Lazy Lazy

I am the hardest-working person I know. And sometimes, I think I am lazy.

I’m from New England. It’s that Puritanical work ethic, which is rooted in guilt. If I’m not doing something, I feel guilty. I don’t know if anyone else has had the same experience. I allow myself about 30 minutes of TV watching a day, from 930-10pm. Usually a Charlotte Hornets game. And even then, I have a tough time sitting still. There’s always something I can be working on.

I work so hard, that I even work hard at being lazy. There is a scene in The Fountainhead (it has been a while since I read it) where Howard Roark goes on vacation and lays around on a boat for a month. He’s the most creative, productive person in the world, but when the guy relaxes, he really relaxes. He deliberately does nothing. I can’t even do that. On our trip to Greece last year, I didn’t bring my laptop, but I was still answering emails on my phone.

All successful people are a bit obsessed. Maybe it’s trading, maybe it’s tech crap, maybe it’s teaching, maybe it’s research. But they spend all their waking hours working—because they love it. Bezos did this for a few decades, and now he’s getting his wick wet, having climbed the mountain, and planted a flag. Elon Musk is still doing it, though he has a colorful personal life. Funny thing about Wall Street—apart from the poor investment bankers, trading is really a 9-5 job. I was typically done around 5-6pm every night, went home, had dinner, and watched TV. I had a life outside of work, though it was pretty lame.

I’ll cut to the chase—I have found that there is a direct correlation between work and happiness. People who work hard are happy, and people who have lots of unstructured free time are generally unhappy. I have no data to support this. It’s all anecdotal. My friends who are putting in 14-hour days are grounded, emotionally satisfied people. They may be tired, but they are happy. The person who has a 20-hour a week part-time job is not. Frequently, there are substance abuse issues, or other addictions. Too much time running around inside your head.

And that is one reason I work as hard as I do, because I don’t want to go inside my head without a shotgun and a flashlight. The inside of my head is a bad neighborhood. Apart from my usual mental health problems, I’m neurotic and anxious. If I am gainfully employed every waking hour of the day, there is not much time to worry about things. I work all day, I collapse into bed, I pass out, and I wake up the next day with my brain rebooted, and I do it all over again.

I agree with the politicians that unemployment is the worst thing in the world, but for different reasons. They think it is the worst thing in the world because of the lost income. It’s actually worse than that. It’s that you suddenly have all this time on your hands. Stay unemployed too long, and it becomes difficult to escape the gravitational pull of unemployment, and then you’re down at the country club drinking at 10am. You hear about these people who stay unemployed for a long time because they are waiting for the perfect job to come along. Christ—take any job. It is better for your mental health than sitting at home watching the soaps. You can always trade up to a better job later. When economists say that people “lose skills” when they are out of work, they are not referring to someone’s ability to turn a wrench. They are talking about someone’s willingness to put on pants.

But not everyone agrees with me. Some people truly hate work, which I find bizarre. They would rather go sans pants. But then we are back to the beginning, where people who don’t work are frequently unhappy. But they can never locate the source of their unhappiness. That’s because the source of the unhappiness is within—they have no self-esteem, because they aren’t doing esteemable acts. Self-esteem isn’t a feeling, it’s the result of an action. You do good, you feel good. You do nothing, and you feel nothing, and unhappiness rushes in to fill the vacuum.

And work doesn’t necessarily mean a 9-to-5 job and a W-2. Work can take many different forms. Maybe you like fancy pocket knives, and you spend your time buying and selling fancy pocket knives on Ebay. Maybe you like mowing the lawn, and you mow your own lawn in the middle of the summer even though it makes no economic sense to do so. Maybe you are a Top 500 Amazon reviewer. Etc. I don’t really care what it is that you do, just make sure that you are the best at it. People are employed doing all kinds of weird shit in this country. So you don’t want a boss. Great, don’t have a boss. What I can’t understand is people who want nothing, aspire to nothing, and do nothing.

But there comes a time when you have to take a break. Especially in today’s world, where we are all plugged into the Matrix. You have to unplug from the Matrix from time to time. Vacations are important. One of the reasons I was so fucking miserable at Lehman is because I only took one real vacation in 7 years. In fact, outside of sick days and a trip to the hospital, I only took 7 days off in 7 years. That’s crazy. Even if you are obsessed with your job, you need to take time off. People say that if you don’t, you will become burned out. No—you will literally go insane. And by the way, Lehman didn’t have the Mandatory Block Leave like other banks. 2 weeks off would have been good for me, but that was not part of the culture.

And this is all part of a larger conversation about mental health in general: unhappy people want to stay unhappy. Sick people want to stay sick. Unemployed people want to stay unemployed. I call this psychological inertia, where you get used to feeling a certain way (even if it is bad), and it becomes difficult to change. I’ve been depressed. A simple thing you can do to alleviate your depression is to go for a walk. But when you’re depressed, you don’t want to go for a walk. Perversely and paradoxically, you want to keep feeling like crap. We must have a bias to action—move a muscle, change a thought. It is kind of hard to feel sorry for yourself when you are bagging groceries, or waiting tables, or anything else. Just the simple act of using your hands is a psychological release. We can live in these imaginary worlds of Instagram and Facebook and Tiktok, or we can go out and do things. And we wonder why mental illness is an epidemic in this country.

Just the simple act of writing this article made me feel good. I’m on a plane, and I have 3 hours, and I can spend the three hours staring at the back of the seat in front of me, worrying about shit, or I can write something fun. Sometimes life is hell. The antidote to that is to stay busy.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music Recommendation: Guy Mantzur and Sahar Z – Sliding Doors (2015). I loved this track when it came out. Guy Mantzur and Sahar Z are legendary Israeli progressive house producers. This one came out around the time of the movie Interstellar, and the breakdown reminded me of the Temple organ used in the soundtrack.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Feel free to forward to as many people as you like.

P.P.S. I’ve been publishing twice a week for a while, but I’m going to go back to once a week next week. You’ve been getting WGGTB on Tuesdays and Fridays—we’ll go back to just Tuesdays. Sorry!