Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

I noticed how frazzled she always seemed to be, how irritation about her job had turned to anger and despair.

but on a day-to-day basis she’s irritable and short-tempered, and often remarks on the joylessness of her life.

She doesn’t have patience for inefficiency or anything that strikes her as foolish.

are not sustainable for most people. I also came to see how the thing that we call “laziness” is often actually a powerful self-preservation instinct. When we feel unmotivated, directionless, or “lazy,” it’s because our bodies and minds are screaming for some peace and quiet. When we learn to listen to those persistent feelings of tiredness and to honor them, we can finally begin to heal.

When people run out of energy or motivation, there’s a good reason for it.

When we call someone “lazy,” we don’t simply mean they lack energy; we’re implying that there’s something terribly wrong or lacking with them,

We know that drug addiction is a behavioral and mental disorder, and we know that statistically, most people attempt sobriety several times before they succeed.

The Laziness Lie has three main tenets. They are: Your worth is your productivity. You cannot trust your own feelings and limits. There is always more you could be doing.

When we don’t have work to do, it can feel like we don’t have a reason to live.

The Puritans had long believed that if a person was a hard worker, it was a sign that God had chosen them for salvation.

It was very important to the colonies’ wealthy and enslaving class that they find a way to motivate enslaved people to work hard, despite the fact that enslaved people had nothing to gain from it.18 One powerful way to do so was through religious teachings and indoctrination. A productivity-obsessed form of Christianity evolved from the older, more Puritanical idea that work improved moral character, and it was pushed on enslaved people. This form of Christianity taught that suffering was morally righteous and that slaves would be rewarded in Heaven for being docile, agreeable, and, most important, diligent.

Enslavers made it a point to keep enslaved people as busy and exhausted as possible out of fear that idle time would give them the means to revolt or riot.

away from bondage were seen as mentally ill and suffering from “runaway slave disorder.”

Our modern-day educational system was formulated during the Industrial Revolution, and was designed to train students for employment in warehouses and manufacturing plants.

unable to find a job on the bases where they lived. Maura had clearly lived a rich, responsibility-filled life. Her twenties had been much more interesting and challenging than my own, yet she believed she’d done “nothing” with all that time.

Our culture looks down on people who quit things. Rather than encouraging their good judgment and self-respect, we perceive them as weak-willed or dishonest.

In this chapter, I want to take that argument even further and explore how resting, quitting things, cutting corners, and all the other actions we typically write off as “laziness” can actually help us heal and grow.

seemingly “lazy” people almost always have a sensible reason for why they lack energy or drive.

depressed people, procrastinators, and apathetic people who don’t see the point in caring about work or school.

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

We are not machines. Our bodies and minds aren’t set up to perform repetitive or mentally taxing work for eight or more hours per day.

distracting themselves from stress and exhaustion by browsing Facebook or shopping online. It’s a form of procrastination that most of us have intimate personal knowledge of (I don’t know about you, but I do it almost every day), and in the social-science literature it’s called “cyberloafing.”

Most of the jobs that humans perform require time for reflection, planning, or creativity. We aren’t computers or robots.

explicitly about abandoning goals for a little while, letting go of stress, and restoring energy and well-being in the process.

now takes the average worker just eleven hours to complete what would have been forty hours’ worth of work back in 1950.

Researchers consistently find that in office jobs, people are capable of being productive for only about three hours per day, on average.

Attention fluctuates naturally because the human brain is constantly scanning the environment for new information, potential threats, opportunities for social contact, and more.

Since our attention is naturally so scattered, focusing on something requires us to exert some serious effort. That effort can’t be sustained forever, which is a big part of why most workers need lots of time to be lazy.

Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). It’s a popular and well-regarded measure of burnout that researchers and therapists still use to this day.56 The MBI describes burnout as consisting of three things: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (loss of identity), and a lost sense of personal accomplishment.

work. I’ve known her since we were teenagers, and she’s always been deeply reflective and willing to go against the grain.

priorities. On the Wild Mind Collective site, she’s shared a series of questions that she uses to determine whether her life is on the right track.65 When am I most in my element? What doesn’t bring me alive? What feels dreadful? What do I find inexhaustibly fascinating? When have I been most happy? Who are the people I want to work with? What do I need to be physically well?

These tips are rooted in industrial-organizational psychology research, as well as a series of interviews I conducted with therapists and mental-health counselors who help overcommitted, burned-out clients. Put very broadly, the tips fall under three umbrellas: Advocate for Your Autonomy Focus on Quality, Not Hours Spent at Work Break the Work-Life Interference Loop

It squashes and pushes down their motivation.” 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.

restorative idleness,

back to granting people autonomy—and trusting them to get important things done at the pace that feels naturally sustainable and right.

strong sense of self-knowledge and allow themselves to walk away from professional tracks that didn’t line up with how they wanted to live.

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.

Our culture teaches us that if we achieve greatness, we may finally deserve to feel safe and at ease.

Constantly having to put on a performance of being diligent, motivated, and well behaved can leave people feeling like their lives are inauthentic and don’t reflect who they truly are.

haze of anxiety and obligation—and

see our lives as having innate worth, no matter what we do or don’t accomplish.

data shows that constantly checking e-mail and Slack messages distracts employees and stresses them out.

On the Internet, being knowledgeable and well-read can be a liability just as often as an advantage.

strives, in every way, to be informed, self-educated, and politically aware.

Before the 1800s, there was no such thing as a college major. Back then, all students were expected to take courses in all topics. A college degree meant you were very well-educated in all the “liberal arts”: writing, philosophy, music, math, astronomy, and more. By the mid-1800s, however, there was simply too much information available for that to be a reasonable expectation anymore. So, the idea of “majoring” was developed. Instead of trying to learn about everything, a student could choose a subject, study it deeply, and become a specialist.

It’s only by taking the time to reflect on new knowledge that we can really make deeper sense of it. When we spend time carefully pondering information, we’re able to reevaluate our preexisting opinions, discover the holes in someone’s argument, or see a familiar idea

partner and are more likely to share personal information.40 The warmth and emotional complexity of a real-time conversation can help two people reach common ground when they disagree,

rush into conversations when we lack relevant expertise.

In order to form authentic, safe bonds with others, we must get comfortable with letting other people down.

“A lot of people are addicted to approval,” she says. “I think most women are, but it’s not just women who do it. A lot of people seek out situations that feed into that need they have to feel useful to other people.”