My material needs are met; I have no material wants exceeding my needs. It would be nice to have a bit more cash in the bank, but only for an increased sense of security rather than because I have any desire to buy something expensive that I don't currently own.
This is one of the great luxuries of getting older: discovering that there is little to covet.
People who know me also know that I'm not much of a reaching-out kinda guy. If someone contacts me and suggests meeting up, I'm usually delighted by the invitation and rarely say no. But I'm seldom the one who takes the first step. You may attribute this to laziness. Yet I live, as my primary-school teachers used to say, in my own little world. And I like it here. It is generally a little world of joy (especially when the sun shines upon it, as it's doing right now).
I don't have a constant need for human company. Solitude is a luxury. Human company is rather like spice in food: it brings things alive, introduces something unexpected, but too much of it can overwhelm everything else. One or two social outings a week, online chats with family and friends, conversations with neighbours encountered on my walks – that's quite enough for me.
I'm happy with my own thoughts, but that doesn't mean I don't value other people's! Quite the opposite. An hour or two of intelligent conversation can provide material for several days' subsequent thinking. Someone throws out an idea, an observation, an unexpected connection, a brilliant insight and off it goes to be further pondered over. New ideas gratefully received. Original thought is a deficit item in our modern world.
Much of what another person might consider as my laziness is actually the consequence of having thought through what would happen if I simply didn't do something. Why have I never been on an exotic holiday or cruise or trekked distant lands? Because I neither need to nor want to. Why don't I drive a big, expensive car? Because of entropy; it would be expensive to insure and maintain, I would worry about it getting scratched and dented. Why don't I mow my lawn? Because every blade of grass on my land is a tiny oxygen factory, and during the growing season I let nature maximise leaf cover. I keep paths clear. Bushes get trimmed, branches lopped and hedges shaped in late winter, before the sap begins to rise. The rest can get on with being vegetation.
There's a useful distinction between laziness and refusal. Laziness is failing to make an effort towards something you value. Refusal is deciding that the objective itself isn't worth the effort of pursuing it.
Modern life tends to confuse the two. We're surrounded by injunctions to optimise ourselves: travel more, earn more, network more, exercise more, renovate more, consume more, experience more. Anyway, endless growth is bringing on climate change. We live in a hierarchical society in which many seek external validation; their focus is on their place in the pecking order. Failure to pursue commonly coveted material goals can be confused for lack of ambition.
There is nothing inherently virtuous about expending energy. The question is what the energy is for.
Duty answers that question efficiently. When have children to feed, clothe and educate, and a mortgage to pay off, you work. When lucrative work appears, you take it. You pull in the cash because there are large bills waiting to swallow it. Duty staves off laziness because duty removes choice.
Now I can take things somewhat easier. There are still twelve cats to feed and four litter trays to keep clean. And domestic entropy continues its tireless work.
But there's another kind of not-doing which I find harder to justify. I continually have that nagging sense that I should be reading more, writing more, producing more – sharing insights, creating, devising, inventing. There are books sitting unread, ideas sitting unwritten, and half-formed thoughts that ought to be followed through to a conclusion. And I'm not doing enough of it. My notebooks should be filling up much faster than they are.
And this raises tougher question – is this genuinely laziness? Is this an ethical issue (not working sufficiently hard at fulfilling my potential as a human being)? I think so.
But perhaps it's diminishing energy, an age-related thing. Perhaps I have never possessed quite as much drive as I imagine I ought to have possessed. Looking back, were my energy levels ever sufficient to achieve, excel, push relentlessly forward? I should have had a handful of books published by now. Or did duty disguise the limits of my natural drive? Surely my creative peak has already passed? A hard thing to admit to myself.
There is a crucial difference between not wanting something that other people tell you ought to want and failing to pursue something that you yourself believe worthwhile.
I genuinely don't want the large car, the exotic holiday or a manic social whirl. Nothing sacrificed there. But if I genuinely want to read the book, write the essay, develop the idea – and nevertheless don't – then the accusation of laziness becomes harder to evade.
And yet even here there is another question: ultimately, how much should I care?
I am who I am. I arrived in the world with certain talents and without others, with a particular temperament and a particular allocation of energy. None of us chooses the hand we are dealt.
This is where the modern cult of agency becomes slightly absurd (an interesting article in The Economist this week about 'internal locus of control'). We are constantly told that we must shape our own destiny rather than allow circumstances or other people (or God!) to shape it for us. There's some truth in that. But balance is called for. At one extreme lies fatalism: qué será, será, or inshallah. Why bother? Everything has been preordained, determined by the stars above. At the other extreme: the fantasy of total personal agency – you, and you alone, are responsible for how your life ends up unfolding. Work hard enough, want hard enough, organise yourself efficiently enough, see your projects through to the end, and the universe eventually submits to your will.
Neither approach to life is right. Chance matters; birth matters; temperament, health, your family, friends and colleagues, history, geography, and yes, good fortune all matter. But choice matters too. Agency is not about choosing the hand but how to play with what you have.
And perhaps contentment itself requires a similar balance. It is hugely liberating when you get to the point in life when you realise that you have enough. But there is also a danger that contentment becomes a philosophical name for inertia.
So I find myself somewhere between the two. I don't strive for more things or more travel. I don't particularly feel a need for more social activity. I don't particularly want a busier life. or more things..
But I do want more from my mind, and for my soul.
And that is worth striving for.
This time last year:
Getting in, and staying in, The Flow.
This time two years ago:
To ease the soul
This time three years ago:
Retrocausality and the Goneself
This time four years ago:
Many Machcins
This time seven years ago:
The Long Dark Half-Hour of the Consumerist Soul
This time eight years ago:
Fields filling up with houses
This time 15 years ago:
Battle of Britain: Poland's contribution
This time 16 years ago:
Sewer under ul. Karczunkowska
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