I have struggled with “laziness” for a long time. Cleaning is hard to do, and I live in mess — which is fine if you’re cool with living in mess, but I actually hate it. Often, I do things late, or I don’t finish them. I repeatedly lose interest in things and just can’t muster the energy to make myself continue.

I’ve also been really tired a lot, in varying amounts and flavors, for most of my adult life. For some reason, the possible connection between these things did not occur to me in my younger days. Back then, I was more into “stop being a lazy shit and do the thing you fucker” type of methodologies. Unsurprisingly, these did not work.

Later, I figured out that whatever we call “laziness” is made of many things. Most of these things are not what the social norm usually regards as the root cause of laziness, which, as I understand it, is “you’re a crappy person.” Sometimes, it’s a perfectly rational assessment from your brain that the thing you are supposed to be doing is not worth doing.

A Question of Priorities

The priorities of your instinct-driven mind and body are probably not the same as your personal ones. I mean, to your conscious self, “finish writing your paper” may seem like the primary thing you should care about, but to your lizardbrain, that’s basically an optional side quest in the mission of life. Going to sleep or doing some nonsense thing to relax may be a far higher priority to your primordial self than things like writing papers, or cleaning your house, or building doors out of garbage scrap wood to affix to your rotting shed so the feral hordes of children that roam the neighborhood will stop dumping their Nerf Howitzers and potato chip bags in there.

And, honestly, it’s got a point. Sleep and rest are essential for survival. Excessive stress has all sorts of terrible health effects. Losing sleep or living in constant stress will physiologically and psychologically fuck you up, possibly for life. Writing your paper is merely a question of failing your course or whatever, which can either be repeated or rejected for some other life pursuit, like puppetry or mealworm farming.¹

Your most basic self knows this, even if your more complicated self-that-lives-in-a-society doesn’t, because the conservation of energy is huge determining factor in life or death in the natural world.

The Energy Thrift of Pelicans

Recently, I went to see the ocean.

I have this thing about the ocean. I love it. I’m fascinated by it. But I also hate it because it makes me throw up and could easily kill me. So I spent only one day on a boat. After that, I satisfied myself with looking at the ocean from the safety of land.

I walked on the beach awhile. There weren’t many other people, but I wasn’t alone.

Groups of brown pelicans kept coming in from nowhere and gliding past me, right over the surf. So close to the surf, in fact, that their wingtips were sometimes millimeters from a gathering wave. It looked like even a slight miscalculation in their flight path would result in them splooshing into the ocean.

As I watched them, I wondered what they were doing. It almost looked like they were…surfing, sort of, following the crash of the breakers, or trying to follow the gentle lump of a gathering wave.

I went to look this up later, and found out that this is pretty much what’s happening. But instead of riding the water itself to get their rush of speed, they’re riding the bursts of wind and updraft that come off the wave when it breaks. This way, they minimize the amount of work they do to rise up off the water, without relying solely on a bunch of flapping.

It is a very specific way of doing what a lot of birds do with other forms of wind currents: taking advantage of natural phenomena to do less work. And doing less work is, for most animals, a critical survival tactic.

Doing less work comes in a lot of forms, and most living things do whatever they can to achieve it. A lot of the time, it’s something subtle, like what the pelicans do — using breezes, currents, the sun’s rays, and so on. But some are a lot more complex.

There are a whole suite of behaviors, in fact, that get other animals to do the work.

Traps and Thieves

There are a lot of predators that wait for the prey to come to them. Anglerfish use lures, stargazer fish use camouflage, spiders use traps woven from their bottom-silks. This is big on energy conservation, but may be low on yield. If your prey does not come to you for a while, you may not eat.

So some predators go further and become kleptoparasites — thieves, basically. They wait for another animal to catch the prey, and then steal it. Parasitic jaegers are well-known for this, but bald eagles do this sometimes, and it was one of the main reasons Benjamin Franklin did not want to it become a national symbol.

Bald eagles will also eat dead things, but they’re not as famous for this as vultures. Vultures, however, have trouble ripping apart flesh themselves. So they will often wait for other carrion-eaters to rip into the carcass for them. Why try so hard to cut into a tin with a dull pocketknife if someone else is going to come along with an electric can opener?

Then there are the brood parasites — animals that make other animals raise their young. Cowbirds and cuckoos have a particular reputation for laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. But they also watch the nest from the shadows with little fedoras on, to make sure that the chosen parents hatch their eggs and raise their chicks. If not, they retaliate, and destroy the entire nest.

And this is just the behavioral stuff. Some animals have evolved dramatic changes to their physiology solely to conserve energy.

Bodies for Energy Efficiency

A classic example of this is hibernation, or various forms of dormancy. In nature, a wide range of animals and plants go into some state of reduced existence in winter. This lowers their energy expenditure to match their likely energy sources (less than usual, or possibly none).

