The Lemon Life | online magazine offering a fresh perspective on post-grad life.

Words by: Adele Connolly

Image by: Cristina Gardeazabal

In high school I used to skip school a lot. Not to do anything remotely exciting or rebellious but to hang out in my underwear watching soap operas and filling the couch cracks with crumbs from all the snacks I ate. One day I woke up and felt unable to subject myself to the regular cycle of numbing boredom pierced with the occasional shock of humiliation that makes up a day of high school, and– once again– played absentee.

The initial decision to indulge one’s baser tendencies, put everything off, and give into the temptation of laziness is wonderful. The sweet promise of endless hours of a pointless yet absorbing activity, tinged with the bitter remembrance of some important project which has been abandoned. Yet all those things we have yet to do still loom in the distance, and at first ignoring them feels joyfully reckless, but increasingly anxiety eats away at us and that ’to do’ list grows more menacing. A young, carefree spirit such as mine risks being destroyed by responsibilities and other boring adult things, so naturally I look for some way to escape. Actually doing the project would be the most sensible thing, but alas, reason has never been my strong point.

My preferred method for escaping the fear of failure is engaging in some activity that is so stupid it has a nearly anesthetising effect as I slowly lose brain cells and/or consciousness. The Internet is great for this– God knows how many late English papers became so after someone felt the need to meticulously comment on each of their friends’ statuses. Facebook isn’t as much my poison as much as Youtube, which I view as an irresistible vortex of time sucking. Some things I have spent many hours on when I should have been doing something else: watching a documentary about the reunion of 90s British boy band sensation Take That, looking up endless music videos, and attempting to view every single Internet meme in the known Universe (How Is Babby Formed? is hilarious but by the time I got to the one that is literally just an anime of a girl spinning a leek set to some Scandinavian folk song I slowly backed away from the computer and ordered myself to get some fresh air).

But do I even like doing these activities? Not really. But there’s something addictive about laziness, and it soothes anxieties, or at least patches them over until a later date. But as any seasoned procrastinator knows, when that later date comes and your paper or presentation or child support for your drunkenly conceived bastard child is ready to be handed in and you’re not ready, you curse yourself for putting it off and wonder if you’ll ever change. Because the old routine– of feeling worried and drowning that worry in laziness and feeling even more worried etc– could have been avoided if you just started a little earlier. This is what I learned that fated day I skipped school so many years ago. To make a long story short, I ended up crouched in some bushes in our suburban back yard, in my underwear and wielding a spatula, praying my mother wouldn’t notice the pan of eggs cooking unattended in our kitchen after she came home from work early. Believe me, during the shrill chastisement that followed (which I received still in my underwear, which was probably splattered with egg grease) I realized it wasn’t worth it. I should have just gone to school.

• Features