I want to discuss whether or not there's is an inherent right to be a slacker. Or even the bigger question, what does a man owe to his society? What are his unspoken obligations and what happens when they're not fulfilled? I feel qualified to address this subject because I have an opinion. Also, I never lie and I'm always right. So here goes:
Individual morality is much easier to judge than public morality. And mostly, if you can uphold a moral personal life, you'll not struggle much with public morality either. The basis of individual morality is "love thy neighbour as thyself". If you honestly don't mind people stealing from you, maybe you have some kind of argument for stealing but you'd be pretty unusual. However, there are certain situations where even this law doesn't hold. Let me try a couple of examples out on you.
My first year at the University of Waterloo I saw a few very promising students who never got past their first year because they couldn't handle the freedom of being away from home for the first time. In particular, the succumbed to the dreamy world of narcoplexy, i.e. they smoked way too much pot. Some of these guys were top of the class types. One guy who was in the group house I stayed at my first semester had come in very highly on the Sir Isaac Newton physics contest which Waterloo runs. It's open to all of Ontario so to do well on that puts you on the very short list of extra-ordinarily gifted people the universities vie for. But he never got past first year physics. Last I heard of him, he had dropped out and had a programming job. That was back when it was a hot career, not like today.
Okay, so he blew his scholarship. But did he really hurt anybody in this "coulda, shoulda" scenario? I really don't know. He did waste a lot of people's time and probably disappointed his parents but hey, if he's really that bright, he should be able to recover! Right?
Well I can't really think of a second example so I'll just give you a laundry list of those "coulda, shoulda"s:
It's too late to stop myself before I go too far. It's hard to say in these kind of situations who is harmed or how "love thy neighbour as thyself" even applies. In the late 19th century, a mathematical prodigy, the likes of which is rarely seen, was discovered. Karl Friedrich Gauss at the very early age of 17 solved a problem which had eluded mathematicians since before the time of Christ. It has to do with drawing polygons inside of circles and wasn't exactly a breakthrough that improved everybody's standard of living. What is amazing is that thousands of people, some of them very gifted, had applied themselves to the same problem for two thousand years and failed. Karl Gauss solved it at the tender age of 17. Apparently he was also a prodigy at languages and couldn't decide what he should study. Coming up with this proof tilted the scale towards math and science. He went on to make major contributions in math, physics and astronomy. His contributions were so significant, they probably really did improve the world's standard of living. At least he did mine. I would have hated to solve systems of simultaneous equations without Gaussian elimination! I wonder what would have happened had he chosen languages?
I don't know if Gauss ever asked him self, "What field can I make the greatest contribution to?" But I think the answer was important as heck because he was one of those rare individuals who could have really made a difference. Had he chosen languages he could have written many pretty books but he likely wouldn't have been able to come up with the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.
You can see where I'm going here, I'll try not to belabour the point. But private decisions can have public consequences that either help or hurt a society even when they seem innocuous and unremoved from personal morality.
I'm going to call Public Morality that area of man's action that affects a society as a whole. It's a bit like what the Boy Scouts call citizenship. It mostly overlaps private morality but there's an area where there's little intersection between the two: what many refer to as "victimless crimes". There's different ways to categorize them, let me start with these three: sexually promiscuous behavior, protection from danger and denying freedom.
Sexually promiscuous behavior comes in a near endless variety and I don't want to say anything but this: any kind of sexual behavior that tends to weaken the relationship between a husband and wife tends to destabilize society as a whole. As it has always been, the family is the cornerstone of society and strong families make strong societies. Adultery has always been the fastest way to destroy a marriage and once that happens, much misery results. Being unfaithful to the one you have made vows to has both public and private consequences: the results of selfish actions are felt by many.
Protection from danger is a broad category. Should people really be able to decide for themselves whether to go bungee jumping, ride a motorcycle without a helmet, shoot heroin or seek an assisted suicide? How about drive their cars with a cup of coffee on their lap ? According to the concept of public morality, if that person dies while doing something risky, everyone is robbed of the contribution they would have made. Consider the life of another mathematician, Evariste Galois who, at the age of twenty died in a duel. He looked like he would have had a very promising career but we'll never know for sure.
Denying freedom is an even broader category! It can be slavery or corruption in government. Whenever you use force to change another person's behavior for your own selfish purpose you deny their freedom. That's very difficult to distinguish from using force to change another person's behavior for their own good but the distinction is important. Again, the society is robbed of the contribution a free people would have made. In the case of government, many people believe that a ruling elite or bureaucracy is better than people ruling themselves so, if you believe that, fill in your own example. Maybe stick with slavery and dictatorships.
If your friend Johnny jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge too? One of the ways to determine the public morality of a practice is to consider what would happen if everybody in a society did it. If everyone sat around and watched tv and nobody worked, there'd be shortages of everything and civil disorder would soon erupt. If everyone played around, there'd be no marriages, no families and a sharply reduced birthrate. The effect could decimate a society. If everyone smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, they'd be a lot sicker and the last few years of their lives would be miserable.
Governments are often charged with keeping an orderly society and they often pass laws to protect the society as a whole by proscribing private actions. Drug laws are a good example. I know there's a lot of people who will tell you that a government has no business telling you not to get stoned, and that the choice to make is your own. That choice argument is particularly tiring. Can I choose murder or theft? Of course not and the reason why is because they violate others. To some degree being a slacker and a stoner also affects others too because we all live in a society and our lives are interconnected. I'm not arguing for or against drug laws, I just want to explain both sides. I don't think the case for these laws has been properly made, mostly because people are a lot better conditioned to think in term of private rights whereas the concept of citizenship (aka public morality) has been too often ignored.
In summary: strong individuals make a strong society and, like it or not, you have a responsibility to be strong in order to serve the other people you live with. Be the best you can be, you owe it to everyone who has helped you.