Am I promoting laziness? I am and I'm not. I'm certainly in favour of cutting right back on mindless activities - activities that add no value, nor preserve value; and particularly cut back on activities that damage the environment (even by one eight-billionth of a percent).
I take as my starting point for today's post an article in this week's The Economist (here, but behind paywall), entitled The best bosses know how to subtract work. We may have an innate inclination towards laziness but: "doing less goes against the grain in many ways - one is how humans are wired." The piece quotes a study, published in Nature in 2021, in which people were asked to think of ways to improve something, revealed that without an explicit prompt to think about subtraction, participants would tend to add features rather than taking them away.
On the działka, it's easy for me to find things to do; indeed there's too much. And so I focus on the Important and Urgent (as I wrote the other day), paring down those activities which are neither. Exercise is important; were I to stop doing my daily sets, I would be inviting health issues further on up the road. Cleanliness and personal hygiene is important for the same reason; but spending too much time and effort on press-ups and polishing also needs to be avoided. And don't mow lawns!
The article ends with the following exhortation to corporate leaders:
Add value. Do less. ■
It's not just CEOs who need to follow this - it's all of us.
Do less. Buy less. Consume less. Waste less. Eat less meat. Eat less sugar (well, no sugar, really). Expect less (of the material stuff). Walk more. Think more. Do all the above, and you can expect more simplicity - and more joy - from life. Below: graffiti from a wall in Kraków, late November 2019. (Ulica Smocza 10 - indeed you can see it on Google Maps Street View.)
This time last year:
Nothing but trees and sunshine
This time three years ago:
Jabłkowizna!
This time eight years ago:
Low water level - Jeziorki lakes
This time nine years ago:
Around the Czachówek diamond, again
This time 12 years ago:
Second line of the Metro runs into delays
This time 13 years ago
Army helicopters in action at Kielce defence show
This time 14 years ago:
World's largest helicopter over Jeziorki
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