Teachers, bosses and parents always say:

To succeed in life you need to work hard!

But have you noticed that many things around us help us to don’t have to?… and yet we complain about how difficult and tiring life is…

Many examples come to my mind… but let’s talk about these two:

1. Nowadays, devices do more and more things for us. There’s no need to press a button anymore, just by telling Alexa (or any of “her” friends) what we want, “she” does it for us.

   

2. If we want a coffee or any beverage to go, we don’t need a real mug, we can take a cardboard-plastic one for free that can be thrown to the bin later.

   

Is it just me or there’s a fine line between easing our days with these life-hacks and being lazy?

We could consider them “more efficient processes”, and somehow they are, but are they really benefiting us?

In the short term they do, but they have been here for a while, long enough to show us they aren’t positive if they are overused.

Alexa and friends, could be helping us to be stupid and incompetent too. I read three articles about it. One of them, “Alexa, should we trust you?” shocked me, it says that in 2021 will be the same number of smart speakers than people living in the world.
“Hey Alexa, Are you Making me Dumb?”, says that experts are still running tests to see the exact consequences on people’s brain activity; however, they already noticed that our need to solve problems have decreased because we rely on what these devices do or say.

That’s why it completely made sense to me what Jeff Crume wrote: every time we have a question we “MUST begin to look within for answers”, but he means by thinking, being creative or approaching to other people first.

However, we don’t care and still prefer this easy-lazy-option.

And what about disposables? A simple mug could be the first step. Just because we don’t want to carry a reusable one in our bag or we don’t want to wash it after using it, we don’t bring it.

Everybody (except a blond beast whose last name starts with a “T”, and ends with “rump”) is now aware of the huge climate crisis we’re facing. We’re feeling the consequences, and in this case, we know plastics are returning to us, in our food… we are eating plastic. Oh, beautiful karma!

If you don’t know anything about it, you can read this article on The Guardian.

Unfortunately, knowing it isn’t enough, we still prefer the easy-lazy option.

And hey! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying these things are the devil. For me, the problem is how much we rely our lives on them.

So, at this point, that message about “working hard to be successful”, that BTW has become so freaking annoying, makes sense, right?

But I would rephrase it…

“Avoid the easiest options as often as you can, that will help you to stop f*cking up your (and everyone else’s) life.”

Now go out there, turn off Alexa for a couple of days and get a pretty fancy reusable mug you want to show off everyday.