Feeling unmotivated/lazy lately. Any tips?

I can't get behind that first point... I get the curiosity driving it, but the logic behind 😂

Sure, but if you rush through it, you’ll just be staring down the next task immediately. You aren't saving any time either way, so why even bother grinding through it? It just kills the momentum.

People aren't inherently lazy; they might struggle with tasks they feel forced to perform—like a mandatory assignment for a class at Harvard—but it is widely recognized that long-term unemployment often leads to depression.
Procrastination frequently occurs when an individual cares so deeply about performing a task perfectly that they wait for the "ideal" conditions, such as a sudden burst of motivation, which ultimately results in endless delays.
If an organism successfully meets all its basic biological needs, it naturally possesses a surplus of hours to spend resting; consider how cats are elite hunters yet spend much of their time sleeping. Humans require roughly eight hours of sleep, which suggests our very nature is designed to devote a significant portion of our daily lives to being active and engaged in purposeful pursuits.

Laziness can actually be a survival skill because you aren’t constantly terrified of starving. You need food for your entire life; everything else is just temporary noise.

People don't all have the same internal drive, so you can't force everyone to be lazy. This obsession with molding kids to fit a specific mold is just bad parenting. It happens when you fail to recognize what a child is actually capable of doing.

It works perfectly in capitalist societies, though. You raise people to just follow orders... nobody understands the bigger picture. It's like our professors know nothing beyond their own families and their day jobs.

Listen, they’ll try to force a lefty to write with their right hand just because they want everyone to have the same handwriting. Isn't that exactly like mass-producing those perfect red apples just to put them on grocery store shelves?

There’s zero creativity left in that system. It’s a generation of products. Everyone goes to the same parties, everyone wears Nike... kids buy the same songs as everyone else because they’re just following the charts. If they actually listened to something different, people might actually find some substance.

If you want to survive, being lazy is a great strategy—but only if you actually have the drive to make it work. Otherwise, you're going to be scavenging just to get by... either digging through the trash or selling someone some mediocre lyrics just to afford a meal.

Mark Perez32 said:People aren't inherently lazy; they might struggle with tasks they feel forced to perform—like a mandatory assignment for a class at Harvard—but it is widely recognized that long-term unemployment often leads to depression.
Procrastination frequently occurs when an individual cares so deeply about performing a task perfectly that they wait for the "ideal" conditions, such as a sudden burst of motivation, which ultimately results in endless delays.
If an organism successfully meets all its basic biological needs, it naturally possesses a surplus of hours to spend resting; consider how cats are elite hunters yet spend much of their time sleeping. Humans require roughly eight hours of sleep, which suggests our very nature is designed to devote a significant portion of our daily lives to being active and engaged in purposeful pursuits.

nah, it’s more like when the task at hand is so mind-numbingly boring and soul-crushing that you just keep dodging it indefinitely... or when it's something genuinely awkward, like finally heading to the dentist or dealing with a clogged drain. honestly, I'd probably tackle a backed-up sink before I ever forced myself into a dentist's chair...

Scott Rodriguez7 said:Honestly, it doesn't have to be that way, and frankly, it really shouldn't be.😁

If you've got drive and actual ambition, there ought to be a real shot at climbing the ladder, snagging a raise, or taking on more challenging projects—assuming your industry even allows for that sort of thing.

You have to find a way to push yourself so you don't feel stuck or useless, and so you can actually prove what you're capable of.
The best way to handle that is by setting a specific goal to act as a motivator, which is something I touched on in my other post earlier in this thread. ☕

That goal is supposed to be the spark that keeps a person working hard.

I remember reading somewhere that people really need internal motivation to hit their targets, but let's be real—for a lot of folks, that inner drive just isn't strong enough on its own.🤷
A ton of people look for external motivators instead (like support from friends or family), and it makes me wonder: is that still okay, as long as they actually end up reaching their goal?

Have you actually read it...?

Scott Rodriguez7 said:Honestly, it doesn't have to be that way, and frankly, it really shouldn't be.😁

If you've got drive and actual ambition, there ought to be a real shot at climbing the ladder, snagging a raise, or taking on more challenging projects—assuming your industry even allows for that sort of thing.

You have to find a way to push yourself so you don't feel stuck or useless, and so you can actually prove what you're capable of.
The best way to handle that is by setting a specific goal to act as a motivator, which is something I touched on in my other post earlier in this thread. ☕

That goal is supposed to be the spark that keeps a person working hard.

