#68: Lazy: A Manifesto (15 Min)

This 15-minute episode is experimental, and it might just change your life. I suspect many of you will listen to it on an ongoing weekly basis, and that's precisely what I plan to do. It's a wonderful essay from the newest book in the Tim Ferriss Book Club: We Learn Nothing http://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/We-Learn-Nothing-Audiobook/B00SNTQU9K?source_code=AUDGBWS0908149AUW by Tim Kreider. The essay stands on its own and is titled "Lazy: A Manifesto." I loved this book so much that I reached out to Tim and we produced the audiobook together. If you want to stop feeling rushed, this is the medicine you need. Here is what writer/director Judd Apatow has to say about Tim Kreider: "Tim Kreider's writing is heartbreaking, brutal and hilarious—usually at the same time. He can do in a few pages what I need several hours of screen time and tens of millions to accomplish. And he does it better. Come to think of it, I'd rather not do a blurb. I am beginning to feel bad about myself." - Judd Apatow And one more: "Tim Kreider may be the most subversive soul in America and his subversions—by turns public and intimate, political and cultural—are just what our weary, mixed-up nation needs. The essays in We Learn Nothing are for anybody who believes it's high time for some answers, damn it." - Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls Enjoy! Don't miss this one. I will be putting up a collection of Tim's cartoons from the book at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast All books in the Tim Ferriss Book Club can be found at fourhourworkweek.com/books http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/books

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  No, we're just in an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm out and about in Santa Monica, that explains the noise, the music, the hubbub. It is a sunny day and I am enjoying the sun. Taking a pause, a brief break from the hustle and bustle. And that is what this episode is about. I'm going to share with you a chapter. And it is a chapter called Lazy: A Manifesto, which is from a book called We Learned Nothing from Tim Kreider, K-R-E-I-D-E-R, who is a fantastic cartoonist. And We Learned Nothing is the latest and greatest book in the Tim Ferriss Book Club, so please check it out, audible.com/timsbooks. That's audible.com/timsbooks.

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  We Learned Nothing is one of the few books that has made me laugh so maniacally and so consistently in airports, in trains, planes, and automobiles, that people stare at me like I'm a complete lunatic about to go postal. It is a hilarious, hilarious book, but it's more than hilarious. As Judd Apatow would say, "It is heartbreaking, brutal, and hilarious." The way he puts it is, "Tim Kreider can do in a few pages what I need several hours of screen time and tens of millions to accomplish, and he does it better." Come to think of it, I'd rather not do a blurb, I'm beginning to feel bad about myself. But really what Tim does is he turns his funny and brutally honest eyes to the dark truths of the human condition, asking some very big questions.

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn't change you, for instance? Why do we fall in love with people we don't even like? How do you react when someone you've known for years unexpectedly changes genders? He tackles these big philosophical and existential questions in a comedic but very, very deep way.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  reminiscent of the conversations you might have with your best friends or total strangers after many, many drinks at a bar near closing time. And I will close with another quote. This is from Publishers Weekly, and I, God, I just love this book so much. I hope you guys enjoy this taste of it and delve deeper. But this is from Publishers Weekly, and here we go. "We learn nothing articulated, for me, more human truths than any book in recent memory. When you're done with it, it almost feels like finishing a textbook. You actually feel like you understand how things work a little better." And I will give you this chapter, which is a great morsel, so Lazy, a Manifesto. Talks about a lot of things reminiscent to The Four Hour Work Week, if you've read that, my first book.

• 2:52Tim Ferriss?

  And I will also be putting up cartoons of Tim's, as well as some other snippets and samples, at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. That's fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Without further ado, here is Tim Kreider and Lazy, a Manifesto.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Lazy, a Manifesto. If you live in America in the 21st century, you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing. Busy, so busy, crazy busy. It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation. That's a good problem to have, or better than the opposite. This frantic, self-congratulatory busyness is a distinctly upscale affliction. Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the ICU, taking care of their senescent parents, or holding down three minimum-wage jobs they have to commute

