Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

When we feel unmotivated, directionless, or “lazy,” it’s because our bodies and minds are screaming for some peace and quiet.

When is the last time you just did "nothing"? Can you do it? I can't. Part of that is the ADHD but part of that is an underlying current of "don't waste time". It's insidious, creeping in even when I AM doing something.

The Laziness Lie tells us that we’re all at risk of becoming slothful and unaccomplished, and that every sign of weakness is suspect. It has many of us convinced that deep down we’re not the driven, accomplished people we pretend to be. That the only way to overcome our selfish, sluggish instincts is to never listen to our bodies, never give ourselves a break, and never use illness as a reason to slow down.

The musical comedian Bo Burnham (whose career started on YouTube) describes this phenomenon very well: “Don’t take advice from guys like me who’ve gotten very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner saying ‘Liquidize your assets! Buy Powerball tickets! It works!’ ”37

It's important to have dreams and goals and stuff, but not everyone can drop everything and chase those dreams. It doesn't mean you forget about them but that you'll have to find the balance between dream progress and keeping a roof over your head and food in your belly.

When I tell someone I don’t believe laziness exists, a funny thing usually happens. The person will almost always try to argue with me about how lazy and terrible they are. They’ll admit to me that yes, of course other people who are judged for being “lazy” are actually very hardworking.

This is SO TRUE! Any time I bring this book up, or the ideas inside it, I get so much pushback and it's almost always the person I'm talking to putting THEMSELVES as the only "real" lazy person to exist. Like... sorry, friendo, you're not THAT special! You're special in lots of other ways, but you are not the exception that proves the rule here.

In a world that equates laziness with evil, saying no is often deemed unacceptable.

Many employers and productivity experts absolutely loathe cyberloafing, because they see it as a horribly lazy act, a “theft” of company time.

Overworked employees are often encouraged to police one another’s habits and to spread their shared misery throughout a department, creating a contagion of unwellness and bad boundaries.

thanks to the rise of the “gig economy,” the pressure to fill even our spare moments with additional labor and “side hustles” has expanded our workloads even more.

I have grown to LOATHE the term "side hustle". So often it means "What I do because my full time job doesn't pay enough to cover my necessities". It steals joys from hobbies, adds pressure to do something, ANYTHING, "well enough" to monetize it.

Researchers consistently find that in office jobs, people are capable of being productive for only about three hours per day, on average.35 The remaining hours are spent doing other things, including preparing food and drinks, chitchatting with coworkers, browsing social media, engaging in online shopping, or even just staring into space. When managers attempt to make up for this supposedly “lazy” time by requiring their employees to work longer hours, it actually backfires, and employees do even less.

Colour me surprised! Body work and brain work are different kinds of work. They require different recovery types. Sure, sitting at a desk may not leave you physically exhausted like working in construction might, but the brain uses energy reserves too!

Workplaces where the goals were vague and projects were never completed tended to have more burned-out workers.54 In other words, when work seems like an endless, pointless slog, and workers have no sense of being recognized for all that they do, burnout is far more common.

Have you ever had one of those work "goals" that has no way of being actually accomplished? Because I have and they SUCK! The goal is like "Continue doing this thing that's part of your job description" and like... yes... I will continue to do the thing that my job says I'm supposed to do... but since the goal is to CONTINUE something, there's no end to it. There's no completion, no check-off. Nothing except a never-ending continuation. It was demoralizing in the extreme.

“Look at how people at work talk about coffee,” she said to me at lunch a few years ago. “Everyone talks constantly about how much they need coffee or want more coffee; some workplaces provide their employees with as much free coffee as they want. It’s a stimulant that makes us work more, and it causes so many people to have terrible anxiety. And yet most people don’t even question why they need to consume so much of it. Instead we romanticize it.”

So, I started working at it slowly, three or four days a week.

Doesn't Seem slow to me!