I remember reading somewhere that people really need internal motivation to hit their targets, but let's be real—for a lot of folks, that inner drive just isn't strong enough on its own.🤷
A ton of people look for external motivators instead (like support from friends or family), and it makes me wonder: is that still okay, as long as they actually end up reaching their goal?

I suspect the situation is... significantly more convoluted than that...

It isn’t that many people actively seek this out—it’s more fundamental than that. It is an instinctual, almost primal drive... much like how an animal operates. A person simply acts, driven by the immediate demands of their environment or whatever situation they find themselves navigating at that moment. It happens within the context of the group one belongs to, functioning through a sort of unspoken cooperation with "their own"—whoever those people may happen to be...

It seems that over the last several tens of thousands of generations, human interaction has essentially boiled down to a somewhat spontaneous cooperation—a necessary coordination to handle the bare essentials of reproduction—augmented by a chaotic cocktail of secondary motivations. We are constantly navigating these endless social exchanges that shape our very cognition: how we think, what we desire, how we assign value, and where we draw the lines regarding responsibility, solidarity, respect, or even the sheer terror of consequences. It’s all driven by whatever drives us—ambition, the mitigation of immediate risks, the pursuit of dopamine through stimulation or recreation, and all the other psychological nonsense that makes us who we are...

Actually, if you look closer, we possess entirely functional internal mechanisms that allow us to adapt through a sort of coordinated "imitation" when certain situations arise—it’s almost reflexive. When something unfolds within the shared space of a group, individuals feel this spontaneous urge to participate and cooperate, though the intensity of that drive depends heavily on how much autonomy they actually retain... or rather, the specific social dynamics at play within the collective. And honestly, this notion that someone will hand you something—let's say, cash—as a literal "repayment" for cooperation is fundamentally counterintuitive. That isn't how it works. The exchange is realized through the very act of cooperating itself; that is its entire purpose. It is essentially just the reproduction of everything necessary to sustain the specific mode of existence that the group has already established...

When you look at the sheer scope of what’s being demanded of us today—how we’re expected to operate across so many different layers of existence simultaneously—it becomes clear that the entire system is fundamentally broken... It’s dysfunctional, plain and simple, if you consider how human beings actually function when left to their own spontaneous, natural devices...

First off, we are being fed this relentless narrative about the necessity of self-reliance—this idea that everyone must learn to become their own internal support system just to maintain any semblance of effort or purpose. We’re told to act *as if* there were someone else there to motivate us, or to work for some phantom companion, when in reality, the actual presence of other people is treated as nothing more than a hurdle—a source of competition or friction. It’s completely backwards... The whole premise fundamentally undermines the very reason humans form communities in the first place, rather than just living like hermits scattered through the woods. If you follow this logic to its conclusion, it’s a recipe for disaster—it guts the population's demographics over the long haul, breeds total social anomie, and leaves us all utterly atomized...

The secondary reasons are becoming increasingly "indirect"—if that’s even the right word for it. Let’s be realistic here: our fundamental necessities and primal drives haven't changed one bit. We still need water, food, shelter, fuel, hygiene, social connection, sex, escapism, relaxation... the usual list. But the reality is that none of these can be satisfied directly anymore. If you actually gathered a few dozen people today to just live authentically—to exist without those artificial layers and simply meet their needs—someone would inevitably call in the SWAT team to shut it down, and the individual would likely just end up getting beaten by the police...
Instead, we are handed these various options—tasks someone else deems desirable—to perform in exchange for something tangible, just so we can afford food, goods, rent, utilities, and so on... but to actually pull it off, we have to somehow maintain the sheer willpower required for daily struggles that simply cannot be justified by any direct motivation. It relies entirely on certain semantic structures we maintain within our own consciousness—you know, the idea that if you do Y, then X will happen, and X is desirable because... well, then you start thinking long-term, or perhaps you identify with this or that, or you motivate yourself through various irrationalities, or you persist in maintaining routines that make things easier...

But honestly, it’s all bullshit. It’s like forcing a monkey to play some game just to get a banana—except the catch is that the monkey doesn't even grasp the distinction between the two...

Regardless, there is an obvious, massive importance to self-regulation—clearly more significant than it could ever be once our inherent foundational patterns are already set. This means the relative success of the vast majority of the population in navigating life depends heavily on the conditioning and formative experiences that allow for such self-motivation and discipline... which, alongside inherited qualitative differences, shapes a person so that everything functions...

