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kimberlysteele
Modern people in the so-called First World are absolutely beset with Sloth. We are physically, emotionally, and mentally lazy. Take me, for instance. Here I am, drinking my cup of tea. I didn't flap my arms and fly to India to grow it and pick it. I certainly didn't gather the water from the nearby river (frozen at the moment) and I didn't build the filter that made the water potable. I didn't build the stove that boiled the water. I didn't mold or fire the pottery that brewed it. I did almost nothing to make my beautiful cup of English Breakfast. When I deposit what's left of my tea back into the ecosystem, I won't be doing it into a cold, self-constructed outhouse. No, I'll be doing that business in the toilet in my petroleum-heated home, full of rooms I did not build.
The Lazy Man's Load
The above example is meant to illustrate just how much most of us take for granted. It's a rare soul who can deal with how much privilege we have nowadays by the simple virtue being born into this era. For those who call themselves Social Justice Warriors, any attention brought to the mundane luxuries of middle class life tends to trigger violent and extraordinary dissonance. "Not me!" They cry, grasping desperately at their victim card, eager to play another round of Who Is The Most Oppressed? Ridden by anxiety, the Social Justice crowd would rather spend their lives mired in depression and prolonged mental breakdown than go deep and potentially skewer their precious egos in the process. For as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
Back when I was a kid and I didn't want to practice the piano, I would distract myself with every form of demoralizing nonsense. I would run into many brick walls: not being able to sightread with proficiency, difficulty concentrating, boredom with repeating a passage I needed to learn, and that would stop me from practicing because it was pointless. I was never going to be smart enough, coordinated enough, or graceful enough, and since I couldn't win I got distracted with doing other things I had a chance of being better at. Because I remember my own state well, I make a special point of combatting this form of demoralization with my music students. I tell them they just have to practice and that they must learn to ignore those feelings of not being good enough or talented enough.
I say, "You must stop weaponizing your own insecurities and aiming them back in your own direction."
Once those insecurities have been set aside, no matter how compelling they seem, you have to sit down and get to work. Yes, there is a twelve year old who can play the piano better than you can. To top that, there is a six year old who plays better than the twelve year old, and that has not stopped the twelve year old.
In short, don't work so hard at creatively sabotaging yourself or making excuses why you cannot practice. Practice, even if it isn't the best quality practice or you can't manage the sonata the six year old mastered in a week.
Enablers
The saddest thing I have ever seen was an adult child getting out of the car with his mom after a trip to the grocery store. The grocery bag spilled. The twenty-something son, who suffered a mental disorder (or several of them) but was physically healthy and robust, stepped over the upturned bag and went into the house. His mother was left to pick up the groceries and schlep the rest of the cargo into the house on her own.
There's a woman I know, now elderly, who has come home for forty years to a husband who has never had a full time job and lives on the couch, drinking beer. She runs a business that puts a roof over his head and pays for their family to exist. She says of her slovenly mate, "I love him, so what can you do?"
I know a man whose wife inherited a small fortune: approximately a hundred thousand dollars in money and possessions. She has not worked since her marriage and subsequent inheritance in the early 2000s. Though he is the breadwinner and works sixty plus hour weeks, she does not pick up the slack by cooking, cleaning, gardening, or running a business out of the house. She has already spent her inheritance several times over and has a raging shopping addiction. To this day, she still doesn't lift a finger around their overlarge, McMansion-size house.
Lazy people don't think of themselves as lazy. The lazy person will often complain about how rough they have it and often they are tortured by mental illness and depression. Look closely at the ones who seem content and in stark relief you will witness how they numb themselves with endless hours in front of the television and with compulsive spending. Examine them and you will find their hoard, their inability to let go of mental and physical junk, and their insecurity. Underneath their laziness, they are terrified.
Zombie Like Me
Zombies represent a couple of phenomena in our culture. The first is the Shadow. Zombies are classic shadow projection for us humans as a species. For one, zombies are dumb. They are ruled by instinct and base urges. They are incapable of working together on purpose: look at any zombie horde in a film and you will see they have no organizational skills. Zombies are also cannibals who ruin every place they occupy and destroy every living thing in their path. Propagandists can Ted Talk all they want about the glorious potentials of the human mind: we all know people are zombies at heart. There is no Star Trek future because we couldn't get along for enough time to settle another planet even if we could survive the radiation or the relentless cold of outer space.
