What If You're The Lazy One?

How to discern when you're wasting your time (?)

One of the funny things about being an adult is that your sense of the value of time changes. Some of this, for me, is the fact that I was an only child, homeschooled, and a pretty good student in a not-terribly-challenging college—up until my mid-20s, time felt functionally infinite to me. I could do things like cook scratch lunches, tinker with old electronics, spend hours going down internet rabbit holes, collect video games and build obsessive knowledge about them, that kind of thing.

I mentioned my old printer in a piece here once before. I picked it up in 2012 next to a dumpster, and it worked and even had a half-full cartridge in it, but it would jam if you printed more than one page at a time. For years I put up with it—it’s my little printer, I rescued it—and printed off school papers or hotel reservations or documents for my driver’s license renewal page by page, manually printing each page of each document as a separate print job.

Last year, I finally decided it was time for a printer that really worked. More importantly, I was finally able to see that not as indulgently, wastefully throwing away my little printer for an ounce of “convenience,” euthanasia for electronics, but as, you know, having enough to do that I couldn’t afford to mess with that anymore.¹

I once I read a tweet, something like “It’s too much work to make a bowl of cereal in the morning and then have to clean the bowl,” and I remember thinking, wow, what kind of lazy bastard thinks rinsing off a cereal bowl is too much work? What kind of spoiled, coddled generation are we raising? Etc. etc.

What I realize now that my time is much more limited and my responsibilities are much greater, is that much of what I thought of as “work” in some way—the from-scratch cooking, the endless tinkering with stuff instead of just replacing it—was itself a kind of laziness, or more charitably, a product of the expansive free time I had.

More to the point, I think, I didn’t so much think not wanting to wash a bowl was lazy, as much as I thought that the obverse—instant breakfasts, disposable products, robot vacuums, the throwaway ethic in general—was self-indulgent. These people with their big corporate jobs think they’re big shots. They think they’re above vacuuming the house or cooking real food. And the kids using all these things don’t even have the excuse of making a lot of money!

To be honest, I still think there’s something to that. It feels to me like someone whose time is “worth” too much to do anything normal and human has a problem. But I’m far from making that kind of money, and even I increasingly realize I was abstracting and simplifying this time calculus.

All (well, no, not all) those things that seemed like gee-whiz self-indulgent wastes of money seem like sensible uses in the time-is-money sense now. More than that, I can now feel what that lazy young’un meant by washing the cereal bowl being too much work. I get why people buy a programmable, automatic coffee maker, so you can “bundle” getting the water and the grinds set up while you clean up the kitchen at night, and then come down in the morning to the coffee ready made.

There’s this fuzziness of defining a task like “making coffee.” I can strawman it or “steelman” it.