Parse

The same effort can be felt either positively or negatively according to the disposition of mind. Digging a hole to look for a treasure doesn’t have the same effect as digging the same hole if you know it’s useless.

It is often enough to say that a job is useless or unjust to find it particularly stressful, while the same work, performed in a good psychological arrangement, because it will bring money or because it is found interesting, seems infinitely less painful. This ambivalence is striking in sport: over-efforts that seem intolerable are felt as a form of achievement if they are provided under the aegis of an Olympic medal.

Everyone knows that a suitable dose of daily effort is necessary for the proper functioning of the organism. Fear of effort as we feel it is not necessarily natural. Different psychological factors, such as the monotony of life, the absence of a project, sexual frustration, can make every effort to transpose an unconscious opposition against a life form contrary to our genetic potential or our spiritual aspirations.

The search for ease often involves artifacts whose environmental impact is not negligible. Replace the brushing of a carpet with the effect of a chemical cleaner, the scratching of a skillet with a detergent, a small walking by the bad burning of diesel, each of these customary details of existence actually replaces the effort that we could willingly make, for the greater good of our health, with an artifact harmful to the environment. Each one repeats the same pattern, the small laziness we decode as a right to progress multiply by billions and end up having irreversible consequences on the environment.

In the face of every effort that we avoid by resorting to any artifact, we should begin by questioning the reasons that make us feel this effort as painful. Then on the real consequences that suppression of this effort can have on our health and on our existence in general. And finally, on the consequences that the artifact concerned may have on the environment. It’s up to everyone to take stock.

All kinds of psychological factors can be involved and it is one of the tasks of human ecogenetics to unravel the skein.