Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

Through all the burnouts, stress-related illnesses, and sleep-deprived weeks we endure, we remain convinced that having limitations makes us “lazy”—and that laziness is always a bad thing. This worldview is ruining our lives.

The Laziness Lie is a deep-seated, culturally held belief system that leads many of us to believe the following: Deep down I’m lazy and worthless. I must work incredibly hard, all the time, to overcome my inner laziness. My worth is earned through my productivity. Work is the center of life. Anyone who isn’t accomplished and driven is immoral.

The laziness we’ve all been taught to fear does not exist. There is no morally corrupt, slothful force inside us, driving us to be unproductive for no reason. It’s not evil to have limitations and to need breaks. Feeling tired or unmotivated is not a threat to our self-worth. In fact, the feelings we write off as “laziness” are some of humanity’s most important instincts, a core part of how we stay alive and thrive in the long term.

It’s a strange paradox, but when we set out to do more than is good for us, we end up feeling like we’re not doing anything at all.

When a person juggles dozens and dozens of responsibilities, we laud them for “having it all,” but what happens if they decide they don’t want it all, or that the constant juggling isn’t worth it? Can we actually respect a person who revokes their consent? Can we see a person as impressive for admitting that they no longer want to carry something they’ve been shouldering for too long?

In workplaces with ineffective or incompetent managers, for example, employees become apathetic, because they know their hard work will go unnoticed and unappreciated.16

We also see this in the low voter turnout rate in the United States: a majority of nonvoters are people of color and people living in poverty, who report that they do not feel their interests are being represented by the political options available to them.17

What happens when we work more than forty hours per week? We get very stressed-out, but we don’t get a whole lot more done. The more a person works past that forty-hour limit, the less efficient and accurate they seem to be at their job. Past the fifty-hour point, a person’s productivity declines very sharply; past the fifty-five-hour point, and a person is so unproductive and tired that they might as well not be at work at all.

Workplaces where the goals were vague and projects were never completed tended to have more burned-out workers.

In the psychological literature, this is sometimes called the “overjustification effect.”70 Basically, if you take a job that a person naturally likes doing and then start tying that pleasant activity to rewards or punishment, such as their level of pay or whether they get reprimanded, you’ll actually make the task less pleasant for them.

Research consistently shows that when an employee crafts their job into what they want it to be, they’re more engaged and will flourish on the new career path they’ve created for themselves.

Abusive managers thrive on making workers believe they have fewer options than they actually do. If you find that your workplace isn’t receptive to change, and you lack better options, consider talking to your fellow employees and organizing to get things changed.

The Laziness Lie loves to blame victims for their own oppression. It tells us that if a person wants to succeed in the face of bigotry, all they have to do is work harder than everyone else, and attend to their own needs even less.