Are you a Lazy Brain?
Do you have the capacity to think harder? Do you not judge a book by its cover but instead take the time to look at its back cover for a synopsis? If you didn’t know what synopsis means, would you at least take the time to Google it? If you answered no to all these questions, you might be a lazy brain. A lazy brain is a mind whose critical thinking skills are lacking or even non-existent. People who are lazy brains come from all backgrounds, shapes, sizes and affiliations. The lazy brain is typically inefficient, ineffective and unwilling to try to change that. Being a lazy brain has nothing to do with how introverted or extroverted a person is. The lazy brain in most cases is a creature of habit. Things that are out of the ordinary are few and far between in the lazy brain’s world. There is a lot to unpack about the lazy brain so if you’re not one of them and haven’t already lost your interest, please read on.
Life on Autopilot
What are some of the lazy brain’s behaviors that make them the way they are? The most egregious examples of lazy brain behaviors are jumping to conclusions and making assumptions. Lazy brains are like lightning - not in the sense that they are fast and loud but in that they consistently take the path of least resistance. Making assumptions and jumping to conclusions is the mental path of least resistance. Such a mentality requires very little effort. In that way, these lazy brains are much like the decayers I referenced in my other blog post about adults “growing down.” There are certain telltale traits that are associated with them such as shoulder shrugging, procrastinating, not being easily impressed, and being ungrateful. Since they don’t have the intellectual capacity to go beneath the surface of concepts, it makes them highly susceptible to bad ideas whether from fake greedy gurus, cults of personality, one-size-fits-all ideologies and generally most things that are marketed. They can’t appreciate true genius even if it was right under their noses because that takes mental energy and time to understand it. The lazy brain is usually a spectator and hardly ever the actual doer. In fact, it’s the habit of the lazy brain to leech pride off of something that he/she didn’t actually do. For example, if a person shares a common heritage or common geographical location with the lazy brain and accomplishes something great, the lazy brain will usurp that accomplishment and call it his/her own.
Societal Decay
You might wonder if lazy brains, through their neglect of critical thinking and lack of empathy, have contributed to the world’s socio-economic problems. I would argue that to a large extent they have. In essence, a democracy is supposed to represent the will of the people. However, the will of the people isn’t exactly a good thing when the majority of people are lazy brains. A lazy brain is typically not politically involved and most of the time will prefer rhetoric to reason, which will lead to societal decay over time. They will not take the time to dig into a problem and find its root cause. They will focus on the symptoms of the problem instead of its causes and always miss the mark. That’s why many of the improvements to our society and communities take a very long time, if they happen at all.
Missing the Forest for the Trees
Most lazy brains are devoid of originality and creativity. Their ideas are usually parroted from their friends, family and/or social media. The hallmark of a lazy brain is that they are incredibly easy to manage yet they are hard to motivate. Therefore, they are valuable to companies that reach critical mass and desperately need worker bees. On the other hand, you’d never want them in a startup because they won't bring anything new to the table. Also they have a hard time self-reflecting because many of them don't even know how to assess themselves and the way they live their lives. They mostly operate on projection. Even when you try to leave an obvious trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow they’ll never understand how to follow it. Even when you abandon subtlety and state the solution point blank, they can miss that as well. In the most extreme cases, there could be a breadbasket in front of them with a sign above it saying “Please feel free to take as many loaves as you want.” Yet, instead of taking the bread they’d rather complain about being starved! The question is are we supposed to feel sorry for these people? It really depends. Some of them are suffering and keeping it under wraps, and some of them really don’t mind being the way they are. This can really be torture for an ambitious person who lives with a lazy brain or, worse, has lazy brains as parents.
Arrested Development
There is no more of a perfect personification of a lazy brain that I can think of than Homer Simpson. Homer’s whole life is about finding shortcuts, not thinking things through and generally being a sloth. Lisa, Homer’s daughter, is extremely smart and talented but is tragically undermined due to her dad’s behavior. His lazy brain behavior overshadows his daughters talents. A lazy brain parent can turn into molasses for their children's growth and development. This is the worst and most unfair child parent dynamic, and in a just world it would be the other way around. If the parents are ambitious but the children are lazy brains that’s OK because the parents can pick up the slack. When it’s the other way around, this situation creates a lot of pressure for the children to pick up the slack when they might not be at an adequate level of development to do so.
Thinking Inside the Box
Lazy brains pride themselves on their lazy thinking and believe that it’s something to strive for in life. Remember that a lazy “brain” is just that - it’s the “brain.” Thus, while a lazy “brain” can have an extremely active body, that might not be the case for their mind. The reason why some of them are so busy and have no free time isn’t because they are pursuing noble goals and trying to benefit society. Rather, it is because they don’t know how to prioritize, improvise, or think outside the box. For that reason, even if they find themselves in a scenario where highly advanced aliens landed on Earth and could grant the lazy brains all of their desires, they’d say “I have no time for this because I’m late for work.” The person wouldn’t even realize that one of their desires that could be granted is infinite money. As ironic as this may sound, the lazy brain probably wouldn’t want that (even though they may talk about wanting it so much). Freedom is the biggest responsibility and burden for them because their bread and butter is repeating the same processes day in and day out.