• 3:55Speaker 03

  to by bus, who need to tell you how busy they are. What those people are is not busy, but tired, exhausted, dead on their feet.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  It's most often said by people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed. Work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've encouraged their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition, or drive, or anxiety, because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren't either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way 4.0 students make sure to sign up for some extracurricular activities, because they look good on college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn't have a lot of time, but if something was going on, to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  My question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation. This was the invitation. I was hereby asking him to do something with me. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it. I recently learned a neologism that, like political correctness, man cave, and content provider, I instantly recognized is heralding an ugly new turn in the culture: plan shopping.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  That is, deferring committing to any one plan for an evening until you know what all your options are, and then picking the one that's likely to be the most fun, or advance your career, or have the most girls at it. In other words, treating people like menu options, or products in a catalog.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with enrichment classes, tutorials, and extracurricular activities. At the end of the day, they come home as tired as grown-ups, which seems not just sad, but hateful. I was a member of the latchkey generation, and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon. Time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia, to making animated movies, to convening with friends in the woods in order to chuck dirt clods directly into one another's eyes. All of which afforded me knowledge, skills, and insights that remain valuable to this day. This busyness is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life. It's something we've chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  I recently Skyped with a friend who'd been driven out of New York City by the rents and now has an artist's residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn't consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college. She has a circle of friends there who all go out to the café or watch TV together every night. She has a boyfriend again. She once ruefully summarized dating in New York. "Everyone's too busy and everyone thinks they can do better." What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality, driven, cranky, anxious, and sad, turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment, of the crushing atmospheric pressure of ambition and competitiveness.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  It's not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam, or stadium trampling, or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school. It's something we collectively force one another to do. It may not be a problem that's soluble through any social reform or self-help regimen. Maybe it's just how things are. Ethologist Conrad Lorenz calls "the rushed existence into which industrialized, commercialized man has precipitated himself and all its attendant afflictions, ulcers, hypertension, neuroses, et cetera, and quote, 'inexpedient development,' unquote, or evolutionary maladaptation brought on by our ferocious inter-species competition." He likens us to birds, whose alluringly long plumage has rendered them flightless.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Easy prey. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter. I once dated a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn't allowed to take lunch hours out lest she be urgently needed. This was an entertainment magazine, whose raison d'etre had been obviated when menu buttons appeared on remotes. So it's hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Based on the volume of my email correspondence and the amount of internet ephemera I am forwarded on a daily basis, I suspect that most people with office jobs are doing as little as I am. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible. If your job wasn't performed by a cat, or a boa constrictor, or a worm in a Tyrolean hat in a Richard Scary book, I'm not convinced it's necessary. Yes, I know we're all very busy, but what exactly is getting done? Are all those people running late for meetings and yelling on their cellphones, stopping the spread of malaria, or developing feasible alternatives to fossil fuels, or making anything beautiful? This busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Obviously, your life cannot possibly be silly, or trivial, or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. All this noise and rush and stress seem contrived to drown out or cover up some fear at the center of our lives. I know that after I've spent a whole day working, or running errands, or answering emails, or watching movies, keeping my brain busy and distracted, as soon as I lie down to sleep, all the niggling quotidian worries and big-picture questions I've successfully kept at bay come crowding into my brain like monsters swarming out of the closet the instant you turn off the nightlight. When you try to meditate, your brain suddenly comes up with a list of a thousand urgent items you should be obsessing about, rather than simply sit still.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  One of my correspondence suggests that what we're also afraid of is being left alone with ourselves. I'll say it: I am not busy. I am the laziest, ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel like four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and see friends, read, or watch a movie in the evening. The very best days of my life are given over entirely to uninterrupted debauchery, but these are, alas, undependable and increasingly difficult to arrange. This, it seems to me,

• 10:32Speaker 03

  is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won't maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or Ogle Girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, "What time?" But just recently, I insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time in my life, I was able to tell people with a straight face that I was too busy to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint. It makes you feel important, sought after and put upon. It's also an unassailable excuse for declining boring invitations, shirking unwelcome projects, and avoiding human interaction.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Except that I hated actually being busy. Every morning, my inbox was full of emails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the undisclosed location from which I'm writing this. Here, I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email, I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I've remembered about buttercups, stink bugs, and the stars. I read a lot. And I'm finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible

• 12:01Speaker 03

  to figure out what that might be or how best to say it without getting the hell out of it again. I know not everyone has an isolated cabin to flee to, but not having cable or the internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice. It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body. And deprived of it, we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration. It is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. "Idle dreaming is often the essence of what we do," writes Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes' eureka in the bath, Newton's apple, Jekyll and Hyde, the benzene ring.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  History is full of stories of inspirations that came in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, gold brickers, and Noah accounts aren't responsible for more of the world's great ideas, inventions, and masterpieces than the hard-working. The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system. This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was in fact Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write "Childhood's End" and think up communication satellites. Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work, giving each citizen a guaranteed paycheck.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage, and eight-hour workdays.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  I know how heretical it sounds in America, but there's really no reason we shouldn't regard drudgery as an evil to rid the world of, if possible, like polio. It was the Puritans who perverted work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment. Now that the old Taskmaster is out of the office, maybe we could all take a long smoke break. I suppose the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved like me. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world's endless frenetic hustle. My own life has admittedly been absurdly cushy, but my privileged position outside the hive may have given me a unique perspective on it. It's like being the designated driver at a bar.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  When you're not drinking, you can see drunkenness more clearly than those actually experiencing it. Unfortunately, the only advice I have to offer the busy is as unwelcome as the advice you'd give the drunk. I'm not suggesting everyone quit their jobs, just maybe take the rest of the day off. Go play some skee-ball, fuck in the middle of the afternoon, take your daughter to a matinee. My role in life is to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. Even though my own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, I did make a conscious decision a long time ago to choose time over money, since you can always make more money.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  And I've always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth is to spend it with people I love. I suppose it's possible I'll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn't work harder, write more, and say everything I had to say. But I think what I'll really wish is that I could have one more round of Delanceys with Nick, another long late-night talk with Lauren, one last good, hard laugh with Harold. Life is too short to be busy.

• 15:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm back, folks. This is Tim. If you enjoyed that, and I hope you loved it as much as I love it, then you can get the entire book at audible.com/TimsBooks. That's audible.com/TimsBooks. And I fell in love with this to the extent that I reached out to Tim and his agent, and we produced the audiobook together. So thrilled to shepherd it into existence for your enjoyment and your benefit. Please spread the word and check it out, as well as all of my other books, in the Tim Ferriss Book Club, audible.com/TimsBooks. Thanks for listening.