Slacking Off in Gunma

This time, we talk about visiting a Buddhist temple in Gunma, and working there for a weekend.

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome back to Chestnut English podcast.

In the last episode, we talked about police and law-breaking, but this time, I’ve got a shorter and much more peaceful story for you. I’m just going to be telling you about my experience from this past weekend.

So, this past weekend, I went to the Gunma prefecture. The Gunma prefecture is about a 2 hour drive away from Tokyo, and it’s a bit more rural, kinda like a countryside area. I went there with a group of 5 people, to visit a Buddhist temple, where we’ll stay overnight and do some volunteer work for the temple.

Now this is a Buddhist Taiwanese temple, so there’s a lot of bald Buddhist monks that speak Chinese. And since it’s in Japan, they can probably also speak Japanese too. Maybe. They’re also all women, because apparently the boy monks go elsewhere. But this temple is actually a really big temple, so the size of everything is around the size of a small college campus. They even have like these dorms where guests can stay, and that can probably have a capacity of like 20-40 people is my guess.

Okay so we all woke up early in Tokyo, and we all jam into one car, and after a long-ass drive we get to this big temple in the afternoon. Wow, big building, beautiful views. And then we drop off our luggage in the rooms, and they tell us hey you, it’s time to get to work.

Yeah, we are working on the fields. 

We need to remove weeds from underneath the bushes along the main path. What I mean by that is, the road that you drive up to the temple on, the main path, there’s a bunch of plants and bushes on the side. And those bushes have weeds underneath them, so we need to go remove those weeds.

So, what do we do? We get to work. We all get one little machete (like a big knife thing), and we have to go cut weeds. So we got 5 people, all cutting weeds, and we did it for like, maybe 2-3 hours. So that’s how it all started, and then there’s also a few other things I thought at the time. 

1. So the first thing is, I remembered, when you study American history, there was this thing called an indentured servant. An indentured servant is sort of like a slave, but you get paid. In the 1600s, if you were a poor person living in Europe, and you wanted to go to America… you couldn’t because you’re poor. And you need money to go to America. Can’t go. Sad. But, what you can do is, you can sign a special contract with a rich person, and become an indentured servant. And then you get to go to America for free, paid for by your boss, but then you have to work for that boss for some amount of time, back then around 5 years was normal. It’s kind of like taking a loan, and paying for that loan by working for 5 years.

So for our situation at the temple, we get free housing (we are staying in the dorm for free), but we have to work, and do a lot of weeding. So we were basically indentured servants for a weekend. We get a bed, so we have to pull weeds.

1. So how do I feel about weeding? I mean, I can do it, but I haven’t done it before, so I’m not that good. We also are using small cheap tools, some of them are broken, so I would imagine if we bought big strong electric tools, we can do it much faster. And I was thinking, I want to contribute to the temple (because I have nothing else to do), I wanna help out, but maybe there’s something else I’m better at doing besides weeding. 

For example, in the game Palworld (Paruwarudo), you have to manage your slaves. One of my favorite slaves is an electric-type Pokemon, and he can do two things. He can generate electricity, which he’s really good at, and he can build stuff, which he’s really bad at. So of course the best use for him is to always have him generating electricity. It’s like a pikachu that goes grr and then all your electric batteries charge to 100%. What I DON’T want him to do, is instead of charging electricity, he’s building something that I don’t need. I have other slaves that are good at building, so I just want this Pikachu to focus on what he does best.

So then in this temple, I’m doing yard work, I’m weeding plants. And what am I good at? I’m good at English, I’m good at computers, I’m not good at weeding plants. So I talked with two monks, the first monk was really funny. She was basically telling our whole group that we are bad at our jobs. She was like 

Ni men jui de ba cao pi hen jian dan ma? Ba cao pi bu jian dan ei!

“I see your work isn’t done. You thought weeding is easy huh? Well it ain’t easy. Sometimes you pull too soft, and they don’t come up. Sometimes you pull too hard, and other plants get pulled by accident. Am I right, or am I right?”

And it was really funny, because all 5 of us kind of understood that we’re getting scolded, so we’re all looking down, we have to look ashamed.

Chotto hansei na kao wo misete agenai to ikenai

But then also we don’t really know why we’re being scolded, because of course we’re not good at weeding, it’s my first time weeding, and we don’t have the proper tools. Two people are college students, one is an English teacher, one’s an engineer, no one is a professional weed pulling person.

But yeah the first monk was pretty funny, and then I talked to a second monk, who was a very nice, proper monk, and she wanted me to help fix her computer. That became my new job.

