Intellectual Laziness

Intellectual laziness is insidious. It has a way of sneaking into your daily routine, lulling you into a sense of contentment, effectively melting your brain into a big puddle of goo. I am ashamed to find that I have been guilty of intellectual laziness for perhaps a year or even two.

What I found was my increasing inability to account for the time after work/school and on weekends. Worse yet, it seems that I had no true achievements of note even during the long school hols. That should have clued me in, but it was the feeling of being characteristically occupied that kept me from really putting a finger on what was going wrong.

After all, I never had a bored moment during my free time. I was always doing something as per normal, all the way till bedtime. That seemed ordinary enough. On closer inspection, however, I found that I was not learning new things as aggressively as I used to. I was not coming up with observations of life with the spontaneity I expected. Even when chatting, I did not feel the urge to watch a video to make the most of the time spent. I caught myself mechanically browsing the threads at forums for those worth responding to, but only because nobody was online to entertain me at the time.

These alarming findings were triggered by the way I was suddenly coming up with new blog entries. I was watching Mirrormask when I figured I could stop it halfway, sleep, then continue the following day. I realized then that it was very wrong. It was not very me to leave things undone, especially when it was a story. I would not normally read comics as a substitute for full novels. And I most certainly should not be having difficulty coming up with regular blog entries.

Of course, now that I know a problem exists, I owe it to myself to recapture the old magic that I had in my younger years. The sense of wonderment at what is going on out there, and the respect for knowledge even when my opinions differ from the direction that knowledge is leading.

This evening, I was taking the bus home when I started to space out again. Ok, so some may worry about my sanity (which, by the way, was never really quite intact to begin with), but it was a glimpse back into the worlds beyond the edges of vision. I saw the familiar strangeness like a black blob oozing about in the shadows, how the bus's interior just felt...wrong, and how strangely a bicycle was chained to a staircase at my place. It was that welcome detachment from reality that really spiced things up again. Of course, what is yet more worrying is how to prevent such intellectual laziness from creeping up again...