To the individuals who know me finest, I’m a weird mixture of self-discipline and ineffectuality. I rearrange my fridge every day with the effectivity of an expert Tetris participant, however I as soon as vanquished a snake plant after forgetting its month-to-month hydration wants. Waking up earlier than dawn poses no problem for me, but I lack the persistence to prepare dinner something that takes greater than seven minutes. Just lately, I accomplished a 16-mile run however scraped my knee within the course of, didn’t trouble to disinfect the wound, and located a wholesome colony of micro organism on my leg the following day.
In lots of cultures and throughout many time durations, my minor triumphs can be seen as virtuous, and my recurring idleness is likely to be thought-about an ethical failure. Sloth is likely one of the seven lethal sins. Napoleonic France, the late Ottoman empire, and the up to date United States have all usually stigmatized laziness and praised industriousness. The notion that an individual can embody each of these traits would possibly really feel incongruous.
But due to a linguistic fluke, I’ve by no means seen my actions as an issue. I grew up in South Korea, the place there are two phrases that may roughly translate as “laziness”: geeureum and gwichaneum. Geeureum’s connotations are roughly similar to the English—the phrase bears the identical condescension.
However gwichaneum lacks the destructive valence. There’s even a form of jest to it. To really feel gwichan (the stem phrase of gwichaneum, which I’ll use right here for simplicity) is to not be bothered to do one thing, not prefer it, or discover it to be an excessive amount of effort. The important thing to understanding the time period, nevertheless, is the way it suits into Korean grammar: You possibly can’t say “Bob is a gwichan particular person”; you may solely say one thing like “Doing laundry is a gwichan endeavor for Bob.” The time period describes duties, not folks. It locations the defect inside the act. Errands which might be gwichan induce laziness in you.
To me, this isn’t mere verbal trickery. Quite the opposite, it’s an illumination. Gwichan nails what’s improper with the litany of errands that plague our on a regular basis existence: Lots of them don’t benefit our devotion.
Desirous about our moments of indolence this fashion is just not a renunciation of duty—life nonetheless calls for that bathrooms be scrubbed and toddlers be fed. Gwichanism (a preferred neologism in Korea) is just not an apologia for anti-productivity or anti-work, and the gwichanist will nonetheless fulfill their important life obligations.
You see, gwichanists aren’t unproductive; they’re maybe meta-productive, interrogating the benefit of each enterprise. For instance, you wouldn’t name the traditional Greek thinker Diogenes, who allegedly wrote not less than a dozen books and 7 tragedies, lazy. However within the presence of Alexander the Nice, his solely request was that the monarch get out of the way in which of his sunbathing. He illustrates a key distinction between a lazy particular person and a gwichanist: The previous is chronically unmotivated, and the latter is selectively, purposefully unmotivated. In that sense, gwichanism is a form of managed slackerism, a conviction that achievement is feasible with out a type-A character.
In actual fact, to me, the downsides of being a go-getter or a lazy particular person would possibly manifest equally: Each an overcommitment to all of life’s tasks—nevertheless petty—and a refusal to decide to any of them can result in an absence of company in a single’s life. As an alternative, being a gwichanist would possibly enable you to reclaim your time. Throughout my necessary navy service in Korea, I selected to cowl up scratches on my boots with black marker as an alternative of sharpening them. Sure, this was the form of aggressive corner-cutting that my superiors would have abhorred in the event that they’d been conscious of it, nevertheless it spared me sufficient time to learn virtually all of Vladimir Nabokov’s oeuvre.
The gwichanist philosophy comes with prices. Due to the big range of duties that I select to not trouble with, my on a regular basis life typically feels comically inefficient. On a latest journey to Europe, I traveled with a conveyable printer, as a result of I didn’t wish to have to seek out locations to print my writing for proofreading. At dwelling, I put pens, Publish-its, and authorized pads in all places, as a result of I gained’t write something down if they don’t seem to be available.
What different folks discover to be value their effort or not is likely to be arbitrary. However embracing gwichanism permits me to claim the primacy of my preferences, nevertheless esoteric. In its ideally suited type, the gwichanist way of life isn’t sloppy a lot as breezy. Certain, some duties simply don’t get achieved. However the ones that matter do.
