Take deep thinking, which any teacher worth his or her salt would maintain is essential to turn the mis-shapen, unmoulded ectoplasm of stupidity that so many schoolchildren can be into an intelligent, wise grown-up.
But doctors loathe earnest intellectual thought and cogent analysis.
They know it only produces a very sore head, wilting migraines, and, occasionally, even cerebral aneurism and exploding eyeballs.
This is why I have refrained from deep thought for pretty much all of my life.
I have enough on my medical platter without howling headaches and eyeball bits spilling on to my chest.
I have, as a consequence, mastered the art of trivial flippant thought, addressing every issue that sore-headed close personal friends bring to my attention - the environment, how dangerously we are tumbling down life's hill through our own flagrant uninterest and inexcusable ignorance - with the intellectual attention I would normally reserve for a speck of lint on my sleeve.
And yet only last week a close personal friend asked me a question which simply HAD to be addressed with deep thought, and, ironically, and let's be perfectly frank, life can at times be ironic.
I have spent ever since then thinking deeply about it : why do we get out of bed?
I can already hear a chorus of hurrahs.
Many many people have posed this question, especially in winter when the cheap Taiwanese alarm clock attempts to reproduce the sound of a crowing cock at dawn, instead sounding like the dying squawk a chicken might make if being stabbed very slowly by a fork, to announce it is Time To Get Up.
But it is cold and dark.
Why would anyone with even a quarter of a brain want to do this when ensconced snide and snug in a double-duvet bed?
You can argue that one should get out of bed to make breakfast, have a shower, get dressed and go to work, but this is waterhead babblemutter, senselessly mired in tradition, no deep thought in sight anywhere.
Look no further than the unemployment figures, which deface our news pages daily.
World Health Organisation figures confirm there are millions of people out there who actually enjoy making breakfast - let these people be employed to bring breakfast to those who wish to stay in bed!
This is not maverick economics, this is common sense.
A shower?
Washing? Strewth, we all know Luke 11:38, don't we?
Is this passage not ingrained, where the Pharisee was shocked that Jesus did not wash before a meal?
Huh?
Most historians agree personal hygiene in the 17th and 18th centuries was disgraceful, a time when the behavioural catch-cry was the French proverb ''the more a ram smells, the more a goat loves him''.
And these times produced Mozart, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare - seriously deep thinkers.
Getting dressed?
Pshaw.
There is nothing more comfortable than a pair of jammies.
Why on earth would anyone want to get out of them?
And work?
There are so few jobs now, let the people who really want to work, those who actually like leaping from their bed like a young fawn singing something from Mamma Mia!, DO those few jobs.
Let the deep thinkers stay in bed.
Bed is a magnificent place, so long as you have long arms and a number of extension cords.
As I lie in my bed in the morning squirming irritably at the thought of exit, I cannot help but notice I have a Kindle on my bedside table with hundreds of fine books inside.
I have sensible diabetic food (potato chips, chocolate, smoked oysters, Mountain Dew) in the bedside cabinet, and a television and dvd/stereo system 2m from the pillow.
All computer tasks can be done on my smartphone, which never leaves my hand.
What else IS there?
Oh yes.
Well, Rome wasn't built in a day, and it certainly wasn't built without a plumber and long plastic piping.
Why EVER get out of bed?
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
