Connor Beaton identifies the "lazy man" as an inner critic that resists action and hides in shame. He counters it with meaningful social contact, small physical actions like getting out of bed, and acknowledging rather than suppressing that part of yourself.
The idea of a lazy man really being a man who is often complaining about life around him, circumstances around him, complaining about relationships, judging other people's relationships, other people's work, and really being the voice of the critic. And the reality is that we all have a lazy man within us.
All of us. Like for a long time I used to joke that I had a like 500 pound fat guy that lived in me that just wanted to eat popcorn, smoke weed and play video games and that's all that he wanted to do. And the truth is that that part of me hasn't gone away, right? That part of me still comes up and just wants to sit around and watch anime all day and do absolutely nothing. Nothing. It's true, right? Like even the most productive people in the world, even the most successful investors in the world, even the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, now a part of them that, that wants to resist progress, that wants to resist doing the work. The challenge is, is that when we have enmeshed ourselves with the lazy man, when we've given that lazy man too much power and we've hidden him from the world, that that lazy man starts to take control over our actions. And he justifies judgments, he justifies criticism, he justifies complaints, he justifies not doing what he knows he needs to do to feel self led and empowered. And then if we have allowed that lazy man to take too much control in our life, that will be this thing that we shame ourselves for. So then we'll start to go into shaming, we'll start to go into self criticism. The inner critic will come up. You should have, you could have, you would have if only you would have, right? And it becomes the thing that we allow ourselves to self deprecate, self loathe and criticize for. So what do we do? How do we combat this lazy man within us? What do we do about the part of us that wants to do nothing, right? That really rejects any form of moving forward? The first thing that I would say and the first thing that I started to do was really understand what this lazy man was all about, right? Why was he there? What was he trying to communicate? Was he just depressed? Was he sad? Was he feeling lonely? And the reality is that when I started to tune in to that lazy part within me, I started to understand that it was very closely linked to my sadness, to my depression, to my sense of isolation and loneliness. And so my form of combating that was getting myself to be more social with people that I really cared about. I started to allow myself and give myself permission to push my boundary, right? When I could hear that lazy man just be like, hit snooze again. It's like, okay, all right. I've committed to going to the gym and the alarm goes off at 6:30 in the morning. And as soon as I hear the alarm go off, the lazy man pops up and he's like, just hit snooze just once. And as soon as I hear that, I'm like, just roll out of bed legitimately for a little while. I would just roll out of bed onto the floor and I would be like in my boxers, sitting on the fucking floor. And I was just like, okay, here we go. Like, fuck you. You know, I'm not. You are not going to win today. I'm not going to let you win. And it was a little bit of that battle at first, right? I think the lazy man is this part of ourselves that we usually don't talk about because we have a lot of shame around him, right? We feel like we shouldn't talk about him. We don't give him any more power, but it's actually bringing him out of the shadows and starting to talk about him, starting to talk about this part of ourselves that actually allows us and gives us the strength and the courage and the vulnerability to start to address him and start to move forward.
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