New Year. Same Old Lazy Me.

​There’s a lot of bullshit propaganda out there saying “New Year. New Me” implying that you should jump into an immediate change to your lifestyle, decisions, and  personality.

Unfortunately, that’s just NOT  how things work. You can’t just equip a different belief system and set of habits like you equip different armor in a video game. It takes time to nurture, develop, and grow and that time will likely take more than one single year at that.

You’re no more new today than you were yesterday, or yesteryear, for that matter and you’re not going to change just because you tell yourself “New Year. New Me.”

This idea of immediate lifestyle alterations and “change now” attitude” is nothing but stress-inducing and energy depleting. It’ll lead to burn out and disappointment if you follow it’s demanding protocol.

Hence why most people who take these “New Year. New Me.” words to heart end up quitting their goals and not really changing much at all in 365 days or otherwise.

See, you must accept who you are first before accepting any sort of change in yourself. Lay on back and enjoy the comfort on your own couch and in your own jammies. Be comfortable with you who are in the now and what you have in the present.

The more you try to change yourself before accepting your (lazy) self, the more resistance you will experience in doing so and the more problems you will come across. It’s like trying to cook a certain recipe before you accept what ingredients you actually have (or don’t have) in your kitchen. be realistic -- it’s the lazy way.

You’ll make it harder for yourself, and let’s face it, you want the easy way to do this.


If you identify as what you should be in the future, you give no credit or appreciation toward who you are right now. And that gives you a sense of insecurity and lack of control. It’ll work you up and make you feel upset/worry.

You must give yourself acceptance, including all your flaws, even laziness. Lean back and relax.

If you can accept who you are and where you are, as well as what strengths/flaws you have “in the now”, if, so to speak,  you can accept what type of ingredients you currently have in your kitchen, you can create a better, more fulfilling recipe than if you try to follow the recipe of a book when you’re not stocked to actually make it properly.


Now speaking of acceptance of flaws, there’s this little phenomenon called the “Fat Acceptance Movement”, which aims to get fat people (mostly women it seems; you don’t see “Big  Handsome Men” messages like you see “Big Beautiful Women” ones) to be seen as pretty gorgeous, and attractive.

That’s all well and good; you should definitely feel comfortable in your own skin at whatever size you are. You should have the confidence and self respect necessary to be at ease, without regard to weight or measurements.

But here’s the thing: at the end of the day, being fat is NOT healthy. It’s just not.

It’s a matter of health if you decide to eat in excess, in the same vein it’s a matter of health if you decide to smoke cigarettes.

Increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, respiratory  problems --  the list goes on and on in the type of health problems being fat can cause.

Unhealthiness is not beautiful. I know I probably just triggered a couple of my readers, but say it with me now: Unhealthiness is NOT beautiful.

And that’s okay.


True acceptance is being okay with that; it’s not wishing, hoping, waiting for, or trying to convince other people and society to approve of you and find you beautiful and amazing.



 It’s being at ease and indifferent when others do not approve of you or your lifestyle choices. It’s feeling so self assured in yourself that negative comments and hate messages don’t effect you. You yawn and remain unfazed.

Imagine if smokers pushed for  a campaign saying: “Black lungs are beautiful”

Like uhhh, noo, they’re not. They’re not healthy. They’re not beautiful. They’re gross and disgusting.

It doesn’t mean that an individual should feel insecure about who they are, it just means they are participating in unhealthy behavior.

Black lungs are unhealthy and fat bellies are unhealthy too.

 It’s not an insult, it’s not a debate, it’s a fact.

And true acceptance is knowing this and still feeling good about yourself; it’s not denying it or trying to change people’s minds about it. Not to mention, that’s a lot of hard work anyway.

True acceptance is actually, well, accepting the way things are. It is absolutely not approval seeking. You’re not trying to change people’s attitudes or viewpoints by debating with them or yelling at them. That’s a rather vigorous way of handling the situation and not lazy at all.

