Touching Fish
Is laziness a human right?
What’s it with the fish?
Recently, the Guardian had an article titled “Touching fish craze sees China’s youth find ways to laze amid ‘996’ work culture”. This was a bit puzzling on the first look, so I tried to read it and understand what it was talking about. Turns out, in case you don’t know (like I didn’t), that “996” means having to work from 9 in the morning to 9 in the evening, 6 days a week.
The “fish” reference is explained in the article thus:
According to the article, this leads to behaviours like: “fill up a thermos with whisky, do planks or stretches in the work pantry at regular intervals, drink litres of water to prompt lots of trips to the toilet on work time and, once there, spend time on social media or playing games on your phone.” (The Guardian)
And an anonymous person contributed this bit of wisdom: “Not working hard is everyone’s basic right … With or without legal protection, everyone has the right to not work hard.” (The Guardian)
A right to laziness?
This is something to think about, particularly in the context of Aristotle, of whom we have been speaking recently on this blog. It somehow doesn’t seem right that young people, often in their first jobs, on their first steps into their own lives, would see it as a worthwhile activity to sit in the office toilet and play games instead of working. I don’t mean to endorse working twelve hours a day for six days per week, but retreating from work entirely and considering “not working hard” a “basic right” also seems odd and somehow wrong. But why exactly?
It so happens that Aristotle gives us just the right answer.
Aristotle would not at all see “touching fish” as a problem of the legal regulation of work. For him, laws are largely irrelevant to the morality of our behaviour. Yes, we are part of a society, and as such we must find a way of coexisting in a beneficent way with the people around us, but in the end, the purpose of life is not to obey laws but to reach eudaimonia, that perfect kind of happiness that comes from meaningful engagement with the world that surrounds us.
For Aristotle, behaving ethically is not something that we do because we would be punished if we did not obey the laws. It is, rather, the only way of acting rationally, of acting in a way that will, in the long run, benefit ourselves.
And it will do this because every one of us must function as well we can as human beings so that others can also reach the highest level of their “functioning,” of their own “human potential”. And then we will all together profit from that optimal level of everyone realising their abilities and talents to the greatest extent possible. We will be a society of happily busy, creative people who operate under their own will at the highest levels of what they are, every one, able to achieve. People who derive a deep satisfaction from living and working as their best, most productive selves.
Now it is easy to see where the idea of laziness being a “basic right” goes wrong. It is a bit like claiming that being poor or uneducated, or eating bad food are basic rights. Well, they might be, but no one in their right minds would want to claim such rights.
Being lazy, far from being something good, would be, for Aristotle, a total failure of a human being and the best way for someone to make sure that they will never reach true happiness.
Imagine a lion that is too lazy to hunt. An ant that is too lazy to carry food into its nest. A bee that is too lazy to fly from flower to flower. For Aristotle, the human being who hides in the toilet in order to get away from their work is acting in an equally crazy and self-defeating way. That lion, that ant, that bee: they will never reach any kind of happiness or satisfaction in their lives. When they hunt, or carry bits of food, or fly around amongst the flowers, they don’t do it only because they’re hungry and because they would otherwise starve. They do it because acting in these ways is a fulfilment of their best potential as what they are, each in its own way.
The best kind of lion is strong, quick, deadly to its enemies, but good to its own kind, producing healthy and strong offspring. How can a lion reach this stage if it doesn’t hunt? Where will it get to practice its speed and strength, how will it compete for a mate, and how will it teach its young to do the same? A lazy lion necessarily is a failed, unhappy, starving lion, the worst example of its kind. In the same way, if a human being spends their life “touching fish”, playing games on a toilet seat, hiding from any real challenge, how will they ever be able to develop their virtues, their intelligence, their social skills, their work skills, their talents and their phronesis? They will not. They will remain unfinished human beings, unable to find lasting satisfaction in their own existence, unable to be productive and proud of their own productivity.
And this has nothing to do with exploitation or with working laws. It is an argument that is entirely based on the conditions of fulfilment for every individual life. Something that every person will have to experience for themselves.
Realising one’s potential is, for Aristotle, the only way to a truly happy life.
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In our own lives…
This whole thing is not really about China’s youth. It is about all of us and how we relate to our own lives and to our own productivity. Often we dream of being lazy as some ideal state. I know myself how tempting a warm bed looks on a cold morning, and how much easier it is to just watch another YouTube video of someone gardening instead of getting up and writing a blog post, teaching one’s children a new language, or practising scales on a piano.
But in the end, we also all know how empty a day can feel after we’ve filled it up with meaningless activity. How bad one feels after hours of lying around watching videos, or an evening spent in front of some brainless TV show. Deep inside, we all feel the satisfaction of a work well executed, of a successful, difficult dish that we managed to prepare, or the satisfaction of finally beating our laziness and scrubbing the bathroom clean. After such feats, the rest of the day feels good in a way that it doesn’t otherwise, as if everything was bathed in just a little brighter light, as if we were guided by a good spirit: which is precisely what the word “eudaimonia” means.
We should then look out for opportunities to not be “touching fish”. We should be looking for ways to engage more with the world, not less. Try to see if we can use that half-hour between the hairdresser and picking up the kids from their lesson to jot down a few ideas for a creative dinner. If we can use the ten minutes on the bus-stop to listen to an educational podcast. If we can use the time that we’d waste watching TV to read a good book or to talk to the kids about their day. And at work, to try and realise the best version of ourselves in our work. To make the world better by that little bit that our eight hours of daily working life can contribute to society. And if our work is really just meaningless drudgery without any positive effect on anyone, then perhaps we should look for a different job, one that will let us become better, richer, happier people.
For Aristotle, touching fish is almost certainly the wrong way to go about one’s life.
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