They say that intellectual laziness is an evil of our times. Also, that we think less and less and allow ourselves to be manipulated much more. This idea overwhelms and outrages. Thinking requires a lot of energy, and, therefore, it tires. However, if we let ourselves be carried away by cognitive laziness we will be more vulnerable to deception and manipulation. Moreover, there are many people who get carried away by the emotional without first passing through the filter of the rational when it comes to taking a piece of news for granted. Moreover, in a context in which data, news and information flow constantly, the mind becomes more passive. After all, reasoning requires time, patience and energy, and these are dimensions that are in short supply. We have become lazy because we depend more and more every day on a created technology.
For that reason, some comment that we don't need to retain information because Google searches and answers all our questions. Nor is it necessary to remember where we have parked the car if it is going to such an address, because the GPS guides us effortlessly. That is why intellectual laziness is a process in which the mind stops applying reflective and critical thinking. Instead, it applies an automatic cognitive approach that stops using such basic tasks as analyzing and processing incoming information. This phenomenon has become present as new technologies and the internet have become more established in our lives. A little more than two decades ago, to look up the world's largest butterfly or the approximate age of the universe, we would go to a library.
We would even look in a specialized encyclopedia and read several pages until we found the exact information we needed. Nowadays, it is enough to ask the question in the Internet search engine and get the answer in a few seconds. We have reduced to the maximum our cognitive effort when searching and processing information. We do not question anything (or almost anything) that Google tells us. And it gets much worse when we enter the chaotic universe of social networks. False knowledge bias is one of the triggers of intellectual laziness. We stop making the effort to think, reason, remember or plan because our cell phone already does it for us. It is our second brain, the one we constantly carry in our hand.
In the same vein, technology should always be that allied tool capable of enhancing our life, our work, our leisure time. But not at the cost of slowing down our cognitive processes, allowing it to do the thinking for us. In this society of entertainment, immediacy and being distracted by anything, we are losing the ability to reflect. It is important that we stop seeing laziness simply as a defect or a vice. In all types of laziness there are more complex realities, which we may be overlooking. Mental laziness is related to the use of our cognitive faculties. It is one of the types of laziness that stem mainly from a lack of motivation. Most commonly, a person does not see a concrete benefit in intellectual activities and therefore is reluctant to engage in them.
In short, to understand laziness we must start from the fact that human beings find it difficult to delay reinforcement; they are more motivated by short-term positive consequences than when these appear in the medium to long term. The way in which laziness establishes itself in our lives is through a well-known trick: taking away what you do not like immediately, and not showing the bad of this behavior until some time has passed. If we ask ourselves how to overcome laziness, the answer can be found in motivation and willpower. However, these are very volatile concepts, which, as they come, disappear. We have all experienced a situation where we know we have to do an activity, but we are unable to get going. There are many reasons that prevent us from overcoming laziness.
What do you think about intellectual laziness?
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