So, we're talking about upbringing, education, training, labor, specific types of drills, and those experiences—again, experiences of consistent activity or work, the experience of success, the influence of drilling, routine, and habit... and certainly, the vital integration of patterns and forms from one's environment, whether that stems from family or other social situations...

That is why I am asking—could people take a moment to reflect so we can analyze what those situations were, what those influences were, what those patterns were... if we simply set aside biological inherency—because, let's face it, we don't possess the technology to manipulate that—we are left with everything else that makes one person function differently than another...

For instance, it would also be interesting to ask how much time is required for a pattern to be integrated from experience, or how tolerance for effort and frustration develops through the daily grind of nonsense—again, through experience—and generally, how one manages oneself so that the daily exertion of any kind stops being such a monumental struggle...

I think it’s worth pointing out that we’re seeing more and more incredibly hardworking athletes struggling with depression lately.

It seems especially common with pros who have already hung up their jerseys. Is that sudden loss of a high-intensity routine often tied to that heavy sense of emptiness?

Well, athletes serve as a perfect case study

what they actually do is entirely unnecessary, unproductive—frankly, quite absurd

I mean, let’s be realistic here—if a human being spends more than half their life training just to sprint down a hill, or run in circles, or throw a heavy metal ball... well, damn, it's not as if they are achieving something "objectively measurable" in any meaningful sense

And yet, that is precisely why it's such a prime example; in this day and age, we are all essentially forced to function this way. We are all expected to perform arbitrary combinations of ridiculous tasks with a certain level of competence just to receive some kind of reward

So, any sort of "objective assessment" of the action itself becomes irrelevant—the organism doesn't distinguish between them anyway. The only true distinction lies between actions driven by internal necessity—say, eating, sleeping, smoking—and the things we do "for various reasons" that are, more or less, socially constructed constructs

That is why sports, as an activity, is much closer to dance or other art forms. In fact, many spiritual or even occult practices—when you strip them down to their operational elements—function almost identically to sports. They utilize similar methods: autosuggestion, visualization, mastering internal states, managing will and focus, the ritualization of specific movements, the gradual self-modification through repetitive practice, and so on...

I suspect a lot of this would become clearer to us if we truly understood how athletes operate from the inside—specifically psychologically—and how they reach those states in the first place

Think about it for a second: sports prove that a person can be brought into a state where, for several hours of intense effort and focus, they execute a sequence of absolutely nonsensical actions while remaining highly motivated. This implies that what is being done is actually secondary; what matters is *how* it is done, or rather, what is happening within the individual during the process, and how they managed to arrive at that mental threshold to begin with

It’s honestly pretty straightforward!

Think of it like this: someone who actually puts in the work has the cash, while someone just coasting through life ends up broke.

When you're driven, you're living the dream and staying independent, rather than being that person who's constantly leaning on everyone else because they couldn't be bothered to step up.

That’s one possible outcome—but why does it actually happen? I mean, why aren't they both just lazy, or conversely, both driven? What are those specific, underlying nuances that create such a stark divide...

placidwolf27 said:Well, athletes serve as a perfect case study

what they actually do is entirely unnecessary, unproductive—frankly, quite absurd

I mean, let’s be realistic here—if a human being spends more than half their life training just to sprint down a hill, or run in circles, or throw a heavy metal ball... well, damn, it's not as if they are achieving something "objectively measurable" in any meaningful sense

And yet, that is precisely why it's such a prime example; in this day and age, we are all essentially forced to function this way. We are all expected to perform arbitrary combinations of ridiculous tasks with a certain level of competence just to receive some kind of reward

So, any sort of "objective assessment" of the action itself becomes irrelevant—the organism doesn't distinguish between them anyway. The only true distinction lies between actions driven by internal necessity—say, eating, sleeping, smoking—and the things we do "for various reasons" that are, more or less, socially constructed constructs

That is why sports, as an activity, is much closer to dance or other art forms. In fact, many spiritual or even occult practices—when you strip them down to their operational elements—function almost identically to sports. They utilize similar methods: autosuggestion, visualization, mastering internal states, managing will and focus, the ritualization of specific movements, the gradual self-modification through repetitive practice, and so on...

