You are not lazy… Jelly Beans

What good’s all this brilliant knowledge I give entertainers if they’re not using it? We gotta get going making entertainment better! I keep hearing similar sentiments from entertainment pros right now.

• “I’ve been really lazy since the quarantine began”
• “I haven’t been very productive”
• “I got really depressed from all that’s going on in the world”

This post is not motivational, it is non-de-motivational.

Many people already have the de-motivation on lock! The awesome drive to create and be generous is wiggling around waiting to be released, but we gotta dump those sandbags first. Please share this with anyone it may help.

Laziness isn’t a real thing.

As I said in the video on this post, I don’t believe in laziness or a careless person. Laziness is a way to shame people to try to solve your uncomfortability. We can turn it on ourselves. It’s highly demotivating.

If you feel that you need to take off your pants and watch Netflix for four hours, maybe you do need something like that. That is work. You’re working on de-stressing, recovering from trauma, resetting your perspective, whatever. All those are productive. Not Lazy. If you find yourself scrolling social media for days, you might be mourning what your life used to be, looking for some connection, trying to get some dopamine to pick you up. Again, Not Lazy.

Your jelly beans are your business

My wife and I call our resources jelly beans. I don’t know where we got this idea. Jelly beans represent all the time, energy, money, and emotional gusto we have. Different activities cost different amounts of jelly beans. Jelly bean costs are also different for different people. Taking out the trash is way fewer jelly beans for me than her. Shopping burns thru my jelly beans way faster.

When we’re looking at jelly beans, it helps us understand there’s more going on than time spent. It helps us understand that spending some money or some time on something might overall save us other important resources. It also helps us talk about how we’re using jelly beans as a family.

It becomes an economics problem. That’s a game, not shame.

It’s not a math thing

We are not going to win a prize for knowing how many jelly beans are in our jar. We’re going to use this way of thinking as a method of seeing that we have limits, and evaluating how we expend resources.

Getting moving

If you buy into my theory, you’re already moving. You’re already really busy. You are using all your jelly beans every day. Now, the puzzle is are we trading in these morsels for the meal we want?

Taking more of the actions we want will be a sacrifice of some of the actions we currently need.

Let’s start with pruning tasks that we drag out. Do you hate doing laundry so you make it really long? Set timers. Go quick. Get done. It might feel like this kind of self-parenting boundary-setting is going to take more jelly beans in the moment, but it is going to take fewer. You’re cutting out something you hate.

Next set a timer and do maybe 15 minutes of something in your higher intention. Great! You just traded up and possibly invested in something that will give you more jelly beans! You’re candy-crushing it!

Candy Crushed

After we sacrifice some of the boring drag-out activities, it’s time to build some fences around the really hard culprits – dopamine dosing destabilizers (DDDs). These tasks feel like an immediate reward, and also make it tough to get back to your train of thought. Depending on how much trauma you’re dealing with, they can be extremely intense or small ripples in your consciousness. DDDs put you in some single emotion, or something in order to comfort you.

Dealing only with extreme suffering for example is a relief sometimes when we feel like things are really complicated. DDDs that trigger shame can be really comforting, but shame extinguishes our intentions.

DDDs can be a quick relief and it’s up to you whether you eliminate all of them. The main problems is that they often end up consuming a lot of jelly beans in the background and make it hard to evaluate what our true intentions are.

DDD examples

• annoying video games
• sex
• drugs
• gambling
• social media
• memes
• unhealthy food ( i guess like jelly beans )
• watching the news

Bean rich activities

Finally, after cutting down the drag-outs and the DDDs, we can try to find replacement activities that are more JB efficient than some of the things we’re still doing. Let’s say you want to de-stress.

Taking a walk while talking to a friend on the phone might lower your stress levels a lot, give you exercise, help you connect, open up your world-view, give you sunshine, and give you a little confidence boost. Renting a movie would help you relieve stress and rest, but it will cost you money and not have the same health benefits. If it’s a horror movie, that might be a DDD for you. The movie would probably take up more time too. So, movie loses for time, money, emotion, and health.

It can be super helpful just taking a moment to quickly think, “What’s the purpose of this activity?” (it’s not a stupid activity, it’s doing something that serves you. Figure out what that is). Then, “Is there a combo activity I can do that will serve this purpose and gimme more for my beans?”

Koalas are OK

My wife and I love koalas. We got to see a ton of them in Australia at a “zoo” type place. Koalas sleep 18 to 22 hours of the day, so if you see one, they’re probably sleeping.

At this “zoo” a lady loudly said, “look at these koalas! They’re so lazy!” My wife and I heald our stupid rage until the lady left and then we were like “What the fuck!? What does she expect? Who are these koalas supposed to be faxing right now?!”

If you can love yourself as much as we love koalas, maybe you can forgive yourself for the type of work you’re doing today… and look unemotionally at how many jellybeans you have to use tomorrow.