That's what makes the I Believe In Science group such a farce. The proud scientist with a cushy job (the kind that has health insurance and paid vacations) who obediently wears a mask to lower the transmission possibilities of a flu with 99 percent survival rate is not smart. Instead, she is superstitious. How many comfortably numb scientists, those without the backbone to stand up to a soft mandate, would act nobly under harsher circumstances? The Siberian gulags reduced normal people to their worst in a few weeks. In a few short, brutal strokes, the comfortable scientist is easily transformed into a slavering zombie.
In the Jordan Peele film Us, zombies are portrayed as doppelgangers: dumb, menacing mirror image stalkers who menace their living counterparts shortly before death. Though the zombies of Us were mostly non-verbal, the one who did feature a voice explained enough to reveal a healthy dash of privileged guilt. I believe the zombies in the film Us represent the families in the euphemistically termed "developing nations" who make the stuff that keeps the affluent Western salary class up and running. For all of the bellowing we hear from the fortunate about equality, there are always those telltale Made In China tags that speak of hideous alternate realities where Uyghur slaves are worked quite literally to death. If they cared as much as they claim to care, how could they let such a thing happen? Aren't these the same people who claim that if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention? If we judge them by their actions and not their words, it would follow they must not be paying attention...
Martyrdom: The Opposite of Sloth
There is an old Iranian tale about a sculptor who saw a beautiful woman passing by in a caravan. He fell in love with her at first sight. Utilizing all his skill and resources, he bankrupted himself and built a palace for her in the desert with every luxury. He built the place thinking that she would see it and fall in love with him an live happily ever after. When they met again, the girl rejected his efforts. Despondent, he threw himself from the highest tower in his desert palace.
Martyrs don't always die for good causes and the Iranian sculptor in the myth above is one of those martyrs. The Bible wisely describes this form of pathology "pearls before swine" and cautions any talented, motivated people who would waste themselves on lost causes. The three enablers of my previous paragraphs would do well to ask themselves hard questions, such as what caused them to get involved with a Sloth in a co-dependent relationship and how much it would cost them to get out.
Martyrdom doesn't always help the people it is ostensibly for: a classic example is battle-prone parents who stay together "for the children".
Diligence
Diligence is the recognition and observation of limits. "Diligence" is far too simple a term for the balancing point between Sloth and Martyrdom, so if you can suggest a more subtle word or phrase, I'm all in.
Gratitude, as per usual, comes to the rescue as the condition of Sloth as well as Martyrdom are marked by a lack of gratitude. For the Sloth, their ungratefulness creates a petulant expectation that the world owes them a living. Correcting slothfulness involves lucid assessment of one's own limits: for instance, admitting I am gifted but lazy was the first step to developing better practice habits as a musician. If you cannot calmly walk through your own negative behavior because you're either too afraid to look at it or in complete denial it exists, you won't be able to correct it.
For the Martyr, there is a single-minded compulsion to overwork for work's sake, and there is an absence of appreciation for the here and now because the future they are working for is always more important than the present. I once watched a documentary about awful working conditions for Chinese factory workers. In one factory, these workers -- entirely women -- sewed cheap clothing all day in fourteen hour shifts. Conditions were horrible. During her interview, one of the young women spoke about how she put up with the relentless abuse and horrors. She survived by thinking of her brother, to whom her pittance was going to in order for him to continue his studies. She spoke of him as if she was the lowly disciple and he was the Savior. It was obscene. She unquestionably accepted her suffering in an act of Sartrean bad faith, immolating herself on the pyre of Chinese filial piety.
Diligence is the acknowledgement of privilege as well as the acknowledgement of one's own shortcomings and the resolution to do the thing. Diligence rejects "should" and it rejects demoralization. Diligence does not play mind games of avoidance. Diligence does not greedily presume exact results. Diligence can act as a retreat from limits in the case of correcting martyrdom or a pushing of limits in the case of correcting sloth. Both paths wrangle thoughtstoppers and prevent a slide into futile directions, dredging the muck from the subconsciousness and watching it wriggle and squirm in the light of day. Now, off to practice the piano...
Re: Seven deadlies
Date: 2021-02-12 03:27 am (UTC)Re: Seven deadlies
Date: 2021-02-12 03:31 pm (UTC)