The Arctic ground squirrel is one of the more extreme hibernators. For only a few months of the year is it out there doing squirrel stuff — eating and eating all summer — and then, in winter, it becomes very nearly dead. Its heart rate drops to 1 beat per minute, its blood drops to temperatures literally below freezing (though it remains a liquid for reasons not entirely known), and connections between its brain cells shrivel up and disappear.

Then it gets warmer, and it wakes up, and it’s fine.

But there are even weirder things. Remoras, for example, are fishes that have evolved sucker-like pads on the tops of their heads. This is so they can stick themselves, upside down, to larger oceanic creatures and sometimes boats, in order to use them like buses. They can swim on their own, but, well, they prefer not to.

They will also eat stuff on and around the thing they are stuck to: parasitic copepods, plankton, skin sheddings, even poop. Why go out to eat when there’s food at home, I guess.

And then there are the terrifying wasps who have developed both brain-altering toxins and also incredibly precise knowledge of exactly which parts of a another insect’s brain to inject them into. In the pursuit of baby-making, one of these wasps will find a larger, meatier bug, inject their brain with poison, and create a sort of mind-control-slash-Ratatouille situation.

After the poison takes effect, the meatbug is powerless to escape. Its oxygen demand is also lowered, allowing it to stay alive and um, fresh, for a while.

The wasp can “steer” the now-docile, drugged-up meatbug by its antennae. Into a wasp den. Where the wasp will lay its eggs in or on its body, and baby wasps will hatch out and eat the bug right there. Sometimes, the meatbug in question is also hypnotized into defending the wasp larva from outside threats until so much of it has been eaten that it finally dies.

Much easier than dragging in a heavy slab of meat to feed the kids with just brute force.

These are just a few examples. There are, I would estimate, frillions of ways that living things do their utmost to not do any more work than they absolutely have to.

All the Energy All at Once: A Brief Note on the Other Side of the Spectrum

It is, perhaps, worth noting that there are creatures who do the exact opposite. Once the baby-making kitchen timer in their brains goes off, these animals throw every nanoparticle of energy they have in their bodies into the act of breeding.

To the point where they, um, die afterwards.

There are different ways this happens. But in some of the most well-known cases, like with Pacific salmon, their bodies become so thoroughly depleted that they self-destruct. They actually start to fall apart even while the animal is alive.

It makes for pretty successful breeding, but not-so-great survival. So I would suggest…um, not doing that.

But What About Humans?

It’s fair to say that animal conservation of energy is a pretty straightforward equation of calories consumed versus calories burned. But what if you are a human? In a situation where you don’t have an issue consuming enough calories? And in fact, may try to artificially restrict your calories, or else purposely try to burn more of them by going into a loud building with a lot of little fake-running machines?

Well, this situation has been created by the human adaptation geared towards energy conservation. This is the tactic of “create a society in order to distribute the labor of surviving.” Other animals do this too, but humans have gone, um, totally fucko bonkers with it. I mean, it works, in that I don’t grow my own food or know how to make bread, and yet I am eating Cheesecake Factory brand rolls right now.

But.

…But. Human societies have become ridiculously complex. As a result, we expend enormous amounts of energy to participate in them in a legal, acceptable, survivable, and personally fulfilling way. So…our “energy stored, energy burned” equation is a bit different, I would argue. It’s more difficult to untangle. And it’s harder to know what kind and how much of our energies are being drained away, and what kind or how much rest is going to restore them.

For example, if I work several long shifts in a row, or if I have a long bout of insomnia I can’t get over, I end up too tired to cook nutritious food and instead eat things that will make my intestines angry, which makes me feel worse, and then my mind goes and I end up yelling at a tree and tell it to go fuck itself with a flamethrower and other things I’m not proud of. When it’s over and I have a day off, or if I finally do sleep one night, I usually find I can’t really move for most of the day. Or think straight. And end up typing “poop” into the internet browser search over and over.

In fact, I can’t even remember what point I’m trying to make right now.

Concluding Remarks

I think what I’m saying here is, energy conservation comes in many forms. One of these we call “laziness.” But really, it’s just about smart living, and maximizing your survival time. So don’t feel bad about doing less work to guard your energy — it’s the natural order of things. And at least you’re not a kleptoparasite.²

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¹ You may argue that passing your course has an effect on your ability to make money, which is essential. But to be fair, money is imaginary and essentially a bunch of made-up numbers or random objects to which changing values have been assigned by who-the-fuck-knows and sometimes doled out or taken away for no sensical reason, and your lizardbrain can’t be expected to deal with it. Also, you can probably make more money as a mealworm farmer.

² I’m assuming.