Last week I was enjoying an infrequent evening of “SportsCenter” when I saw a commercial that made my jaw drop. A little girl and her dad are in their living room playing with a new toy. This little conical object sits on the ground and spins a bar for the child to jump over. Wow! Amazing! It’s like a jump rope, only not social!

Immediately the device reminded me of an older toy that used to be the object of my satire: Skip-It. Years ago when Skip-It was a new toy, I found it absurd that families would spend money on a toy that reduces children’s social interaction. Skip-It was the non-digital precursor to the Conical Living Room Jump Toy (or CLRJT as I will hereafter call it).

People’s willingness to purchase toys like the CLRJT is emblematic of how lazy American culture has become. Doctors complain about obesity, we see commercials for drugs that treat previously unheard of emotional disorders, and the news endlessly reports stories about corrupt politicians. These three cultural phenomena have an underlying commonality: Americans’ indolence.

According to the Web site for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 17.4 percent of 12- to 19-year-old people are overweight (the CDC do not label children or young adults as obese because of the body’s changes during puberty). More than one out of six children is overweight, yet society grows more accepting of static entertainment like videogames and poker, not to mention less active toys like the CLRJT. What happened to going to the park with friends to play baseball, soccer, or basketball?

Similarly, my friends in education talk about difficult students. While some have chemically or socially rooted emotional problems, the modern social atmosphere for children does not teach them how to deal with life’s real problems. We emphasize test scores and academic achievements instead of more important aspects like actual learning and coping strategies. Decades ago, childhood entertainment depended on young people getting together to play, often outside and often in an active way. Certainly some children were excluded, picked on, or otherwise hurt by the social and academic demands of that era but, speaking from experience, those rites of passage strengthen character more than weaken it.

So what links the CLRJT and childhood obesity to corrupt politicians? On a daily basis, we as a society look for the easy way out. Who can blame us? Who wants to work hard when you can work easy? Cultural laziness is an unavoidable fact.

Families do not grasp the importance of increasing children’s social fortitude. They accept videogames as substitutes for playing ball outside. The American population wants quick snippets of politics from the news instead of reading and thinking about the greater issues. Were the public more interested in socially prosecuting politicians’ errors instead of harping on minute verbal miscues, the elected caste would feel less able to commit such transgressions. Each case provides more ways in which our culture chooses the easy solution instead of the more beneficial one.

Much of our laziness stems from our own success. Technology has been so good to us that we (I am most definitely included in this) are used to more immediate results with less effort. I don’t mean to argue that people aren’t working hard – just ask a factory worker, farmer, or small business owner for the definition of hard work. The problem is that we have institutionalized laziness in everyday life while directing our “hard work time” almost exclusively to our jobs.

Certainly putting all social problems under the umbrella of laziness is a simplification of the greater issue, yet when I see poker, racecar driving and competitive eating discussed as sports, I wonder where our definition of physical activity has gone. After seeing the CLRJT commercial, I wonder how long before institutionalized laziness envelops even more aspects of our lives.