How to be Lazy

How to be Lazy

Chapter 1

Early morning, May 13 1607. Three ships sail up the Chesapeake Bay. Their mission: to establish the first successful English settlement in the New World, an event that will lead directly to the creation of the United States of America.

The site for their colony is chosen, and is named after their king. Jamestown is born. However the years ahead will be very trying for this plucky little fort on the edge of a swamp. The settlers are indolent “gentlemen” who have never had to soil their soft white hands with an honest day’s toil in their lives. Their only purpose in this grand adventure is to find gold without investing much in the way of effort. Without crops or proper shelter to withstand that first winter, a cruel “Starving Time” begins, and almost two thirds of the original settlers die from malnourishment, disease, Indian attacks, and ennui. The future of Jamestown is dim until a bright young “go-to guy” with the likely name of John Smith takes control of the operation. His first order is that he who does not work does not eat, and he was apparently serious about that or something. Under his tough management, the colony survives, and eventually flourishes, and then finally dies out, its true location a mystery to this day.

What can those of us who do not want to work learn from this? There are lessons here for us if we but read carefully. For where know-it-all Captain John Smith may have seen lazy, shiftless gentleman too slothful to work enough to support themselves, we see visionaries, whose most crucial mistake was being born too soon.

For the 17^th century was no time to be lazy. There was no central air, no Wii, no cookie dough ice cream, no Scooby Doo marathons on the Cartoon Network. These valiant pioneers were still living in the bad old days when idleness was a dream to which only royalty could aspire. No, laziness is a modern innovation, like Ipods or teleportation.

While it is true that there have always been people who didn’t do anything, it is also true that laziness was a neglected science until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Until then, lazy people were just as miserable as working people, if not more so. Active people like to work; they enjoy bending over the crops from sun up ‘til sundown and they tingle at the gentle brush of the master’s lash. Not so for our prehistoric goldbrickers. Those early do-nothings were people out of their time. Who is more miserable than somebody who does not want to work but has to? For those of us who are not so psychologically warped that we enjoy the tasks that our good lord and master sets before us, we can never be so happy as we are when we are not doing anything.

Laziness does not exist in a vacuum. Without the creature comforts of modern science to please us and gullible simpletons to do our work for us, laziness dies. So, all of human history, up until about 1870 or so, these are the dark ages of laziness. In those unenlightened times, even royalty had to do some sort of work. First, they were always defending themselves from their fellow royal bastards, and b) if they didn’t keep moving they’d freeze to death in those drafty castles. Anyone less than Holy Roman Emperor couldn’t even dream about not pulling their weight. If you were healthy, you had to work. If you were unhealthy, you had to work. There was no Workmen’s Comp or disability back in those “not-so-good-old-days.” You worked or you were put to a horrible death. Then you worked until you died a horrible death.

So the next time you’re drinking beer down at Hooter’s when you should be buying sheet rock at Lowe’s, or you’re smoking out back with some of the maintenance crew when you’re supposed to be submitting your E-Docs, pause and take a moment to thank those brave, foolhardy, forward dreaming, jimson weed addled souls of the Virginia colony. Thanks to their unwilling sacrifice, their dream is now our reality.