I suspect a lot of this would become clearer to us if we truly understood how athletes operate from the inside—specifically psychologically—and how they reach those states in the first place

Think about it for a second: sports prove that a person can be brought into a state where, for several hours of intense effort and focus, they execute a sequence of absolutely nonsensical actions while remaining highly motivated. This implies that what is being done is actually secondary; what matters is *how* it is done, or rather, what is happening within the individual during the process, and how they managed to arrive at that mental threshold to begin with

sports actually have way more in common with the lives of our early ancestors than "normal" jobs do. take a typical office job, for instance—you're just tapping away at some pile of plastic and decoding little symbols on a screen. what does that have to do with anything we've been doing for the last two million years? sports are physical; for millions of years, we were chasing animals and using our muscles to hunt them down and eat them. it’s pretty obvious why engaging in sports feels good to people—those whose brains didn't trigger endorphins to encourage this behavior died of hunger early on and never passed their genes down to the next generation

what I find most fascinating is the motivation behind completely abstract pursuits, like mathematics. where do we get the internal drive to mess around with stuff like that? how did the genetic predisposition to find joy and fulfillment in activities that had absolutely nothing to do with survival or reproduction a few thousand years ago manage to survive?

Honestly, if you think about it, even just sitting down at an old-school typewriter required way more actual effort than tapping away on a laptop today.

And don't even get me started on the music scene from thirty years ago. It was a whole workout! Between hunting down vinyl, lugging around heavy speakers, messing with turntables, or manually rewinding cassette tapes... man, DJs back then had to stay constantly on the move. They probably had much better cardio than most people do now, right?

It feels kind of paradoxical to me how all this technological progress is actually just pushing us further away from our primal sources of motivation—things like eating real food, getting decent sleep, moving our bodies, or even the raw hunt... We invented speech, then we invented an abstraction of speech, which led to writing, and now we’ve moved on to an abstraction of writing, which is just tapping away at a computer keyboard 🤣 so how can we honestly expect people in the future to be any happier than we are now, especially when our brains are hardwired to crave experiences that we don't even engage in anymore? 🤷

edit: I mean, sure, there are things like meditation that actually work and can make you feel centered without needing to satisfy those basic instincts, but it almost feels like cheating to me. Plus, nobody is really encouraging people to actually do it, and we certainly haven't needed to invent some high-tech gadgetry to make it happen either :/

So, we eventually hit on this trend that seems to be spreading like wildfire lately: everyone is just copying everyone else.
It’s become totally mainstream because, let’s be honest, a lot of people don't actually want to do the work of getting to know themselves. Plus, they’d rather just keep seeing others through these old, fixed lenses instead of seeing who they really are now.

And when you factor in how much time we all spend glued to our screens and scrolling through social media, the imitation just goes into overdrive. Why bother doing your own research or thinking for yourself when someone else has already summarized everything for you? It’s easier to just follow the crowd, right?

If you’ve got a handle on English and feel like diving into something deep, there’s this one book that hits the nail on the head regarding all the weirdness in modern society—it’s called *The Matrix* by Jean Baudrillard. You can pretty easily track down a digital copy online, though I’ll skip dropping any direct links here just to stay on the right side of the rules. It’s easy enough to find if you know what you're looking for.

Well, this supposed "copying" is really just one of the fundamental ways people operate—both as individuals and within a collective—it’s how behavioral patterns spread, how we learn, and how people eventually get "acclimated" to their environment... in truth, it serves as a cornerstone of any developed culture, which is essentially built upon the repetition of behaviors and the reproduction of established forms. The more opportunities you give people for mutual interaction, the more this "copying" will occur—quite literally, because it is a functional necessity, one of

placidwolf27 said:Have you actually read it...?

I suspect the situation is... significantly more convoluted than that...

It isn’t that many people actively seek this out—it’s more fundamental than that. It is an instinctual, almost primal drive... much like how an animal operates. A person simply acts, driven by the immediate demands of their environment or whatever situation they find themselves navigating at that moment. It happens within the context of the group one belongs to, functioning through a sort of unspoken cooperation with "their own"—whoever those people may happen to be...

It seems that over the last several tens of thousands of generations, human interaction has essentially boiled down to a somewhat spontaneous cooperation—a necessary coordination to handle the bare essentials of reproduction—augmented by a chaotic cocktail of secondary motivations. We are constantly navigating these endless social exchanges that shape our very cognition: how we think, what we desire, how we assign value, and where we draw the lines regarding responsibility, solidarity, respect, or even the sheer terror of consequences. It’s all driven by whatever drives us—ambition, the mitigation of immediate risks, the pursuit of dopamine through stimulation or recreation, and all the other psychological nonsense that makes us who we are...

