If a man will not work, he shall not eat...

[jerrypua]

"How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep?"
"If a man will not work, he shall not eat."
- The Bible

I'm not religious but I find this "deadly sin" (sloth) incredibly dangerous to our personal/financial/spiritual growth.

And if you really go deep into this you'll realize it can even cause death, hence it belongs to one of the "7 deadly sins" in Christian Religion.

"Sloth does not simply mean that one suffers from an overall laziness in their life. From the sin of sloth emanates a whole world of despair, depression, boredom and restlessness, and spiritual indifference, culminating in one giant shrug when it comes to practically all aspects of life. On a spiritual level, this is the road to disaster.

The brutal drone of despair that is one of the fruits of sloth is akin to suffering a slow death. Faith and love dwindles ever-increasingly, and the soul begins to become indifferent to its own enlightenment."

 

If found these 2 very insightful videos that might interest you and make you realize how self-destructive and disgusting laziness is.

Some of it is bullshit obviously due to religious bias but regardless, it contains some wisdom!

[Yarco]

To play "Devil's Advocate" for a minute... sloth and laziness were required as a survival adaptation for most of human history.

When you're a hunter-gatherer, there's a much bigger risk-to-reward ratio for getting all ambitious and running around to try out crazy new ideas that might not work.

The safe thing to do is stick to what you know, and do the bare minimum to conserve energies (calories).

Go out and get the minimum nuts and berries that you need for the day. Snag any injured animals or literal low-hanging fruit you see.

Hunting healthy animals or climbing trees wastes precious energy, and risks life-threatening injuries (which is most injuries if there are no hospitals.)

Look at other animals like lions... they sit around in the shade doing nothing for days at a time, and only go out to spend energy on killing something once they're hungry. Deer and other animals lazily meander and graze, only running if they need to escape a predator. Even animals like squirrels that have an instinct to stockpile for winter likely do the bare minimum they think they need to survive. The risk of doing too much just to have your food rot or be stolen by another animal makes it not worthwhile.

Ambition is starvation. It used to be a last resort, one final try to avoid death when the slothful approach wasn't enough. 

Obviously we're in a very different time now with lots of abundance. You're 1000x more likely to die from obesity-related diabetes or heart disease than starvation in the 1st world. But I don't think that naturally makes laziness "disgusting".

Even if you earn a million dollars per year, you're in some kind of comfort zone. You earn just enough money to get the comfort and security that you desire. What's to stop you from earning 2 or 10 million per year? Where is the cutoff between sloth and ambition? What % over baseline survival should we strive for? Where at the other end of the spectrum does over-ambition become equally self-destructive and disgusting, when people don't have time for family at night because they're so busy accomplishing big things. Especially when so many of those tasks that are important to us right now, will be meaningless and forgotten once we're dead.

Edited August 3, 2021 by Yarco