Being Lazy… Can be Good, Actually

“When work becomes life, what happens to living?” A reflection on burnout, productivity, and the art of slowing down.

At various points in the grand, self-perpetuating hamster wheel of life, I often found myself running at full speed, convinced that if I just moved fast enough, I would finally catch up with… well, something. What exactly that something was had always been a little unclear. I knew I just wanted to be better, but be better at what? Be better for what exactly? The truth is, for the longest time, I never stopped long enough to find out.

In architecture school, building was the thing I knew best, and build I did. Projects, expectations, skyscrapers without a ceiling– in retrospect, it was only a matter of time until the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. Between my part- time job and school, whatever scraps of time I had– from my first sip of coffee in the morning to the same fluorescent light of my desk lamp the next morning– were spent preoccupied with perfecting my models, fine- tuning every detail, stretching myself thinner and thinner like overused Blu Tack. Somewhere in that haze my days became measured in deadlines and deliverables; time itself blurred into a strange mix of late nights, sore wrists, and the cold, disorienting glow of my laptop screen at 4 a.m.

In The Scent of Time, Korean- German philosopher Byung- Chul Han critiques our society’s obsession with efficiency, arguing that our relentless drive for productivity fractures our sense of self. When we rush from task to task, never savoring each second for its intrinsic value, we lose the ability to simply be. After all, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. If every day is reduced to a checklist, every hour merely a bridge to the next task (of endless tasks), and every moment nothing but a splintered sub-unit in time, life goes by just like that. Blink and you miss it.

As for me, I closed my eyes for a power nap and woke up four months later. I barely recognised myself then– I was pushing my body far beyond its limits to produce assignments I was completely detached from, chasing a standard that felt increasingly meaningless. I wasn’t creating out of passion or curiosity. I was working for the sake of working, burning myself out in pursuit of a singular grade. Is this it?-- I wondered aloud to myself, and the stars looked back at me with the collective wisdom of a thousand centuries of death. Anyway, I dropped out two days later.

The point is, it’s not very different in SMU or anywhere else– place a thousand bright minds together and you’re bound to create an ecosystem where ambition never sleeps. Where the air thrums almost palpably with the anxiety of caffeinated students racing against deadlines, productivity is a currency, and just like any other, you just can’t have too much of it. We are constantly reminded that every moment wasted is a moment we could have spent securing an internship, or maximising shareholder value, or something. But in this relentless pursuit of efficiency, we risk losing the very things that make us who we are: creativity, self-expression, and the small rituals in the everyday.

Of course, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to work hard. As an old friend of mine once told me, anything meaningful in this world must come from labour. But where are we directing our energy towards? Is enough of that energy being channelled into things that are meaningful to us– friendships, personal projects, the kind of work that lights us up on the inside?

Rest isn’t just a pause between moments of productivity; it is what makes those moments meaningful in the first place. When we allow ourselves to do nothing, we give our brains the space to process experiences and consolidate memories. Rest isn’t just a pit stop– it’s the narrative woven between otherwise disjointed events in our lives. It makes us human.

So this is a gentle reminder to those of us who have been running too fast for too long: there is beauty to be found in the simple, the slow, and the seemingly unproductive. Sometimes, the most meaningful thing we can do is nothing at all.