the art of not working yourself to death (great article on laziness)

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Though it’s medically possible to work oneself to death—especially among the Japanese—I know more people who are digging their own graves by not working at all.

Day after day, more and more people around me seem to be turning off, tuning out, popping pills, and joining the Anomie Army. The ranks of the gumption-deficient seem to swell with every passing minute.

I was reminded of this by the saga of Michael Cole, an on-the-dole British alcoholic in his 50s who recently murdered his wife then botched a suicide attempt due to an all-consuming sense of hopelessness. With no jobs, no children, no future, and no apparent motivation, Cole said the only bright spots in the couple’s bleak and barren lives were when they found something worth watching on TV.


I’ve known far too many people like the Coles: those who painted themselves into depressingly numb and comfortable corners and allowed their spines to disintegrate while basking in unearned income, intoxicants, and endless television.

There was a writer I knew who exploited the well-intentioned but ultimately misguided kindness of a wealthy benefactor who essentially wiped his middle-aged anus for him whenever he made a poop on the floor, which was often. He had a roaring Xanax addiction—up to four bars, AKA 16 doses, in one swallow—and would fritter away most of his days playing video games on a computer while a TV perched right above the computer blared in his face. His benefactor paid for his multiple stints in rehab as well as all his medical bills. Her generosity was rewarded with a searing and repugnant ingratitude—if she didn’t cover his bills quickly enough for his liking, he’d call her an a$$hole—but never to her face, since that might have jeopardized his free ride.

There was a girl whose father had allegedly been the West Coast’s wealthiest pimp until he died and left her a sizable inheritance, enabling her to essentially act disabled. Her house was a dusty, cobwebbed, cluttered amalgam of Miss Havisham’s abandoned wedding feast and an episode of Hoarders. Her dietary regimen consisted of two packs of cigarettes and two six-packs of beer a day. This was supplemented with tomato juice that she’d pour into a morning glass of beer next to her night table. As a large-screen TV continued droning by the foot of the bed, she’d sip the vile concoction while puffing on the day’s first cigarette, often falling asleep and adding another hole to a blanket already pockmarked with at least a hundred cigarette burns. On especially exertive days, she’d go down to the corner store to buy more beer and cigarettes.

There was a Vietnam veteran with a back injury who subsisted on government benefits and swallowed what seemed like a cupful of prescription painkillers and opiates daily. He would never awake before 2PM, at which point he’d rouse his flabby husk and plant himself in front of a large-screen TV, where he’d passively sit without burning a calorie until he fell asleep and the cycle began anew. Doctors at the VA hospital spotted something grapefruit-sized growing on his kidney, but he didn’t fret in the least about it. When I asked him what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, he said he didn’t know or care.

And there was a girl who, after a series of personal setbacks, fell into a rabbit hole of Xanax, antidepressants, and a full-blown relapse of prior heroin or meth addictions, if not both—I’m not sure. The inside of her house looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. She could never keep a job and sucked money lamprey-like from the government and everyone around her. And none of it seemed to trouble her a whit.

I could have easily become one of those people, except for the fact that life and the government didn’t afford me the opportunity. In my high-school graduating class of 955 kids, I had the second-highest SATs but due to no looming sense of urgency and the fact that I had a roof over my head during my teens, my grades saw me graduating around 650th in my class. Then at 19, when my father died of colon cancer, it hit me—I’d either have to get my shyt together quickly, or I’d become homeless in due time. With no safety net to cushion me, I hit the ground running, enrolled in college, and graduated at the top of my class. Without that gun to the back of my head and that carrot on a stick dangling in front of me, I likely would have lapsed into a life of petulant, indolent alcoholism.

Ever since then, my life has been an uninterrupted parade of having my balls busted and busting them myself—often simultaneously. And I feel I’m the better man for it. Rather than choosing to spend my life fleeing from pain and conflict and challenges, I tackle them head-on as if I was wrestling a gator. I’m in my 50s, but rather than allowing my body to melt into a sagging blob of failing organs, I hew to a rigid exercise and dietary regimen that would make Yukio Mishima—or at least Travis Bickle—proud. When the Grim Reaper finally comes a-knockin’, I will swing a barbell at his head and try to take him down with me.

