The lazy cycle of progress.

There are a lot of things in the world. From axes to zebras, anywhere you look, everything practically screams interesting. But what intrigues me the most, is the human mind.

But the human mind is far too big a subject to talk of in a single post. So I decided to write on an idea that has been pestering me for quite a few weeks, after all, that is what this blog is for. 

I've heard, and I'm sure you have too, this phrase a good many times: don't be lazy. I speak from my heart when I say I'm positively tired of hearing it. And you know, if we stop being lazy, we may end up delaying the inevitable; development. I've got a perfectly viable justification; laziness is the engine of progress. 

For our entire life as beings of the Earth, we have been surrounded by progress. But our progress has been curved on the charts by two factors; laziness/comfort and curiosity. Today I focus on laziness. 

Before fridges were invented, we had to buy/make fresh food daily otherwise it would spoil. It was routine, but because someone was too lazy to go to the market and buy fresh food daily, the need arose for a cool store inside the house. Hence, the fridge. 

Now we can send texts through our phones because we sometimes don’t have the time to attend to calls with our hectic lives. 

We have the microwave to heat the food so that we can prepare it when free and store it for later (in the fridge, probably). 

We have inventions that were made solely for the comfort of humans; the TV, the cooler, the thermostat, the washing machine, the dishwasher, to name a few… And to us, comfort basically means lazing around, which isn’t wrong; we all need our downtime.

It’s odd how even though we are encouraged to get off the couch and work hard, ultimately our laziness turns our wants into needs which are obliged by engineers looking to make a buck and a name, which in turn leads to progress. 

So laziness is more than what we think of it as; it’s one of the reasons development is still going. Because we cannot achieve paradise while we are alive, we strive to make it on Earth. But if we achieve that, then we shall start moving backward. So laziness is very possibly, the true engine of progress. 

But we underplay comfort’s role here. As I said, comfort is a part of lazing around. People who come out with brilliant ideas that reduce our workload are probably the ones who took a long, big look at human’s daily workload and decided what would be beneficial to us in terms of workload-reduction and to them in terms of revenue. Like Bigbasket, which came around to bring your groceries to your door, in case you do not have the time to go to the stores yourself. Naturally, comfort is also something we are all vying for. This comfort comes in the form of machines that do our work for us. Hence, it plays a huge role in progress.

But the biggest part really, is still something we are all told to be. I am contradicting myself here, but it is a really important contradiction. Hard work wears the apron in every topic, even in this one. 

Yes, it is an age-old poke in the side, but hard work will get you places you could never have imagined. And it can be fun to work for a cause you love. When you think of a washing machine about 2 centuries back, people could safely say they would never see anything like it. But now, it is not only a reality but a standard. And to build them, the developers would have had to go through so many prototypes, made so many calculations, tried on and on. There’s your hard work.

It’s easy to laze around and dream of ideas for machines or innovations in general, but the people who sit up and think, “Sounds like a good idea, let’s try it,” are the real progress makers here. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to say, “Stop watching TV!” or “Get off the phone!”. We would not have the efficient communication system in place, or the ability to get results to queries within one-tenth of a second by the Internet, nor would our standards and morals change for the better. I say I am tired of hearing the phrase ‘Don’t be lazy’ but in all honesty, it’s what fuels us all. 

And to be honest, hard work plays the biggest role in my little epiphany (although I started with laziness because let's be honest, laziness is like the hero in all those cheesy comedy films; it does nothing, literally, and yet right now, is getting all the credit). Because it helps observe yet another circle in our big world of circles. Laziness is the engine of progress, comfort is the fuel, and hard work is the wheel.

The most fun part about this conclusion is understanding the circle. Because when you take a close look at it, you realize that a. Laziness and hard work go hand in hand and b. We will keep perpetuating this cycle till the end of our reign on Earth. 

It is riveting to think that a few decades from now, teleporting humans might be a true and fun reality and that it might become normal. It is grin-worthy to think that 50 years from now, people might wonder how we lived without a few inventions from their time. Perhaps an animal language-translator (ooh, fascinating), if I had my way. That maybe they will be the “modern ‘uns” and not us. And I cannot wait to see if they can get robots to wash the dishes and put them inside or do the laundry. 

The current times are pretty interesting, for sure, what with this wretched virus, amongst other things. Honestly, humans are interesting. And we will keep getting more and more interesting as we walk towards our ultimatum - an undefined ambition. The goal might not be visible, but the journey surely is. As we pass by the times, we can see the world moving on, and us being pushed on with it. And sometimes, we just gotta go with the flow.