Take a nap, you deserve it Aris Sánchez

I am lazy. This isn’t something I ever used to think about myself – maybe because before Cambridge it was always assumed I must not be lazy because I got good grades. There’s a good chance I actually wasn’t particularly lazy before I came here, which I realise sounds a bit paradoxical. How can you be a student here, survive the academic side of things and become almost shockingly lazy? And if you can do all these things, then is there actually anything wrong with laziness?

This somewhat shocking realisation really came to me last Friday, after my final lecture of the week. I went shopping and, after dragging it all back up the hill with me, dropped the bags outside my room and sat leaning against my door (yes, from the outside) watching videos on my phone and starting to eat the food in the bags. I didn’t actually go into my own room until at least two hours later.

“Laziness can actually work at Cambridge. Sometimes, it can even be essential”

In the interest of fairness to myself (and to avoid calls of concern from friends and family who might read this), this was definitely an exceptional case. Although, someone did ask me the other day why I was looking at them over my glasses instead of through them, and I replied that I just couldn’t be bothered to move my head yet.

What does all of this mean, other than that I really should have enough will to move my head in sync with my eyes? I think it shows that laziness can actually work at Cambridge. Sometimes, it can even be essential. The weight of the workload here is intense, as everyone knows. If none of us were at least a little lazy sometimes, we’d crumble under the pressure of it.

I often find that unless the work I’ve got to do is due the following day, it becomes much more difficult to find the desire to do it. Unless your workload really couldn’t facilitate this, a sense of laziness like this can be a life saver. When the time to do your work does come, you can sometimes find a level of focus in the immediacy of the deadline which I don’t think can be replicated by doing the work a week in advance.

Of course, a disclaimer – this doesn’t work for everyone, by any stretch. Cambridge is enough of a high-pressured environment as it is, and there is absolutely no need to create any more pressure for yourself if you don’t have to. Obviously all my supervisors would prefer that I do their work weeks in advance. Yet my recently uncovered laziness means that this very rarely, if ever, happens.

This usually means I spend the time I could be doing work well before the deadline doing something else – usually a lot more relaxing, a lot more sociable and a lot more fun. What I’m really trying to say is: don’t feel like you have to suppress your inner lazy person.

That might mean you end up lounging around outside your own room for two hours on a Friday – but as long as it means you stop working sometimes, that can only be a good thing