eli5: Why do we always get strong urge to be lazy if its better for the brain to be active

Question

I mean its so much better for the brain to be active working doing useful things stimulating your brain or working out, we all have a reward system and everytime we finish a task we feel a sense of accomplishment but everytime you should be doing something that you know will feel good in the end you just get this urge of doing nothing today and just relaxing,
shouldnt our brain be chasing this sense of accomplishment? Where does this feeling come from

In: 7156

Answer 1

I’m surprised no one has really touched on dopamine.

Dopamine is the agent involved in most brain signaling. Essentially, it acts on parts of the brain associated with ‘pleasure’ and ‘reward’, and it helps you feel satisfied. Abnormalities in dopamine signaling, such as perturbations to dopamine transport signaling, can lead to mental issues such as ADHD, autism, and Parkinson’s.

From an evolutionary perspective, the mechanism of dopamine is extremely useful. You kill a sabretooth cat; you feel extremely excited not only because you have food for a week, but dopamine spiked after the adventure. You burn ships’ worth of tea, dopamine spikes. You witness the overthrow of a Cheetoh-colored dictator, dopamine spikes.

But in modern times, our priorities change. Most of us don’t have access to hunting and voting is very infrequent, so we have to rely on more immediately gratifying events. Acing a test will do it; your favorite team winning will do it; but most people rely on drinks and memes.

So, accomplishing tasks is rewarding. There is as much evidence for that as for evolution. But vacuuming the house is not; mainly because it will just revert back within days. So, when faced with a choice between perusing Reddit and vacuuming the house, we will rationalize that Reddit is better because we are contributing to a conversation or keeping up to date with all the latest, while also rationalizing vacuuming would be a waste of time because it’ll just get dirty again (obviously a very reductionist argument); so we opt for ‘lazy’.

I do want to point out, ‘thinking’ is often misconstrued with ‘being lazy’. In this day, most of the tasks that took up a lot of time in the past are done in a shorter time. It leaves us extra time to do other things, be it gaming, reading, or just thinking. Baseboards are an annual thing, so once the house is clean I have no guilt with just sitting out back and thinking about stuff.