappy.” Excitement and acedia are mutually exclusive.
Focus on being productive instead of being busy. Many a false step was made by standing still. One of the most common excuses you’ll hear from people is “I’m too busy,” or “I don’t have time”. Some of us don’t even have any excuses- we just sit in front of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and whatever your poison might be and spend hours staring into space, clicking on notifications and trying to keep up with information that moves faster than we can absorb it. The trick is to figure out what you really want- a clear, specific goal, whether it’s “I want to be a Level 85 Death Knight”, “I want to write, record and sell an album” or “I want to make the most of my university education”, and remind yourself of it constantly.
Avoid depending on willpower. Our minds are incredible things, but they’re not as reliable as we’d like to believe. I think that most sloths tend to overestimate their own abilities. “Things aren’t so bad right now,” we’ll tell ourselves. “I’ll start studying/looking for a job/putting in the effort in a while/later/when I feel like it/when it’s obvious that I ought to.” We are far, far too generous when evaluating our future mental states. Willpower is fallible. If you want to quit smoking, it’s better to avoid people and places where you’re likely to smoke than to go there and count on your willpower to get you through. Similarly, when your assignment is due in a week, don’t presume that your future self will somehow acquire wisdom, prudence and effectiveness in 6 days. You most likely won’t. What you’ve been doing so far is almost always more powerful than what you say you’re going to do.
The trick to developing an accurate evaluation of your own willpower is to keep track of it. This minimizes the self-deception that normally perpetuates sloth by putting you face-to-face with reality- how often do you get something done when you say you’ll do it tomorrow? Write it down. After a few months, the evidence will speak for itself. Once it seeps into your subconscious, even you won’t buy your own excuses.
“Hacking The 7 Deadly Sins“, including Vanity,Lust, Greed.
Hacking The 7 Deadly Sins: Sloth
Sloth is… laziness, inactivity, idleness, restlessness, ennui, boredom, indifference. Everything that I’m personally quite guilty of from time to time. Here’s a description from Wikipedia, that I find terrifyingly familiar:
The sluggard (lazy man) will share this fate with the talkative persons, with dreamers that ″watch the wind″ or ″regard the clouds″ and with those who ″chase fantasies″ (follow worthless pursuits).
–
Sluggard, talkative persons and dreamers- good God, that sounds exactly like me! Since this is so rings so true for me, I think I’ll approach this one from my personal perspective.
Sloth is very context-specific. A boy who’s absolutely listless, apathetic and unconcerned in school might be incredibly proactive, prudent, hardworking and motivated in World of Warcraft. A person who goes to work every day before everyone else and goes home after everyone else could still qualify as slothful, and I think this applies to a disturbingly vast majority of most people stuck in the rat race today.
It’s very easy to convince ourselves that we’re not slothful by looking at it from another perspective- I’m not doing my work in school because I’m busy with something else.
This is how some people “waste their time”.
Sloth is a lack of mindfulness. As Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” We become slothful and acedic when we disengage from reality, choosing to succumb to inertia rather than to make a conscious effort to assess it.
Sloth is inertia. An object at rest tends to remain at rest unless a force acts upon it. Inertia is “easy”, in the sense that it’s easy to keep doing what we’ve always been doing. It’s comfortable and familiar and incredibly easy to succumb to. Even if it’s not necessarily the easiest way of doing things.
Hacking Sloth
The secret lies in the realization that slothfulness often isn’t the easiest way to do things. I think most sluggards, including myself, have a substantial taste for ease and comfort. We like to do things in the simplest, quickest and most efficient ways, and if such a methodology is not immediately apparent, we choose to put it off. The inertia kicks in. It seems easier NOT to do your homework than to do it. But it actually isn’t. This will only become clear to you, however, if you…
Develop a long term perspective. Cramming before a test can seem immediate and fulfilling, but the sheer number of hours you’ll have to put in is actually disproportionately higher. An hour of study every weekday for a month adds up to about 20 hours. If you squeeze in those 20 hours into about 3 days before your test, you’re only going to understand and remember a fraction of what you would have if you simply studied an hour a day instead.
So I’m guessing you’d have to cram about 40-60 (or perhaps even 80-100!) hours into the last week if you want to get the same results. And even then, that additional workload will be incredibly taxing on your system- it will be exhausting, frustrating, tiring. You won’t be able to rest or relax. You might fall sick, and your social life may suffer. The enlightened sloth with the long term perspective gets a lot more done in far less time, and has a lot more time to enjoy the pleasure of idleness.
Focus on being excited, not happy. People tend to say “I want to be happy. That’s an incredibly ineffective way of doing things. ” Happiness is a weasel word that we use when we don’t want to take the effort to really figure out what we really want. It’s a vague concept that often simply means “I don’t want to feel the way I’m feeling right now.”
Excitement, on the other hand, is powerful stuff, and relatively much more straightforward. It allows you to transcend listlessness by focusing on something that you care about. I think it’s best to focus on something greater than yourself. I’m a lazy bugger, yet I manage to (barely) sustain this blog by reminding myself that I want to provoke and inspire other people to think harder, make better decisions and craft a better world. The idea of it excites me, and that pushes me towards doing what I know I must do. I’ve never met a person who said “I’m really excited, but I’m also kind of bored, listless and unhappy.” Excitement and acedia are mutually exclusive.
Focus on being productive instead of being busy. Many a false step was made by standing still. One of the most common excuses you’ll hear from people is “I’m too busy,” or “I don’t have time”. Some of us don’t even have any excuses- we just sit in front of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and whatever your poison might be and spend hours staring into space, clicking on notifications and trying to keep up with information that moves faster than we can absorb it. The trick is to figure out what you really want- a clear, specific goal, whether it’s “I want to be a Level 85 Death Knight”, “I want to write, record and sell an album” or “I want to make the most of my university education”, and remind yourself of it constantly.
Avoid depending on willpower. Our minds are incredible things, but they’re not as reliable as we’d like to believe. I think that most sloths tend to overestimate their own abilities. “Things aren’t so bad right now,” we’ll tell ourselves. “I’ll start studying/looking for a job/putting in the effort in a while/later/when I feel like it/when it’s obvious that I ought to.” We are far, far too generous when evaluating our future mental states. Willpower is fallible. If you want to quit smoking, it’s better to avoid people and places where you’re likely to smoke than to go there and count on your willpower to get you through. Similarly, when your assignment is due in a week, don’t presume that your future self will somehow acquire wisdom, prudence and effectiveness in 6 days. You most likely won’t. What you’ve been doing so far is almost always more powerful than what you say you’re going to do.
The trick to developing an accurate evaluation of your own willpower is to keep track of it. This minimizes the self-deception that normally perpetuates sloth by putting you face-to-face with reality- how often do you get something done when you say you’ll do it tomorrow? Write it down. After a few months, the evidence will speak for itself. Once it seeps into your subconscious, even you won’t buy your own excuses.
“Hacking The 7 Deadly Sins“, including Vanity,Lust, Greed.