When we talk about true acceptance, it just means you’re okay with the given state of affairs and your current mental, emotional, and physical condition (and you’re also okay with people not feeling the same way.)

You recognize the reality of the consequences of your behavior (eg. over-eating causes health problems and being too lazy causes career problems) and still feel good about yourself, and you don’t expect other people to lift your spirits up or convince you that you’re a worthy human being who is “equally as beautiful” as others.

Look, some people are just better than you. Some people are also worse.  Either way, you don’t compare yourself to others, if you’re really striving for any sort of “acceptance” in its true form.

People have advantages and disadvantages; pretty and ugly parts; good and bad traits. Not everything about you is good. Not everything about you is decent. Not everything about you is beautiful and amazing.

I don’t say that in a depressive or discouraging way. I say that in a loving, encouraging : “shut the fuck up and ACCEPT it” sort of way.

Likewise, not everything about you is bad. Not everything about you is disgusting. Not everything about you is ugly and awful.


So when I say to give yourself a bit of “Lazy Acceptance”, you must recognize that work ethic is trash, that you get distracted from important tasks easily, and you may even be a bit messy and fail to clean up after yourself.

But that’s okay. Whatever.

You enjoy your laziness and fully accept it and all of its (unhealthy) flaws.

On the flip side, as a lazy person, you are also efficient with your time, in terms of minimizing effort and maximizing results and a natural leader because you get other people to do the work for you.

That doesn’t mean you want people to find your laziness to be beautiful or amazing, as a matter of fact you’re too lazy to care about what other people think. You don’t need to rub it in people’s faces or force attraction, attention, and compliments from others.

You are just fully okay with both the good and bad side of your laziness. You find comfort in your own laziness.

You’re not wasting your energy bouncing around trying to excuse yourself or your behavior. You’re not wasting your breath trying to convince other people that your lazy decisions are acceptable. You’re just carefree and laid-back about the whole thing.

There’s a difference between Acceptance and Approval.

The “Fat is Beautiful” movement aims for the latter. They’re not just trying to encourage people to feel good about themselves for being fat (which is a good things) but also convince the general public to find them attractive and give them positive attention.

So what? You’re lazy? You’re fat? You’re ugly?

Why are you trying to get other people to approve of you?

You haven’t truly accepted yourself if you need other people’s attention, approval, and compliments to make you feel “beautiful” about yourself. Wanting other people’s approval comes from a place of insecurity, not pride. You’re not Proud to be (fat, lazy, etc) if you need other people to encourage you for it, if you need people smiling and clapping for you.

Lazy Acceptance goes beyond that. It goes beyond the need to get others’ rooting for laziness or putting procrastinators up on magazines as models. We don’t want that -- too much work and too much intensity. Ease it up. The Lazy Acceptance is a carefree and composed approach to raising awareness, not an agitated intolerant attack on society.

Society can work hard and encourage others to do so, but we don’t care, and we’re not going to

It is not the goal of the Lazy Acceptance Movement to achieve love, care, approval, or otherwise. No matter what you do, people aren’t going to like you and you (as a lazy procrastinator) can remained poised about that fact.

The goal, rather,  is simply to allow the individual to be lazy without feeling remorse for the consequences that follow such slothful behavior. It’s not trying to barter with a hardworking society that laziness should have no consequences or that laziness is a practical lifestyle (on the mass scale), but to raise awareness that being lazy is okay (if used correctly) and how to use it to your own advantage (on a small scale). It is waking up people to the truth.

The “Acceptance” comes at an individual level and it is not the responsibility nor the burden of the whole of society to give Acceptance to the lazy man (or woman).

Part of this is because not everyone can be lazy in a fully functional society. As a matter of fact, I am not ruling out “hard work” as a necessary practice but simply stating that some people are not motivated to do it, and it is not necessary for these people. See,  there is a balance of roles in play. Lazy people create the machines and gather the crew, the hardworkers actually press the buttons and move the pedals to keep it all running.

