Indolence as an art form

How to make laziness work for you

confirmed it.

BY NURY VITTACHI

Lazy dad tip: you can answer any question asked by your child with “Go ask your mama”, including “Where’s mama?”

The tragedy of modern life is that people look down on lazy individuals, not realising that Advanced Indolence is an art form.

And it’s better than working. Consider this. A man was sacked recently for working too hard. Bosses at Lidl supermarket in Barcelona gave Jean P. the boot after seeing security footage which showed him toiling from five o’clock in the morning.

A news cutting about this was put on this columnist’s desk by a colleague with a note saying it should be added to a file headed: “Things Which Will Never Happen To You.” Ha ha, very funny.

But it did reinforce my belief that hard work may actually be a bad thing, and I phoned a friend in human resources who

“Actually, you’d be surprised, but working over long hours is considered bad for the company,” she said, and sent me a link to the work of HR expert Suzanne Lucas, who showed that people who over-work prevent bosses from knowing how many man-hours any particular job needs.

But I’ll admit this is mostly a Western attitude. Bosses in Asia take an opposite stance, as shown by the case of Li Jianhua, who worked himself to death at his desk in Beijing in 2015.

His employers, the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission, held him up as an example other staff should follow, saying (and I am not making this up): “We can all learn from Comrade Li Jianhua... who gave an unremitting struggle to perform his best and to sacrifice everything.”

Then a report flashed up on the news monitor which said that Richard Thaler, who just won the Nobel Prize for Economics, revealed the secret of his success: “Terminal laziness.” His “default tendency of avoiding work” led to him to focus only on the most intriguing puzzles, leading directly to his winning the Nobel Prize.