Remember 2012, with all that running for President, jumping out of the stratosphere to break the speed of sound, watching a 2½-hour movie about Lincoln negotiating for congressional votes, and pretending to understand the Higgs boson? All that trying so hard? This year, we learned a lesson. This year, we took it easy: 2013 was the year of not trying too hard.
The leader of the free world was the leader of not trying too hard. Instead of last-minute negotiations to prevent the sequester, we sequestered. Instead of last-minute negotiations to prevent the government shutdown, we shut down. He drew a red line on Syria's using chemical weapons and then decided that enforcing red lines is much harder than drawing them. After years spent working to pass the Affordable Care Act, the Obama Administration delayed implementation of its plan because it felt that it's too hard to make a website, something that hundreds of teenage One Direction fans are capable of. Though there are no reports that Obama played a game of Monopoly this year, if he did, there's no way he finished it.
Even the Tea Party, which is specifically about unleashing the power of hardworking individuals, didn't try too hard: after 16 days and no concessions whatsoever, it reopened the exact same government it had filibustered to close. Then the Senate decided that filibustering takes too much work, so it ended some of that too. Congress passed fewer laws than in any other year in American history, including the 1970s, when members of Congress were high and sleeping with one another.
How popular was giving up? Pope Benedict XVI did it. It wasn't even clear that the Pope could quit, and yet he gave only 17 days' notice, which is barely enough time to return all those outfits. Cher had to give more notice than that to Caesars Palace.
Kanye West, the most creative genius in the world--according to no less an authority than the most creative genius in the world, Kanye West--didn't even make an effort in naming the most important creation of his life, his daughter North West. Syfy, already the laziest cable channel, made the laziest disaster movie ever, Sharknado. Justin Bieber decided that walking up stairs was too hard, so he had his bodyguards carry him up the Great Wall of China. Anthony Weiner decided that despite being humiliated before the entire country just two years ago, not sending random women photos of his penis was too much of a challenge.
Fact-checking is a lot of work, so 60 Minutes decided not to do it for its Benghazi report. Neither did The View, Today, MSNBC or CNN when they tried to illustrate the moral failures of young people by reporting on a viral video of a girl lighting herself on fire while twerking that turned out to be a Jimmy Kimmel prank. CNN didn't try too hard to get anything right while reporting the Boston bombing. And KTVU, the San Francisco Fox affiliate, definitely didn't do any fact-checking when it broadcast information confirmed by the National Transportation Safety Board that the pilots of the Asiana flight that crashed at SFO were Sum Ting Wong, Ho Lee Fuk, Bang Ding Ow and Wi Tu Low. The racist person who pulled the prank also didn't work too hard in coming up with names. Though he did work harder than Kanye West.