And this is why I despise the cloying, coddling delusions of socialism and the welfare state it engenders—because it misapprehends basic human psychology, Dysfunction is rewarded and productivity is penalized. Citizens are plied with pain pills when they really need a shot of adrenaline. Rather than helping people realize their potential, socialism only stunts their growth. Socialism brings out the worst in people, resulting in dysfunctional societies that are, in a perverse way, antisocial.

We are all social animals to some degree, but only the weakest among us are strictly social animals. It would be naïve to deny that one’s lot in life is often shaped by external influences beyond one’s control, just as it would be foolish to disregard the overwhelming influence of personal decisions and will power. If that sounds too Nietzschean, Hitlerian, or G. Gordon Liddyan for your liking, I still deem it better than being some bearded, over-medicated couch potato who knows far too much about Star Wars and jerking off.

Idle hands engage in masturbation. I would rather work myself to death than slowly die while sitting on a couch chewing on day-old pizza and playing video games.

There’s a reason so many people “suffer” from little or no self-esteem. It’s because they don’t deserve it. They haven’t earned it. They seek it through others rather than through themselves. Society will only start to repair itself when individuals start to repair themselves.
The best advice I could give to the demoralized, intoxicated, teat-sucking Anglosphere comes from a friend: “Pull your head out of your ass by your bootstraps.”


The Art of Not Working Yourself to Death - Taki's Magazine
 

Meta Reign

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You know what's good about that article? Is that it's only half way true. . . But isn't that life?

Getting up, going out and getting something is just as much of a choice as it is to be lazy. . . But it does require more work. At the end of the day life is ATLEAST 50% meritocratic.
 

babylon1

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article is complete fukken bullshyt. go ahead and work yourself to death as a slave to the capitalists.

the happiest people on earth live in socialist countries!!!
 

Diyhai

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this sounds like depression not laziness
big difference
hate fakkit articles like this
he is using his life as a measuring stick to compare to everyone else :smh:
everyone is raised under different circumstances
 

zerozero

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this sounds like depression not laziness
big difference
hate fakkit articles like this
he is using his life as a measuring stick to compare to everyone else :smh:
everyone is raised under different circumstances

it also sounds odd that everyone lazy he knows is apparently being written big checks by the government every month
 

ltheghost

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Working for a Japanese company.....what is this break shyt you guys are talking about? We leave when the boss leaves. Not before and only ten minutes after.
 

Robbie3000

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This is a bullshyt article. There are alot of hardworking poor people. They just don't make enough and so they receive welfare benefits.
 

NubianVitruvian

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the system is made to feed of the hard work of those at the bottom. i believe in hard work, but i cant work for things that don't benefit me or mine. I've had to really draw the line with this but the sooner we all work towards self-empowerment the better.

But I blame the system that we are borne into more than the people.
 

yoyoyo1

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typical slick right-wing bullshyt, I guarantee it

these type of people don't care about others, they just care about :scheme: to get people to agree with their point and count it as some kind of victory
 
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typical slick right-wing bullshyt, I guarantee it

these type of people don't care about others, they just care about :scheme: to get people to agree with their point and count it as some kind of victory

wah wah wah wah.


liberals cry and moan over people that can't feed themselves. Cry me a river.

They cry, "it's the SYSTEM!" yet i see million dollar neighborhoods filled to the brim with Indian american immigrants here in the bay Area.

I made something of myself. Where was my white privilaged background? I came from a poor neighborhood in a violient crime stricten city. Yet, somehow I made it. How is that possible? I didn't get loans or aid in school because my parents were in trouble with IRS. I worked 40 hours a week and still had a good GPA. I faced any challenge, and i worked my ass off.


Then i see cry babies on this site with their 10k post counts, and black exceptionalism and their cries about "the system". A system that coddles blacks and holds their collective community hand at every opportunity. I feel no pity for any person in the "hood". I do give my sympathies to immigrants and white working class who are being mistreated at the expense of the White liberal's favorite pet toy.
 
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