Many adults accuse young people of being lazy because they spend all their time on their phone on social media, consuming content, or playing video games. However, I don’t believe this is lazy.
Laziness means not using energy and when you think about it, consuming content does use a lot of your brain power and so does playing video games. You have to process so much information while doing these things and your brain is constantly active. That’s why video games keep you awake and they’re not really relaxing. We just think they’re relaxing because we’re not physically active and all we’re doing is sitting in a chair. True laziness would be just doing nothing and just sleeping all day.
This brings me to the point that most young people are lost, not lazy because they don’t what to put their energy into. They are lost because they haven’t had the correct role models in their life and they have become out of tune with their real self. They don’t even know what they like anymore because they’ve spent their entire life listening to other people and copying what other people do. Think about in school when we are conditioned to be like girls because no fighting, no talking, and you always have to listen to the teacher. As kids we don’t learn, we imitate, and if we’ve been imitating the wrong behavior we will be messed up.
So what can we do about this problem? Learn from the right people is a good way to start. Instead of being the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with, it’s being the average of the 5 content creators that you consume the most. And then once you find the right people, you need to start listening to yourself. Give yourself some time to do nothing. I know I said this was laziness before, but I think giving yourself time to think is actually productive. By being alone and being introspective, you can learn a lot about yourself and your life. So start finding purpose today.