The Call to Italian Laziness

The good life starts where endless striving ends

Buongiorno Amici!

Perhaps if you are familiar with me you have come to recognize a certain pleasure in taking things slowed down and living life a little more deliberately. I view these practices through the prism of appreciation and joy at the smallest things but what about a career? What about all the striving for success, for money and for fame?

My frends, hustle twatter is poisoning our brains. At no time in history before the current phaggy era were people encouraged to work 14 hours per day and sleep for only 4. This is the definition of stupidity in my mind. Even if you get rich this way how will you enjoy your riches? For what are you working so hard?

It’s not even as simple as all that; in fact hustle twitter doesn’t even encourage things that work out mathematically; you will invariably read that internet gurus work 14 hour days and they must also follow a very deliberate schedule of gym, sauna and 9 hours of sleep. All of these things must also be accurately monitored, with a variety of devices, whoops, sleep trackers and calorie counters. If you start to add up all of the instructions you soon find you are unable to match the twitter guru’s output; have fun staying poor loser.

The bugman doesn’t breed (at least not much) and doesn’t marry and so lives alone in a pod of varying sizes consuming garbage both physical and intellectual. Eating the crappiest food known to man via post mates, watching mind poison on the streaming service, ordering yet more products from Amazog and then they tweet out hustle bullshit the other 11 hours a day. What purpose does this serve?

For as long as I can remember, I have heard it said that Italians are lazy (at least in America). Perhaps you’ve also heard it said that Mediterranean people are altogether lazy and prefer lounging, eating and lovemaking over the proud German’s prodigious work ethic and their autistic positions on food and sex. Greeks, Spaniards and especially Italians are thought of as lusty Latins who like to sleep and eat and who could not give a fuck about their duty to the European Union and its varying economic difficulties. Each time I think about the “Eurozone Monetary Problems” associated with the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) countries post 2009, I always see that image of Silvio Berlusconi shrugging with a giant smile on his face.

Regarding Italians in America, the images of laziness have typically been sown on American TV as for many blue collar Americans their exposure to Italians is limited to The Sopranos and other mafia themed programs and movies. Dagos are presented as people who sit around playing cards, committing crimes or at best working blue collar jobs and punching out at quitting time. In my own life, I watched both my father and grandfather work hard but definitely clock out at quitting time. They didn’t give work another thought the rest of their day once the job was done and post retirement could not care less about the economic situation of the world.

For myself I was encouraged to go to college and get a white collar career; which I did but I see in myself the call to a certain type of Mediterranean laziness I describe daily through my tweets and images.

My job is stupid, like most jobs, let’s be honest. Without doxxing myself let’s just say I help clients finance commercial projects and so the job has big numbers attached to it but deals are not happening 24 hours a day and the entire process can be incredibly slow with a myriad of potential issues that could come along and derail the deal. There is also so much competition to do this that the customers have their pick of professionals like me and so much of your resulting success or failure comes down to the kind of personal relationships you can build and not so much on “muh hustle.” So many days are spent without a lot of action going on. It’s a perfect match for me in many ways as I prefer to sit around reading, drinking espresso and doing other things as my personality will demand.

When I first started at my current organization (3 years on now) I was amazed at the way the other people in my office seemed harried, fried and hustling their brains out. WTF were they doing? I couldn’t seem to fill up my day without goofing off on twitter, making an espresso or bullshitting on the phone for 20 minutes at a clip. WTF were they doing all day and how did they come to appear so endlessly flummoxed over it?

Turns out I don’t think they were actually doing anything. The “I’m a good boy teacher” busy work mind virus had invaded them and turned them into a sort of anxiety addicted zombie trying to prove their value. They needed to feel busy to have any sense that things were moving along and also as a means of justifying their salary. Amici, this is not the way. I try to look at my salary as an investment by the company and if I return onto my employers a return on investment of 50% who are they to complain? In fact, the return is far higher as with my salary and typical revenue generation they are earning more like a 1200% return on investment so I feel no shame to tweet out a pasta recipe at mid day or read a book and fire up my second espresso.

Will I become rich like Gary Vaynerchuk this way? Most likely not but I am not anywhere close to starving either. Will my daughter be better off if I hustle my balls off and never have a moment to spend with her, I doubt it.

In the end Italian laziness really isn’t laziness at all, it’s more of a judicious decision about how to spend one’s energy. I encourage my frends who have a salary or who otherwise are not beholden to a time clock to examine their lives and look introspectively at the way they spend their time around their loved ones and the overall society. Do you have time to meet a friend for an afternoon espresso and shoot the shit for 45 minutes? Maybe a beer when the day wraps up? If you don’t, perhaps consider the call to Italian laziness a little more. If the people are beautiful, the food is delicious and the culture produced the Romans and the Renaissance 1000 years apart, they’re probably onto something.