Hard Work: The Ultimate Excuse for Laziness

On Sunday I performed my single most physically strenuous and emotionally taxing feat in ages. I did my laundry.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea. The vast majority of the reader responses to my columns so far have included at least one or two accusations that I'm a spoiled brat, a rich kid who knows nothing and complains about everything, and that I have a sense of entitlement so massive it has its own gravity.

It may come as a surprise to some of you, then, to learn that I do know how to do laundry, and indeed, I've been doing my own laundry for the last four years. OK, so I took advantage of my mother's generosity as a kid, but when I went to college, I did the financially savvy thing and chose to do my own laundry rather than sign up for the university sponsored laundry service, which cost anywhere from $400 to $895 a year, depending on how many pounds of clothing you made them wash each week. The top price was for 60 pounds of clothes a week, and when I was still in school, I thought 60 pounds of laundry was a staggeringly absurd mass of clothing. Now I know better.

Through a curious combination of laziness and arrogant self-justification, I managed to spend 2,800 unnecessary dollars on clothing over the last six weeks. I call this period of time my month of living clotheslessly. Everybody knows laziness when they see it, and it's not much of a conclusion to say that everyday laziness accounts for the greater part of your paycheck that disappears into the abyss every month.

But laziness alone can only do you so much harm. During my month of living clotheslessly, I learned just how easy it was to convince myself that individual acts of laziness were in fact wise and efficient uses of my time and money.

This problem isn't unique to so-called spoiled brats like me -- we may certainly be lazy, but it takes the peculiar arrogance of a real Type-A personality, someone totally convinced that he or she must excel at any cost.

The true financial nemesis of a recent college graduate isn't laziness, it's the kind of laziness that is only possible when you're 100% convinced that whatever needs doing professionally outweighs even the most basic of personal responsibilities. If you're working your butt off at the job, or even if you only believe that's what you're doing, then you've created the best excuse in the world for laziness everywhere else.