The Devil Makes Work For The Complacent

The Royal Wedding weekend has come and gone proceeding the Bank Holiday weekend and my two weeks off work. And what have I to show for it? Not a lot unfortunately. I have pages of notes yet to be articulately typed up and have forsaken a university course application for a fortnight now. There is a list of half-finished home maintenance jobs I have still to go through and, to be perfectly honest, I cannot recall having shaved once throughout the entire fortnight.

Ninety-nine percent of the time I put this down to smoking skunk. In order to procrastinate, especially whilst taking a break from something needing pressing attention, I find myself lighting up a “well deserved” joint and settling down to delight in some unconstructive reading; blogs scrupulously scrutinising every conceivable incense available in the West, research on the genetics of Gujaratis residing in Texas, tracing back their ethnic makeup to Western Asia and the Caucasus and the history of Persian relations with the Punjab, for example. At times I tune in to Soma FM, for their “playful exotica and vintage music of tomorrow”, or to Music India Online, to relish in Classical North Indian raga’s heard at the correct samay for maximum atmospheric effect. And then there is always Facebook… All too soon the pre-dawn sky turns from cobalt to a clear, baby blue; my screen still blank, my ashtray runneth over…

I have always beaten myself up over this; the adolescent years spent locked away in my bedroom actually working for nights on end on some creative project or another, all with the help of nothing more than a trusty score, are long, long gone. I am no longer nearing my twenties, nor does the stuff evoke any other inspiration than a sole aspiration to relax. Yet I continue to use cannabis as an excuse for creativity, an excuse to unwind, an excuse to socialise. Or is it that these activities are used as an excuse to smoke? Year after year I have watched people jog past me on the road to success, each year sprouting younger participants, and I have remained content to stroll at my leisure, enjoying and criticising the surrounding scenery, iPod on shuffle, joint perpetually between my fingers. I have rebuffed handfuls of opportunities through laziness, lack of enthusiasm and a lack of commitment; gigs secured at prestigious venues where we failed to make an appearance, foreign language tutors abandoned, work openings from casting agents disregarded. There is no one to blame for the impending loss of my twenties but myself. But is weed the devil in this case?

I have been discovering over the past few years that many of my friends, acquaintances and even family members have fallen victim to this critical and contagious disease known as Complacence. My closest friend, an exotically beautiful chanteuse – a criminology and sociology graduate – with an infectious and electric persona, has toiled for London’s Emergency Services for the past half-decade; another rather handsome young acquaintance who has only recently moved to the capital with the dream of being discovered as a fashion model, seems to work all the hours that God sends at a well known West End department store to maintain his rent and bills, allowing him no time to pursue his ambition; my sister, a celebrated thespian back in her university days, who had attempted her first novel aged twelve, freelances as a Presentation Scheduler. Others, closer to thirty than they are to twenty, are yet to ascertain their calling and have applied for jobs in sales or within local councils in the meantime. None of these people smoke.

So what could their excuses be for their complacence? Some have family commitments and responsibilities, others choose to save as they live at home whilst simultaneously indulging in retail therapy with the surplus of their income, others still are earning only enough to manage the maintenance of a lifestyle with perhaps a chance to enjoy themselves once in a while if the budget allows it. A job may ultimately be just that, a means to an end, but for how long can it be so? Especially when so many of us in our mid to late twenties have had the education, possess the abilities and raw talent and are also fortunate enough to have the freedom and opportunities to pursue any career we choose. Especially when time is very quickly running out.

One theory is that we are a spoilt bunch! Many of my friends choose to remain at home; I know people who are earning over forty thousand and are still happy to tuck themselves in snugly under the wings of mum and dad. Though I may be supporting myself, so to speak, I do not pay any rent. Also, were anything to go awry, forcing me out of my home, I know that my parents are but a twenty-five-minute drive away in North-West London. I do not, nor would I ever, expect anything from them but I am still secure in the knowledge that my parents’ support is unconditional. I may not even be speaking for a whole generation, rather for a select minority, but never actually having been thrown in the deep end of anything, knowing that I am never alone with an obligation to fend for myself, may have made me soft. My parents were never well off; my dad was the main breadwinner with my mum helping out – either by finding work or by setting up some sort of business or another – over the numerous periods that my dad’s job was under threat. Despite both parents having to really work hard in order to sustain three children and a household, we were never left wanting for anything. It was only recently that our mum divulged to us her secrets and the struggles they had faced over the decades, or we would have been none the wiser. We had still enjoyed a very happy and truly fulfilling upbringing.

