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We’re also taught to view people’s personal challenges as unacceptable excuses.
When we don’t have work to do, it can feel like we don’t have a reason to live.
We learn to neglect ourselves and see health as a resource we can trade for money or accomplishments.
This teaches viewers that our skills and talents don’t really belong to us; they exist to be used. If we don’t gladly give our time, our talents, and even our lives to others, we aren’t heroic or good.
When we give our lives space for slowness, relaxation, and doing “nothing,” we can begin to heal some of our greatest wounds and to create lives for ourselves that are nourishing rather than exhausting.
“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.”
The Laziness Lie tries to tell us that we must earn our right to be loved, or to even have a place in society, by putting our noses to the grindstone and doing a ton of hard work.
In professional settings, women take the lion’s share of the social and domestic work: cleaning out the office refrigerator, buying the cake when a coworker has a birthday, and making sure meetings are up-to-date on the company’s communal calendar. In academia, women faculty members are nearly always the people who organize and lead committees, schedule events, and mentor struggling students.5 When men don’t perform their fair share of this work, women tend to pick up the slack. It’s very difficult for most women, who’ve been indoctrinated by the Laziness Lie and decades of living under
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I could either have a life, or have a clean house,” Kathy says. “And she decided to have a life.”
