But most people are still about that YOLO life, regardless …
Bill Gates once famously said that he'd "choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."
Considering he helped build a corporation worth an estimated seventeen-quintillion mega-diamonds, he may have been onto something. Why? Because research suggests that lazy people are more intelligent than their active counterparts.
The basic takeaway from a newly published report is that smart people rarely, if ever, get bored, because they're locked away in their own thoughts — just lying there thinking about things and entertaining themselves internally.
Dumb people on the other hand, seek out more active lifestyles to get outside of their minds, essentially running away from the stupid shit they think to themselves.
To find this otherwise completely useless — and probably expensive — information, the team used old-school psychology tests to find which participants liked to ponder life's most existential quandaries, and those who avoided them like the plague. They were then given fitness trackers, which told researchers how much they moved around in a week.
(Since most of the people studied were college students, they found very little differences in weekend movement, for the obvious reason of them being college students still living that YOLO life.)
That's not to say intelligent people are better off because of it (even if it means you have better genes than everyone else). A sendentary lifestyle, which smarter people tend to lean towards, has health risks of its own. Previous research suggests that just sitting around on the weekends is worse for your health than sitting around at a desk all workweek. Of course, both of those on top of one another are cause for concern. Get up, move around, do something. You don't want to die, do you?
"Ultimately, an important factor that may help more thoughtful individuals combat their lower average activity levels is awareness," says lead researcher Todd McElroy. "Awareness of their tendency to be less active, coupled with an awareness of the cost associated with inactivity. More thoughtful people may then choose to become more active throughout the day."
So, if you're lazy, you can use this valuable research to mock active friends because they're complete morons; and if you're active, turn it around to suggest that your lazy friends are going to die soon.
Science: Separating the herd since 322 BC.
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