People Are Lazy When They Don't Care

I was having an argument with a friend of mine about why people suck so hard. My argument was that people simply don't care about you. I said that whenever you try to reach out to other people, they hear your words and all they think about is themselves and their lives and their experiences, so all they end up doing is acknowledging that your life sucks or talking about themselves.

My friend argued that most people do care, but are incredibly lazy. Her example is that on Facebook, it is made so exceptionally easy to wish somebody a happy birthday (and you don't even have to actually remember when it is), that they are willing to put in the most minimal effort to be kind.

We reached an impasse at that point. We both had correct examples, so neither of us was wrong. Later on, much after the argument was over, I realized that we were both right; the truth was in the middle. People are lazy and they don't care. More than that, though, people are lazy when they don't care.

I think back to my times in college, and I have seen people fervently studying certain subjects and desperately avoiding others. In this quest for knowledge, the same person might be active in one and lazy in another. The decider, then, is interest. The subjects they want to learn about, they do. The subjects that bore them, they ignore.

This is actually a very important principle to understand about people. Passion determines energy and enthusiasm. The surest way to know how much somebody is willing to do is to see how badly they want to accomplish it (or how badly they want to avoid the consequences of failure, which I think is what drives most college students these days).