A parasite in the mind

I think it is best to think of complacency as a sort of parasite. It grows and feeds off a host, but even more, it inhibits a host from fully reaching the potential they are capable of.

There is a trend that I have found. It is not uncommon to find someone in my immediate vicinity putting work off for later, thinking there is no more to be done on a project, becoming complacent with whatever they are given. To an extent, I believe everyone does so, no matter how many times they try to pull themselves out of that weird limbo. The place where we feel satisfied with the work we’ve done and yet, know that it is not the end, that there is always more.

Although one could solely base their definition of complacency on the standard definition:

“a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements.”

But that is only one part of the overarching beast that is complacency. In reality, complacency can take many forms. Still, the most common is comfort, a feeling of satisfaction that stops a person from growing, prevents a person from looking back and trying to improve from every experience.

Complacency, at its finest, is like being stuck. You have to where to go and no desire to do so. It is the perfect Anti-mindset. It is the mindset that you want to get rid of first because without it; there is no stopping someone from reaching farther.

The feeling of satisfaction of comfort that accompanies a task is welcomed by many, but it is this very feeling that leads to a life of complacency where there is no need to move forwards. If we were to live in a world were everyone was complacent, there would be no computers, no moon landing, and looking even farther back, there would be no electrical lamps! No innovator, entrepreneur, the inventor was complacent. If they were, civilization as we know it would not be where it is today.

This is not to say that there is never a time that one should take for themselves; the health of the mind is just as important as the body’s health. However, complacency and taking a break to recharge are two very different things. Taking a break means restoring energy, it means getting back your bearings and thinking about nothing or something that doesn’t require much effort. Complacency, on the other hand, is the feeling of being satisfied and then stopping altogether. This is the danger to innovation. If there is no desire to keep moving forwards, there is no innovation, and there are no advances in society.

It is easy to sit around and say that complacency is bad, that one should always be looking for something new to pursue, but in reality, doing anything about complacency, as with any mindset or anti-mindset, is difficult. Not only that, but it takes time and patience to draw that mindset out. There is no way to get rid of complacency in a day. As with any mindset, it takes time to learn. For complacency, it takes time to reset the system, for the anti-mindset to be cleaned from the system.