(now, I know this story today is just all over the place, chotto bara bara, but I’ll tie it all together soon, I promise)

So I’m supposed to fix the computer. Apparently it’s slow. I looked at it, we did a bit of troubleshooting, and then I fixed it. The root cause was, every time the computer starts up, there were 23 instances of Microsoft Edge that also started up, and the whole computer would slow down, even the mouse would freeze up. And she doesn’t use Microsoft Edge, she uses google chrome. So in Windows, you can turn on/off apps on startup, so we turned that off, and bam it was fixed. The nice monk was super happy, she gave us some extra candy, and then we went back to the rest of the group.

So the temple experience was interesting, there was a bunch of stuff that I won’t get into, for example we got some lessons on meditation, and then we got bed bugs, but forget about all that. I want to talk more about my thinking process of weeding.

So my job was to pull weeds. If I see weeds, I pull them out. If I don’t see weeds, I go find other weeds to pull out. It’s basically applied racism, but to plants. If the plant is a bush, bushes are good, so we don’t kill them. If the plant is any other plant, even a pretty plant, PFLECH. Pull it out, it’s dead.

Now can I do weeding? Yes. I just explained how to do it. I’ve done it for like 4-5 hours. Do I want to do weeding? After the first hour or so, no. It also feels bad to do a slow job, since we have loser tools. So I don’t love my job. And then, I saw two of my coworkers stop weeding and go for a walk instead, and they never came back. And what does that make me want to do? I want to take a break too. I don’t wanna keep weeding. And then the last 2 people, see nobody else is working, and then they also stop working. And then you have all 5 people not working. This is what I call, sabori byou, or Slacker’s Sickness, and I think it’s as contagious as Covid.

If you are working, but then you see other coworkers not working, then you’ll think “why do I have to keep working? We all get paid the same no matter what, so I might as well slack off like them” 

Nande ore dake ga majime ni hatarakanai to ikenai no? Minnna ha kekkyoku onaji kyuuryou morau kara, ore mo aitsu mitai ni sabotte mo iin jyanai?

I used to work at Google as a software engineer for about 5 years, and I think this is where I really started to feel the sabori byou. Other people seem like they don’t do any work, and they get paid the same as me, or even more. So then that makes me think, I should do less work, and enjoy life more outside of work. I started out as a hard worker at Google, but then slowly over time, I became afflicted with sabori byou, Slacker’s Sickness. And then Covid happened, BAM, everyone is working from home, and everyone is slacking off harder than ever before.

So then how do you fix sabori byou, how do you fix Slacker’s Sickness? Well I can think of a few different ideas:

1. The company cracks down. You start enforcing punishments. If you don’t do your work, someone will be mad at you. So now people want to slack off, but they’re scared of losing their job, so they don’t. If you don’t pull up a lot of weeds, the mean monk is gonna come and get mad at you.
2. You change jobs, or you change tasks. Do something you like more. If you like what you do, even if others are slacking off, you probably don’t mind working more. Because you like it. I could fix old people’s computers all day, it’s easy and they always thank me a lot.
3. You don’t fix it, and you stay a slacker. I think this is most people, they don’t like their job, but they know it’s easy money, so they keep doing the job. And sometimes they slack off. But because they don’t like the job, they’re not that happy, and hope it can change.

So, probably the only actual solution is #2, changing jobs. At the temple, if you hate pulling weeds, don’t just keep doing it forever. Maybe you can go see if there’s something else you can do. If the first monk you ask is mean, you can ask a different monk, it’s okay. Don’t be ashamed and keep trying.

And trust me, I know it’s the easiest to just think these things, oh I want to do something else, but I don’t want to cause trouble, so I’m just going to keep pulling weeds. If everyone around you is pulling weeds, it’s natural to feel like you should pull weeds too. If someone tells you, you’re really bad at pulling weeds, it’s natural to feel like you need to work harder, to appease your angry boss, and now you definitely can’t ask to do something else. But, maybe, if you push yourself to try something new, maybe you’ll find something you like more, or something that you’re really good at. If you don’t do something new, nothing will change. If you find something new and it works, it’s a big win. It’s wonderful. You can celebrate. If you fail, and you find nothing, well it’s not that bad, you just maybe get scolded a little.

So that’s the story of my visit to the Gunma temple, and it really reminded me, if you’re working on something as a team, sometimes you’re better off doing something else, maybe on that same team, or maybe on a different team, or maybe in a different location altogether.

Okay thanks for listening everyone, I’ll see you next time on Chestnut English Podcast.