Though my mum, being the last child of five, may have been raised in modest comfort – her father worked abroad, in Karachi, and would send money over whilst her mother taught classical languages at the local primary school – my dad’s family were part of the Asians expelled from Uganda by the mentally deranged Idi Amin in 1972. They were an affluent middle-class family of bespoke tailors and musicians who were forced to abandon all their belongings, both sentimental as well as three generations worth of accumulated revenue, and flee the only life they knew to seek refuge in England. The Ugandan government permitted them to take only fifty pounds out of the country and this is all they had to their name when they first stepped into the UK. My dad’s family were first-hand witnesses to the atrocities committed against their people over the twenty-mile drive from their home in Kampala to Entebbe airport; Indians being looted of their heirlooms, the ancestral gold and jewels they had attempted to smuggle out of the country on their person and on their children, men being beaten and hanged on roadside trees, women being dragged off by the Ugandan soldiers to be made an example of before being murdered. And upon arrival at the countries of their destinations – a number of families were severed as some members were sent to the United Kingdom and others to India, Canada and the Untied States depending on their passports – the refugees landing in London were greeted with anti-immigration protest marches led by British meat porters clearly fuelled by Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech from a few years earlier, still fresh, warm and rapidly putrefying in their savage minds. My father, being the eldest of the boys, had to find work as soon as he could; he has been working for the same company since he was fifteen. My youngest aunt and two uncles went to school having fruit pelted at them and chewing gum thrown in their hair, facing chants of ‘Piss Off You Pakis’ during their journeys. One of my dad’s brothers was so badly bullied and beaten up by racists that he ultimately died in his teens of a brain haemorrhage. Even after my parents met and married ten years later and I was born on a council estate in East London’s Stepney Green in the mid-eighties, the sheer amount of racial discrimination and abuse the family would regularly have to endure forced them to move to a more racially diverse area of London. Over those past ten years, my dad had managed to save enough money to buy a spacious four-bedroom, detached house in suburban Harrow for his parents and younger siblings, and a much smaller semi-detached for his wife and kids only a mile away in hospitable Kingsbury; this is where my sisters were born and where the three of us were raised. 

So what do we know of true endurance and of having to work hard? We now complain of our interminably drawn out commutes to work, of injustices and of benefit fraudsters, the “council estate scum”. We complain that there are not enough career prospects out there yet we pull sick days when we have guzzled one too many bottles of wine the night before or when we simply cannot find the will to go into work. We complain of our working hours, of how we have such little time to ourselves to actually utilise our free time proactively in order to accomplish the goals of our dreams. Our mothers were managing employment, children and a household whilst our fathers were working unpaid overtime just for job security. It is definitely not in our genes, so why are we still so damn lazy? How is it that hard work has actually become totally anathema to us? It has to be because we honestly have no idea what it is to have to make ends meet; we have no real responsibilities or dependants. And we are complacent in this bestowal. We relish in it.

Again, it’s not all of us who suffer from this disease. Ultimately, as with anything, there is always a balance and just as we are complacent, there are the go-getters of the world, the high-flyers and the doers. They may not have the knowledge, the charm nor the looks but they have the vigour and the patience to persevere. Then you have us, the complacent layabouts, waiting for our successful futures to be handed to us on a warmed plate in one easily digestible and deceivingly delicious portion. We may have it all, the knowledge, the charisma and the strikingly good looks, but none of the drive and fortitude to work hard for an end result.

Now I am the first to advocate the easy life, a life full of enjoyment and devoid of stress, but reality constantly reminds me of the necessity to work to see any of my dreams come to fruition. Besides, remaining idle gives us more time to think wasteful thoughts than is necessary for any human being. Rather than strategise a future for ourselves, we choose to obsess over such insignificant issues as relationships, appearance and other people’s hidden agendas, for example. We seem to lose our grasp on reality through this kind of thinking and begin to take all our parents’ years of hard work, efforts and generous provides for granted; we take the good fortune of our lives for granted. All too soon, the years will have passed us before our very eyes and all we will have to show for it are a developed form of neurosis and deep regret. This wasteful thinking is the work the devil makes for us, both aiding and challenging our complacence to cause utter confusion and lead us to the dangers of self-doubt. Albert Einstein once defined the height of insanity as “continuing to do the same thing over and over, and then expecting different results”. This appears to be the precise nature of the complacent lot; we seem to come up with the loftiest justifications for our intransigence.

“It is only laziness that can make a slave of a free man”

This is a quote I once read in the Shahnameh, the Persian book of Kings, and I have it written in magnetic ‘ransom note’ letters stuck onto my fridge. It is what I strive to live by; I read it every morning to remind me to exert my efforts and to not throw my life away for the temporary pleasures of indolence. Yet, though I see this quote every single day, it seems to have failed to make much of a lasting impact on me; this universal truth is thoughtlessly dismissed as just words on a fridge, part of the furniture, and this is where the roots of our problems lie. The longer we choose to ignore the unmistakable writings on the wall, regardless of whether we smoke the highest grade, regardless of a conditioned complacency or laziness, the more we will suffer ourselves, growing bitter as we grow older, over how we have wasted our lives.

It is up to us to shape our destinies and subsequently the future and fate of our societies. Thoughts and talk are ultimately useless without being followed by immediate positive action.

News clippings of Ugandan Asian refugees landing in the UK, August 1972

My dad with his eldest sister at the flat in Stepney around the late 1970s