By running ads and campaigns and protests about how a certain flaw (like laziness or even fatness for that matter) should be accepted and approved in society (not just on an individual level) what you’re saying is this:

“I don’t really love myself very much and I need other people to love me and approve of me and my lifestyle to feel halfway decent about myself.”

That’s not the cool, clam, collected, and confident way. That’s not the lazy way. We’re not pushing for any sort of mass shift in social stigma or mindset. We’re not approval seeking. We’re just trying to lay back and relax, man, and encourage others to do the same, if the want to.

Whether or not people like it is irrelevant and makes no difference. Honey Badger don’t care. Thumbs up or thumbs down, we’re lying on the couch, whatever people think. (And that’s the attitude fat people should take. “I’m gonna eat. Like it or not and I don’t care if you think I’m ugly. I realize it’s unhealthy, but it’s my choice”  not” You MUST find me attractive! You bigotted ignorant person! Stop trying to force me into impossible beauty standards”)

We don’t care about these “standards” in the first place, in terms of how they function, and we certainly are NOT  trying to change them -- just live our own (lazy) lives.
​

 rds. (There’s actually a whole religion off this called “Dudeism", and I myself am a Dudeist priest)

The Dude abides. He accepts his current state of affairs and lives fully and completely in the present, without regard or care for how he must change or who he must become in the future or how much approval he’ll gain. He wears sunglasses with pajamas and bathrobes and drinks White Russian, not the most fashionable or classy act for societal standards.

He certainly does not aim for any drastic measures of change to become the New Dude. He's just the Dude, as simple as that.

Apply this principle to your own life. Abide yourself and learn to just "be" without a care in the world with how things will play out in the distant future or who will approve of them.

To paint another analogy, imagine playing Pokemon and picking your starter. Let’s say it was Charmander from the original R/B version (put aside the debate of which one to choose for now). Embracing the “New Year. New ME” attitude would be like expecting to getCharizard from the very beginning of the game after picking up the Pokeball from Professor Oak, then feeling disappointed when you realize you have only a tiny lizard that can barely scratch and make a spark instead of a fully grown flying, fire-bnreathing dragon.

No, you have to play with the Pokemon you’re given, and ACCEPT the current level and evolution form you have currently have so that you can play the game accordingly. You can’t be focused completely on what level you want and the Charizard evolution form you want, you have to take it one battle at a time, one badget at a time, one level at a time. slowly and surely.

Certainly you can look at the goal you have in mind, but to believe that you are already there is unreasonable and will probably want to make you put the game down when you see that you’re no where even close. You have to battle with your Charmander even though he’s not a Charizard right now. Yes, he can become one, but quitting the gameor feeling discouraged  because he’s not is senseless. He’ll get there..eventually.

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And you’ll get there eventually too at the level you want to be, but you have to first know and accept the current level you are at in order to upgrade and move forward.

If you’re happy with where you’re currently at, the progress you’ve already made, the person you are that currently exist and not the one that will exist in the future, without any regard to what other people think or how you compare/compete with others, then every move you make feels just a bit closer , just a bit better --- you are consistently making progress and evolving.

On the other hand, if you are NOT happy with where you’re currently at or who you are (despite any flaws), if you don’t ACCEPT these things at a fundamental level, then the disconnect between your current self and what you accomplished right now compared to the ideal identity and set of accomplishments you have in mind,  will wear down on you, especially if you seeking the approval of others.

The more you seek approval, the less confidence you’ll have and the more hard work and effort you will put into attaining your goals in the first place. Do it the easy way,

Don’t regard yourself with societal standards or approval. Sit on back, relax, and enjoy being the same old (lazy) you.

Unshared inner peace is stronger than outer acknowledgment shared among everyone.

Take it easy and happy new year,

N8
Image Source:

Employee Waking Up by FreePik

Young Celebration Man by FreePik

Charmander Dreams by Enogrpaher on TeePublic