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  • You should never feel bad for laziness. In fact the notion of laziness or sloth is a device by industrial authorities to press more work out of an already beleaguered labor force.¹

    We've seen how it goes during the 2020 epidemic lockdown and furlough: most people couldn't couch potato for a week and turned to hobbies, enough of which were monetizable enough to cause the great resignation and give us a moment of elevated ground-floor wages. The rest of us suffer from avolition, a symptom of major depression (or a number of other potential diagnoses).

    Industrialists (and churches and civil officials) fail to recognize that the drive for profit to upper management and shareholders has made a lot of work environments toxic. Most of us who work are overworked, underpaid, and poorly treated by management, if not also dealing with bully coworkers, pollution from industry without adequate PPE, safety hazards and oppressive work conditions. Our capitalist masters could treat workers well, and even would see a productivity surge worth the additional cost, and yet they still crunch in the video game industry, and overtask rather than running a high-morale clerical pool with slight redundancy (where the task list is always short).

    I was lazy enough in my career as a victim of major depression to sleep for about nine months (getting up only to eat or excrete), I am a pro at couch potatoing. Granted, it's not good for me to go without some contact outside, but I'll happily do it. In the meantime, when I was forced to work in late 1980s clerical pool conditions, it drove me to suicide, and typical conditions are even worse today.

    Laziness is a product of slave drivers or mental health disorders. If you're feeling too tired to get work done, it means it's time to take a break. Don't worry, if you're mentally fit, you'll be on task again.

    ¹ Though my sin nun explained the cardinal sin of Sloth as avolition specifically to engage in the work your faith calls for (e.g. feeding the poor, housing the stranger and the transient, healing the sick, etc.) If you have energy to engage in costly signalling and praying loudly in public, but don't mind the unfortunate, then you're engaging in the cardinal sin -- according to a cloistered nun I called for tech support.

    • I was too tired to write this, which immediately jumped to my mind o' reading the post. Thanks, stranger. Basically : what that person said.

  • I partly agree and disagree with the description of executive dysfunction. I would also break it into two categories, but the first encompasses both aspects of the description by "overwhelmed".

    In this case, the anxiety or stress that impedes function is due to uncertainty around how to achieve the desired outcome. The degree of anxiety or stress is dependent on the cost of failure; e.g. something with no perceived stakes (or very low stakes) allows for a high degree of uncertainty and an imperfect or incomplete plan can be executed because the cost of it going wrong is negligible. However, as the stakes rise, the degree of uncertainty required to create a "barrier to entry" (i.e. a sufficient amount of anxiety or stress to prevent action) decreases. The uncertainty itself could simply be not knowing how to approach or break down a task as per the comment, but it is also often the uncertainty introduced by other people. If you know someone well, then you can have reasonable confidence in how they might respond to a particular topic. If not, though, and they are a key part of achieving said goal, then oh boy does that cause stress!

    The other category is not directly due to anxiety/stress but instead a result of fatigue, burnout or being overwhelmed (i.e. near meltdown). The brain effectively goes "nope" and refuses to process the required information no matter how much you want it to or how important it is. The irony is that if the anxiety or stress from the previous category is high enough, it can actually create this overwhelmed state, but in my experience severe fatigue, too much sensory input or too many cognitive demands (i.e. being forced to juggle too many tasks/problems/interactions at once) will readily create this situation too.

  • Yes for sure. Doesn't always help when it comes to bigger tasks on my to-do lists, but sitting down and making those lists helps me a lot personally.

    I usually make one annually every spring because there is a time pressure where I live with only 4-5 months of nice weather.

  • I just wanna actually pick up my guitar and practice and learn... It's right there. I can see it. I have the desire, the motivation, and the time. And yet I can't. 😬

    I hate it. I hate it so fucking much. It's like being trapped in a prison but the prison is your own body.

    • Then let's apply this post. Here's your steps:

      Tune the guitar. Tuna is an app that will make it help, there's hundreds or physical tuners. This will take between 3 and 20 minutes

      Look up tabs for a song. Wonderwall or zombies by the cranberries are very easy to learn

      Do the finger positions and strum them. Focus on the transitions between fret positions. Do you for 10-20 minutes

      Listen to the song, over and over. You can put it at half speed, but after you feel you know it in your bones start to play along. Focus on the strumming pattern and making the notes ring clear... It'll be rough at first but keep at it. This could take 30 minutes to 4 hours, depending on your standards

      And if this works, let me know. I'm self taught on the guitar with ADHD... My brother taught me the basics, and then I hyper focus on certain songs now and again. I'm not particularly good, but I can learn anything on any stringed instrument if I hyper focus on it

37 comments