The human mind, an advanced, intricate database, capable of performing several functions while establishing unique connections and producing new forms of data with alarming accuracy, but stop to ask yourself; what lies in those dark parts of your brain? I’m talking about the area located near the frontal lobe whose control domains over the aspects of our complicated, volatile personalities! Can you bear to fathom the demons lying wait in the dark recesses of our grey matter? To begin, let’s pick apart some of the Homo-sapiens… less desirable subconscious aspects, before you begin thinking back to a certain divine comedy called “Dante’s Inferno” I’d like you to set aside the obvious seven sins and let them sit in the corner for a while. The reason is, that emotions like envy and pride for the most part are just that, emotions, natural responses to real world stimuli that is shared between us and almost every sentient creature on earth. However, one deadly sin I’d like to touch on is the sin of Sloth. Aside from the obvious there is a single, standard aspect that all living things share inside their brains, and that aspect is the “motivation to survive”. In all living things, there exists a singular, common instinct to persevere until the point at which we can reproduce, and then die. This instinct is required in any living organism, as specified by natural selection; however, this motivation to exist only extends so far and in certain stimuli. To best explain, let’s look at both humans, and… let’s say… a horse, the horse exists so that it can eat, drink, reproduce, and die, plain and simple, cut and dry right? However, humans are much, much different… in order to exist through natural selection humans had to accomplish a number of things, for one, we needed to compensate for our lack of claws, power, speed, and predatory aspects. In any normal circumstance mother nature would have crushed us with the old size 11, but that was not the case, instead we were bestowed with incredible intellect and social abilities, as well as the power to think logically and problem solve, but the most mentionable of these are our social aspect, as I mentioned, and our potential to think outside the box, the power to take the less obvious route and succeed! So needless to say, with this over compensated intellect under our belt, we were able to round house kick good old Mother Nature in the jaw and just about anything that lived in a tree! But the question you’re probably asking now is “So how does that tie into sloth?” well you see, it seems our brains were TOO advanced for our own good, giving birth to the troublesome little nugget we call a “personality”. You see, personalities are complicated; they’re the deformed product of whatever amount of logic we posses along with whatever amount of social thinking we have that comes with it! It become tangled up clockwork engine that we still don’t know how to unravel. This tie into sloth because our personalities distort aspects of our mind, at times that drive to live won’t be as “driving” depending on exterior stimuli therefore we get laziness. I know what you’re thinking “But Ansem, a little bit of laziness can’t do too much harm right?” well you may be half right, yeah, at times we don’t need too much to survive, and by that logic we can afford to be lazy, but what if we incorporate that “out of the box thinking” I referenced earlier? When approached with a certain problem, the human will probably ponder the situation, even if it is a brief pondering, and will be more than prepared to pursue the easiest solution possible. Allow me to simplify that further; when faced with a problem human beings, nine times out of ten, will take the EASY WAY OUT! Easy being defined as the “course of action that requires the least amount of thought and/or energy”! In a survival scenario this is more than a good thing, the “easy way out” may be your ticket to waking up tomorrow morning. But in a community, in a country, that has laws, and punishment, and currency… that my dear reader is a horse of a totally different color! Now consider that hypothetical situation to be a choice between an immediately easy option that is illegal, and the more difficult option that is legal. All of those instincts that told our ancestors to survive will be telling you to break the law as to limit energy/thought output for yourself. And sometimes, these parts win. We all feel this nagging sensation whenever we’re told not to do something, but just because that option became the most obvious, therefore the most immediate, we will be inclined to do it anyways. Not to mention that whole thinking outside the box thing, when someone tells you not to think a certain way, we are automatically compelled to explore said way of thinking, often to widen our own view, your actions/thoughts being inside or outside a hypothetical box, being a set of rule or a command. To simplify that, our brains just think that way, once a possibility is pointed out we are compelled to think about it, who knows, it might be a good idea, rules/laws forbid people from taking a certain course of action (most laws are around for a good reason, please do not associate me as an anarchist) therefore being brought to our attention, and someone, somewhere once said; “to take action is the only way to know for sure” and I suppose you can connect the dots from there. Alone, the two influences may seem insignificant, but in combination, which occurs, quite often, their draw can be hard to resist. Or in the simplest case we do things we shouldn’t, just because we can. I once found a YouTube video, regarding a study in which trained dogs were given rules to follow in an average suburban living room, and were then left alone, while being observed via camera. Those dogs proved to be way more likely to break the rules when no one was watching. People, and apparently, even animals, feel a sense of accomplishment, when breaking a rule without getting caught, a motivation to the human mind, as well as some animals that pushes us to go beyond surviving, into the realm of thriving. I suppose in the end, no matter how you spin it, things we once used to survive can one day come around and bite you, and that our urge to thrive may be too great for us to control. But remember, it is, just an urge, as humans we have plenty of brain matter to tell right from wrong, and in life we all have a synonymous freedom, to choose, and the final, and most compelling aspect I will mention, is the sheer thought, of not a sustained existence, but an improved existence, many people aren’t brought up with much materiel or social (social being affection from family, friends, etc) sustenance, and think that they deserve so much more, which more than often they do. Those ideas that rule breaking is an option aren’t that farfetched when an honest life is so much more painful. Perhaps in our lives we need to make a choice between sullied accomplishments (murder, theft, etc.) or our morals. And I’ll leave you with that.