The Shit-Eating Grin of the Tree-Hanging Sloth

Every now and then people stop to ask themselves, and eventually me, how I manage to get all of my work done, nearly constantly work on film projects, and still seem to have a ton of free time in addition to the time in which I get stupidly drunk (which is time I do not consider to be free). There's an easy answer: I do my work, I work on film projects, and the rest of the time I do other stuff and drink. However, this answer is not particularly satisfactory to the people who ask me, and although they don't read this blog, I'll take a moment to answer them in full.

But first, some history. Right now is the period where the undergraduate students at the University of Chicago write their BA graduate theses, which are essentially 40-or-so page essays that are supposed to be the ultimate product of our experience here. Some people write them over the course of a year or more. I started writing mine on Wednesday while hung over, took several breaks to go out drinking, read the excellent and entirely irrelevant novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, stopped working on it on Saturday and spent the next few days drinking with one of my best friends who chose this time to visit Chicago, resumed work on it today (Tuesday), just finished it, and am willing to guarantee that my paper is of above-average quality. I am not lazy or, in my estimation, extraordinarily gifted. What I do is when I work, I work. That's my entire secret.

That this secret doesn't satisfy anybody should be no surprise. In a society where work is measured in the amount of time you spend in a place rather than the accomplishing of given tasks, the idea of working becomes distorted. Playing solitaire or video poker, tagging pictures on facebook, and previewing horny housewives porn videos for later consumption are all ways of working so long as they're all done in the office. Talking to your friends and writing faux-clever, slant-rhymed poems on the bathroom stalls are both working if done in the school library. Why should anything be done quickly?

Since it's more difficult to correct this kind of behavior than to allow for it by lowering standards, the latter option has become prevalent. The work produced is mediocre, but mediocrity is expected, and so evaluations are quite kind. Since it is undergraduate, the ultimate purpose of the essay is to prepare you to do similar projects in the future, and that aim is not achieved - or at least it wouldn't be were it not for the fact that expectations in future enterprises are lowered as well. A chain reaction wave of shit begins with the simple procrastination of dozens of millions students.

Works of quality cannot be produced unless the habit of working is established. If it isn't, there is very little to stop undisciplined enthusiasm from ejaculating everywhere, leaving whatever is attempted drenched in suicided semen. More often there is not even that; undisciplined enthusiasm is a difficulty beyond the reach of most tree sloths.

I realize that this sort of a procrastination is the direct result of our evolutionary success, that we have so removed the bottom layers of Maslowe's pyramid that we've upset that structure, removing the forces of restraint developed at the bottom that allows the most unrestrained flights at the top. We can be taken as victims of our own success. This does not change the fact that the majority of people are too lazy to accomplish even what they genuinely care about, nor the fact that they would all prefer not to be lazy and pine away dreaming of the possibility of being able to do something.

The looks of admiration coming from these sloths is somewhat disgusting. The amount of willpower required to get yourself to do something is very little, but these people have let their will atrophy to such an extent that it could not bend a finger. And so they ooh and aah when somebody manages to accomplish what takes them months of playing grabass to do in the space of a few applied days. They do not seem to see that standards set for dwarfs do not adequately test or challenge giants, or even ordinary human beings. Nor do they see that it is their own fault they can't concentrate, can't adequately achieve anything but a stunning mediocrity and a feeling of helplessness in the face of it.

This is the world modern laziness has shaped. And when something so idiotic as Catholic dogma can adequately describe even this world's deadly sins, you know there's a problem. This is a call to everybody out there not afraid to man up and accomplish something. We are here to swallow the sun and belch out the collected lives of Earth's inhabitants while our eyes glow with the digested supernova. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us, but in reality the majority of mankind live their lives so poorly Death is rendered impotent, incapable of detecting their presence and leaving them to die, increasingly lacking in the most basic aspects of their personality, well into their 90s. All because some assholes can't collect enough willpower to move a dust mite.