Actually, if you look closer, we possess entirely functional internal mechanisms that allow us to adapt through a sort of coordinated "imitation" when certain situations arise—it’s almost reflexive. When something unfolds within the shared space of a group, individuals feel this spontaneous urge to participate and cooperate, though the intensity of that drive depends heavily on how much autonomy they actually retain... or rather, the specific social dynamics at play within the collective. And honestly, this notion that someone will hand you something—let's say, cash—as a literal "repayment" for cooperation is fundamentally counterintuitive. That isn't how it works. The exchange is realized through the very act of cooperating itself; that is its entire purpose. It is essentially just the reproduction of everything necessary to sustain the specific mode of existence that the group has already established...

When you look at the sheer scope of what’s being demanded of us today—how we’re expected to operate across so many different layers of existence simultaneously—it becomes clear that the entire system is fundamentally broken... It’s dysfunctional, plain and simple, if you consider how human beings actually function when left to their own spontaneous, natural devices...

First off, we are being fed this relentless narrative about the necessity of self-reliance—this idea that everyone must learn to become their own internal support system just to maintain any semblance of effort or purpose. We’re told to act *as if* there were someone else there to motivate us, or to work for some phantom companion, when in reality, the actual presence of other people is treated as nothing more than a hurdle—a source of competition or friction. It’s completely backwards... The whole premise fundamentally undermines the very reason humans form communities in the first place, rather than just living like hermits scattered through the woods. If you follow this logic to its conclusion, it’s a recipe for disaster—it guts the population's demographics over the long haul, breeds total social anomie, and leaves us all utterly atomized...

The secondary reasons are becoming increasingly "indirect"—if that’s even the right word for it. Let’s be realistic here: our fundamental necessities and primal drives haven't changed one bit. We still need water, food, shelter, fuel, hygiene, social connection, sex, escapism, relaxation... the usual list. But the reality is that none of these can be satisfied directly anymore. If you actually gathered a few dozen people today to just live authentically—to exist without those artificial layers and simply meet their needs—someone would inevitably call in the SWAT team to shut it down, and the individual would likely just end up getting beaten by the police...
Instead, we are handed these various options—tasks someone else deems desirable—to perform in exchange for something tangible, just so we can afford food, goods, rent, utilities, and so on... but to actually pull it off, we have to somehow maintain the sheer willpower required for daily struggles that simply cannot be justified by any direct motivation. It relies entirely on certain semantic structures we maintain within our own consciousness—you know, the idea that if you do Y, then X will happen, and X is desirable because... well, then you start thinking long-term, or perhaps you identify with this or that, or you motivate yourself through various irrationalities, or you persist in maintaining routines that make things easier...

But honestly, it’s all bullshit. It’s like forcing a monkey to play some game just to get a banana—except the catch is that the monkey doesn't even grasp the distinction between the two...

Regardless, there is an obvious, massive importance to self-regulation—clearly more significant than it could ever be once our inherent foundational patterns are already set. This means the relative success of the vast majority of the population in navigating life depends heavily on the conditioning and formative experiences that allow for such self-motivation and discipline... which, alongside inherited qualitative differences, shapes a person so that everything functions...

So, we're talking about upbringing, education, training, labor, specific types of drills, and those experiences—again, experiences of consistent activity or work, the experience of success, the influence of drilling, routine, and habit... and certainly, the vital integration of patterns and forms from one's environment, whether that stems from family or other social situations...

That is why I am asking—could people take a moment to reflect so we can analyze what those situations were, what those influences were, what those patterns were... if we simply set aside biological inherency—because, let's face it, we don't possess the technology to manipulate that—we are left with everything else that makes one person function differently than another...

For instance, it would also be interesting to ask how much time is required for a pattern to be integrated from experience, or how tolerance for effort and frustration develops through the daily grind of nonsense—again, through experience—and generally, how one manages oneself so that the daily exertion of any kind stops being such a monumental struggle...

Precisely. That is why the discourse surrounding the burden of freedom emerged primarily within free-market, capitalist nations rather than under totalitarian regimes. Freedom inherently breeds anxiety. When you are free, you must be your own master; you carry the weight of your own choices and must grapple with the existential questions of what to do, why to do it, and to what end. Because a person is liberated and left to their own devices, failure becomes much harder to swallow. You cannot shift the blame onto a central authority or a state apparatus; the responsibility rests solely with you. Conversely, success feels much more profound for the same reason. In our modern society, this dynamic has fueled unprecedented levels of envy, frustration, and a pervasive sense of worthlessness.