A persuasive essay I wrote in high school on how laziness is a good thing.

Life is mundane. It should be noted however that this only applies to individual life, not societal life. This is because societal life does not focus on an individual life but on life in general, and so new and different things happen to different people all the time. However, for most people who live in a country that is not plagued with war, disease, or other destroyers of life, they get up, get ready, go to work, come back, and go to bed. It is very routine and clichéd. One can even go one step further and say that life is downright boring and repetitive. People compare life to a river constantly flowing forever. From another point of view, life is a river constantly flowing forever – there is seldom any change in the pattern. Life goes on. Sure things change, but the general flow of individual life remains the same and continues onward in an ever-constant, forever linear line...with some 'bumps'.

Laziness is defined as "the lack of desire to act or work in general or to do an act or work that is expected of a person". Looking at this from a long term perspective, one of the many applications of laziness is procrastination. This is especially true if one has work to do. To illustrate this, observe the Mary Ward1 students. Most or at least the popular majority of these students of all grades take it easy for seven to eight months. They waste time talking, fooling around, and the ever popular 'hall walking'2. Then during the last two to three months, they are stressed beyond all imagination to complete their courses or at the very least qualify for summer school1 or carry-over status1. To make a long story short, they procrastinate until they can procrastinate no more. Thus to recap, laziness leads to procrastination, which leads to stress. When stressed, people tend to be more excited and much more 'on their toes', so to speak. To return to the Mary Ward example, all the students who procrastinated will say that their last few weeks at school were the most stressful of the whole year. However, as much as they would hate to admit it, they would agree that those same last few weeks were the most exciting weeks of the whole school year. Thus, stress creates a new perspective on life, one that can help break out of the mundane.

If laziness, which leads to procrastination and stress, creates excitement, then when applied to all aspects of life, it will create a way of life that is always exciting. Life will lose what makes it mundane and will, more than ever, become worth living. This is because people will eventually reach a point where they cannot be lazy and can't afford to procrastinate any longer. They will be completely stressed and so as a side effect, or rather as a bonus, they will never have a dull moment!. Now, there may be skeptics out there who may argue this: if one is always doing work, then where is the laziness? Whatever happened to the idea of not doing any work? Well, laziness is defined as the lack of desire to work. Those are the key words. Thus to answer the question, no one is saying that one has to learn from their mistakes, or rather "mistakes" as defined by society. All they have to do is continually apply the same concept over and over again in their life to ensure constant stress, and thus constant excitement.

There is, however, an important problem that has to be addressed. Ensuring constant stress is hard work; laziness requires dedication and commitment and is not for the faint of heart. When one is constantly under stress, then one is constantly working – they live exciting lives, but they are constantly working. This means that eventually they will get caught up in their work and then their lives will sink back to the mundane existence that they had prior to taking a walk on the wild side. Thus, it is very important to think about how one will ensure constant stress. One could, as a general suggestion, pencil in times in their now impossible to schedule time slots to be lazy and/or do nothing. No one said that being lazy was easy – it is a very popular misconception.

To conclude, is it not that an exciting life is a life well lived? Does life not deserve to be lived to its fullest? Life cannot be exciting if lived in the "normal, natural" way as society defines it. All human life strives for stability, and thus becomes mundane and boring. Just like a lot of things in life, one has a choice on how to live their life. They can choose to live life the "natural" way and be comforted in the fact that they will live the same boring repetitive life they have always lived. Or, they can choose to live the life of a lifetime by following one simple and easy to use rule – just be lazy.

 


1. My high school. It was an independent study type school and so there were no hard deadlines whatsoever. As you can well imagine, literally everybody procrastinated until the last possible moment at which point they either scrambled to finish their courses, or they finished it in the summer, or they carried the course over to the next year.

2. The act of just walking around the hallways, doing nothing in particular except talking.

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