My self-analysis

Here is the rock-hard truth as a result of self-analysis of my life so far:

I am lazy.

Well, that’s my weakness rooted in my genes, kind like the animal behaviors driven by genetics rather than rational, logical decisions by my brain. Can’t deny it. Here is a list:

  • I prefer to stay in my comfort zone;
  • I prefer to play first and do my homework later, in my primary, middle and high school;
  • I prefer to delay my work and take a nap first;
  • I have also filled my to-do list on Gist or wunderlust, and didn’t finish them;
  • I plan to do a lot of things, At the time when plans are made, I would absurdly assume they are done, strange!
  • I plan a lot, and they change frequently;
  • I have interests in a lot of things, then passion fades away and I turn to new things;
  • My record for Dota2 reached 4000+ hrs. My, my, my…

Sometimes I wonder how I have not been ruled out by the law of evolution.

What Leads to This

The traditional education, culture and beliefs shared among Chinese value hard-working as a virtue. I identify myself sharing these values, and I really feel guilty being lazy.

However, I’m also influenced by other perspectives and by my personal experiences as well, which partly changed my view on hard-working in an unnoticed way, at least that’s what I thought.

Personal Experience

First, since the first day attending the school, I don’t find it difficult to be one of the top students in most subjects without much effort. This might lead to the idea that being smart is an advantage I could take to compensate for the efforts I didn’t pay as others did. I didn’t have much failures during my student days.

But as over-protected organisms will be more sensitive to infections, failures or obstacles strike harder on me when they come. When I entered University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), which is like top five universities in China.I find it difficult to survive by continuing taking advantage of my little wit and not taking much effort. This is because my classmates are all smart like hell. Different from the high school where a stringent and established system that can push you foward, the life in university is more about self-management which I was not good at.1 As a result, my studies were not so good in the first year. Later I slowly accepted this, put some effort in it, and finally ended as an average.

Until now, it might become a habit of me to utilize my small wit for not working hard.

Misintepreted Readings

Second, I read a lot when I could. I ran into multiple interesting articles arguing that being lazy is a virtue, because:

  1. Most inventions came into being because the inventors’ initial motive is to save time and effort.
  2. In order to save time for being lazy, smart people tend to use innovative ways to solve problems and do the work.

Well, that convinced me to keep being lazy. But it turned out I confused this type of lazy with procrastinating, which is just doing-nothing-to-evade-real-life-problems kind of lazy.

Beliefs

Finally, It’s more of a existential crisis of mine in my early 20s, wondering if anything has a meaning. Humans cannot choose whether to enter this world, and cannot choose whether to exit this world as well. A thought like this could make me depressed sometimes, which further lead to a questioning of the meaning of what I have done.

Majoring in biology also leads to my acknowlodgement that there exists a beast inside me for which I don’t have a control. Our brain is easily affected by hormones. All the emotions, motivations, ambitions, decisions, love and personalities are affected by them. In short, most things we do are to serve the reward circuit in our brain in exchange for some dopamine, in another word, happiness. Thought like this makes me tilting. aaaand wanting to release the kraken

What to Do About My Laziness

There are many instructions out in the wild. But I doubt their effiacy. Maybe the biggest difficulty is to take better control of myself, I’ll list a few:

  • Do regular exercises.
  • Read.
  • Write.
  • Do the honest work I’m supposed to do.
  • Fuck it, I’m doing what I want to do and get paid for it, what else should I expect.

comic from xkcd 220.

  1. I am not as well, currently↩