There are people who wake up in the morning with a plan.
They know what they are going to wear. They know what they are going to eat. They have a to-do list. They have perhaps even gone as far as assigning times to the items on that list, which is frankly where we begin to side eye them.
Then there are the rest of us.
We wake up, reach for our phones, check the time and immediately start negotiating with the day.
“Let me just lie down for five minutes.”
The five minutes becomes twenty.
Twenty becomes forty-five.
Then you suddenly remember that you had somewhere to be at 9 a.m., and it is now 10:17. At that point, getting up feels less like the beginning of your day and more like an admission of defeat.
Today, however, there is no need to feel guilty.
It is World Lazy Day.
Finally, there is a day for people who have been told, directly and indirectly, that they are not doing enough, when in fact they are doing exactly as much as their spirit has approved.
We have had International Women’s Day, World Environment Day, Workers’ Day and every other day under the sun. Today belongs to the person who has looked at a pile of laundry and decided that everybody involved needs some time apart.
Who are we to judge?
Please Don’t Give Us Productivity Advice Today
This is not the day to tell anybody to wake up at 5 a.m.
We don’t want to hear about your morning routine.
We don’t want to know that you drink warm water with lemon, meditate for 20 minutes, read ten pages of a self-help book and exercise before the sun comes up.
Wonderful.
Congratulations.
Please leave.
Some of us have not even decided whether we are getting out of bed.
On a more serious note, ere is something particularly aggressive about productivity culture. Every time you open social media, someone is explaining how they turned one free afternoon into a six-figure business, learned Spanish, completed a marathon and redesigned their entire life.
Meanwhile, you spent forty minutes trying to remember why you walked into the kitchen.
You eventually came back to the room without whatever you went there for.
That is also a journey.
Nigerian Laziness Deserves Its Own Study
If there is one thing Nigerians understand, it is strategic laziness.
We have vocabulary for it.
“I’m coming.”
Nobody is coming.
The person saying it is probably still sitting down.
“I’ll do it now now.”
They will not do it now now.
“Let me rest small.”
This one is particularly dangerous because nobody knows what “small” means.
Small can be ten minutes. Small can be three hours. Small can mean you have woken up the next morning and discovered that yesterday’s responsibility has become today’s problem.
Then there is “I’ll do it later.”
Later is a magical place where Nigerians store things they don’t want to do.
Laundry goes there.
Emails go there.
Phone calls go there.
That form you were supposed to fill out last week? Later.
The message you saw and decided to reply when you had the “right energy”? Later.
That thing your mother asked you to do before she left the house?
You have suddenly remembered it because she is calling to ask whether you have done it.
Meanwhile you are still in the same position she left you in.
There Is a Difference Between Lazy and Tired
The problem with calling everything laziness is that sometimes people genuinely need to do nothing.
There is a particular pleasure in having nowhere to be and nothing you are required to accomplish immediately.
You can watch one episode of a show and, before you know it, you have watched six.
You can scroll through TikTok until you have seen the same sound used by 400 different people.
You can open WhatsApp, close it, open Instagram, close it, return to WhatsApp and discover that absolutely nothing has happened in the twelve seconds you were gone.
You can eat something and then lie down because eating has exhausted you.
You can sit on your bed and stare into space.
If anyone asks what you are doing, the answer is simple:
Nothing.
We have somehow reached a point where even doing nothing needs a respectable name. You cannot simply lie down anymore. You are “regulating your nervous system.” You cannot spend an afternoon watching television. You are “engaging in intentional leisure.”
Please.
Sometimes you are just lying down because you don’t want to move and that is fine.
You can have a day where the greatest thing you accomplish is taking a shower and putting on clean clothes.
Depending on the week you’ve had, that is a fairly impressive achievement.
Unfortunately.
There will still be emails tomorrow, meetings, deadlines, bills and somebody sending “Good morning” at 6:02 a.m. as though they personally invented morning.
Today, however, we have an excuse.
So if you are currently lying down, don’t get up on our account.
Whatever you were supposed to do this morning?
You can do it later.
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