Fear or Laziness? (1 Viewer)

[yoddle]

The puzzle goes like this: young student actor Wiley Wiggins, star of the trippy, philosophical film Waking Life, walks into a bar. There he finds University of Texas Professor of Philosophy Louis Mackey, who muses on two kinds of human suffering: those that suffer from an “overabundance of life”, like Professor Mackey himself, and those who suffer from a scarcity of it. Mackey then poses a question about our world that often seems full of failures and underachievers: “Which is the more universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?”

When Professor Mackey asks this, he refers of course to those of us filled to the brim with abandoned aspirations, high goals to greatness that we somehow never meet. He means also those of us who live unfulfilling, humdrum lives with little exploration or adventure. The subject of the suburb’s despair, this middleclass rut, appears countless times in contemporary sitcoms, novels, and cinema. The depression associated with it runs the gamut, appearing in a wide range of films from One Hour Photo to Brokeback Mountain. The same idea even appears in the civilians in V for Vendetta, nuclear family dullards who dream of revolution but don’t seem to possess the true drive to carry it out.

The message sent by modern media seems clear: we cannot climb the ranks we wish, or live the way we want. Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections looks at this modern phenomenon through the eyes of an aging baby boomer, which I’ll paraphrase in the interest of length: We place in our children all of the high hopes and dreams that we never achieved ourselves. Only after our children grow up and fail to make us proud do we resign to simply hoping that they end up happy. In Franzen’s view, this cycle seems to go on for generations upon generations of underachievers.

So what element of the human condition makes us so prone to settling for less than what we once aspired to reach? To paraphrase Mackey, do we disappoint ourselves out of fear of the unknown or just insufficient motivation? Which makes us so pathetic? Fear or Laziness?

A trick question, the student of evolutionary psychology might say. “Fear and laziness” really just refer to one unified trait: self-preservation. The natural desire to keep oneself safe from harm or loss compels us to remain in the cramped confines of our present situation. Like a domesticated animal, we stay where we know we’ll find food, shelter and security rather than scouring the unknown. It doesn’t make sense to venture into uncertainty (fear), and it certainly doesn’t seem worth it (laziness).

Or maybe I have over-simplified the human condition by comparing all of us to house pets. Perhaps we don’t even have an entire class of quitters or cowards at all. Could these complaints of a scarcity of life indicate not that middleclass people have settled for less than ideal lives, but instead that humans have in their nature a fundamental refusal to find anything satisfactory? Even as many Americans enjoy the highest living standards in human history, depression and reported frustration seem to skyrocket. I think this begs a new question entirely: which human characteristic truly dominates: fear, laziness, or discontentment?

Does failure come from “fear or laziness”? | Dangerous Intersection

Let's discuss.

 

[HumanDichotomy]

Hmm. Interesting, and very prudent in approaching the HSC! But, basically, imo, 'fear' leads to a sense of being overwhelmed, then a sense of being unable to achieve, then a lack of motivation characterised by this doubt, which can be interpreted as 'laziness'.

 

[Uncle]

A small amount of fear could help retain one's guard in certain situations but submitting completely in fear is what has dire consequences.

 

[raniaaa]

in my opinion failure comes predominantly from laziness simply because when anyone becomes lazy they procrastinate, ultimately leading to failure.
however with fear it depends on the individual. for some fear of failure is a source of motivation whereas for others it numbs them from any productivity thence leading to failure.

so basically failure is caused by laziness for all people however can be compounded by fear for some individuals.

 

[KFunk]

Anxiety.

Quoth Heidegger (Being & Time, H. 265-6):

"[T]he state-of-mind which can hold open the utter and constant threat to itself arising from Dasein's [= the existing world-bound being's] ownmost individualized being, is anxiety... Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety."

Loose reading: Anxiety is the philosophical mood which brings us face to face with the possibility of our death - the ultimate nature of which is uncertain but is nonetheless 'mine' and so individuates me. Put simply: Death is what individuates us. Anxiety is the mood which reveals, or makes us aware of, death. Therefore anxiety as a state-of-mind is the starting point for investigations of one's ownmost being

That said, Heidegger also spoke about boredom and, along with Kierkegaard, is probably the locus of the ideas in the above article. See attached article for a random example of how these ideas can mix together [/philosophical indulgence].