Stagnation vs. Creativity
Lazy brains tend to put a lot of weight on accolades and titles because those things are usually achieved by following orders rather than thinking for yourself. For example, academia (and the entire education system) is a place where one is negatively motivated by fear of external punishment rather than being positively motivated by one’s inner passions. To further illustrate the point, a Ph. D in therapy who has always done things by the book and only knows things by the book is more of a lazy brain than a videogame designer who dropped out of high school but hustled and used his creativity to create a videogame everybody knows and loves. The former required no originality and creativity whereas it was absolutely essential for the latter.
Lazy Brain Management 101
If you’re an ambitious individual who has to deal with lazy brains either at work or in familial matters and you feel bothered by it, try looking at things from a different perspective; you will likely feel less hopeless. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is never expect a lazy brain to conform to your ideals. Trying to “make” (and sometimes even force) a lazy brain to be something that they aren’t is like trying to push a boulder up a very steep hill. Both of you will feel bad over time because you won't see eye-to-eye. Instead, concentrate on things that are more productive for you in your life. When you’re young and idealistic, you might think that life is like a Disney movie where every person eventually gets closure and their “happily ever after”. As people grow older, they realize that this isn’t the way our world works. Sometimes a solution to a problem requires a majority effort, but if you live somewhere where the majority consists of lazy brains then you have to find a way to get them on board with you whether you like it or not. The best strategy with lazy brains is to show them that your plan or movement will provide them with instant gratification. If you play that card right, they are more than likely to support your strategy. However, also keep in mind that some lazy brains will discount your ideas if you’re not rich and famous. Some will instantly knock down good suggestions while never contributing anything to the solutions themselves. Therefore, be sure to appeal to their desire for instant gratification and make your presentation short and sweet so you don’t lose their attention.
Building an Idiocracy
If you’ve ever heard the saying “America runs on Dunkin”, it’s also true that most economies run on lazy brains. It’s not a coincidence that lazy brains outnumber ambitious people by a large margin. In ancient times (and not so long ago) most lazy brains had carte blanche to torture and ostracize the people in society who were the critical thinkers only to honor many of these visionaries after the fact. That’s because lazy brains make the most fertile ground for the marketing and sales of cheap goods that corporatists who control so much in our world today rely on. The reason why corporatists and the ones who are in cahoots with them can live such lives of luxury and not be responsible for their terrible actions is that the lazy brains they created can never see the bigger picture, and that’s just the way the monopolists of giant economies want it. So they’ll pump out more bureaucracy and media propaganda to make sure that these brains get even lazier. That way, the corporatists’ iron grip on our economies and ways of life can never be unclenched. To a large extent though, the corporatists themselves are lazy brains because they can’t imagine a world of happiness and abundance for everyone. They have a scarcity mentality, but the intelligent and visionary among even this shady ruling class understand the severity of this insanity.
Achieving Our Potential
To sum it up: a lazy brain is one who enjoys nostalgia while the ambitious visionary looks towards the future. One likes looking back on history while the other is focused on making it. I want to warn you against a trick: there are those that always go against the crowd, but they do it in an unconscious, unthinking way instead of with intent. The ones that go against the crowd unconsciously are lazy brains and the ones who do it with a WELL-RESEARCHED intent are most likely not. This isn’t a question of not liking lazy brains or feeling superior to them; it’s a question of understanding them and knowing if you are one of them and/or your relationship to them. It hurts ambitious visionaries when lazy brains don’t “understand” them. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s simply not within the lazy brains’ capacity to understand you. This can be a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s your job to understand yourself and realize your ambitions. You don’t need the lazy brains validation to do so and even if you did get that, they wouldn’t even understand how to support you afterwards. In my last blog post I raised the question of whether or not a drama-free life is achievable. This to a lazy brain is a welcome idea but where the lazy brain goes wrong is confusing a drama-free life with a challenge-free life. There is a difference between unnecessary drama in one's life and healthy ways of challenging oneself to become a better, more conscious, and self-actualized human being. The lazy brain will get confused between the two and see them as one and the same. However, it’ll serve you well to understand that we as humans all have our lazy brain moments. Life would be quite overwhelming if every minute of the day we were constantly overthinking things and never took a rest from it. The problem lies in the lazy brain mentality taking up a majority of your life rather than filling only scattered moments throughout it. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and I think we were all made for more than just being survival machines.