Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

the advice that both Sharon and Kathy give to their clients consists of three broad strokes: challenge expectations that the person has for you, practice disappointing the person, and keep repeating your no, over and over again, even if it makes you feel like a broken record.

tell their family members they’re going through something and that they’re going to be less available,”

They also expend a great deal more energy monitoring how they speak and act, because even the smallest expression of displeasure can get them labeled angry or rude.

Your values are the beliefs that define what is most important to you. They guide each of your choices in life. For example, someone who values family might try to spend extra time at home, while someone who values success in their career may do just the opposite.

When we say no to the things that aren’t the most meaningful to us, we have the capacity to deeply invest in the things that are meaningful.

too addicted to being “useful” to other people.

“We all have a mix of healthy and unhealthy motives for doing things,” she says, “and that’s okay. But you do want to get a sense of what the ratio is there.”

In particular, you should disengage from enmeshed, unfair relationships in which you don’t feel appreciated, and in which interactions leave you feeling used up or taken advantage of.

If you’re always there to help your friends feel better when they’re down, you may accidentally train them to rely on you in order to feel better. Instead of using their own resources and problem-solving abilities to address their problems, they may begin to feel that they need you to fix things for them.

our friendship might not have taken the toxic, parasitic turn it did.

The show does a fantastic job of illustrating the pressure to conform that has always haunted the American workplace.

Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, once said that the show was about “becoming white.”

The more a person can buff out all their rough edges, becoming as smooth and featureless and “normal-seeming” as possible, the more they and everyone around them can ignore systematic problems and focus on being productive.

In the mainstream, workaholic workplace, nothing is more threatening than “distracting” nonconformity. The very concept of what counts as “professional” behavior is rooted in the desire for social control.

The Laziness Lie demands perfection, and it defines perfection in very rigid, arbitrary ways: a body that conforms; a tidy, presentable life; a day filled with “productive,” virtuous activities that benefit society; a life that has no room in it for rebellion or complaint. If we don’t check off each of these boxes, we’re made to feel as if we’ve failed.

To set ourselves free, we have to refuse to meet the expectations that harm us. Deciding not to conform to these unreasonable restrictions may get us branded as “lazy,” but in truth it’s some of the hardest, most virtuous work around.

Upward comparison is, in essence, a way of using other people’s accomplishments to determine what our own goals should be. It kills contentment and self-acceptance.

I spoke with several mental-health professionals who regularly treat clients for activism fatigue, and their overall advice was this: prioritize causes that genuinely inspire you, set realistic goals for your activism, and work to accept that there are certain problems you cannot fix, no matter how hard you try.

“There are a lot of traumatized people in activist spaces,” says Sharon Glassburn. “They’ve experienced a lot of injustice and abuse, and they don’t have the ability to walk away from it completely, and so they become really emotionally dysregulated, and they can re-traumatize the people around them.”

“I think a lot of the conversation about activist burnout is actually about grieving, about being really able and willing to just sit in this space of This is fucking awful And there might not be anything I can do to solve this.”

People of color and women are often expected to be unfailingly productive and uncomplaining, above and beyond the level white men are.

The Laziness Lie is rooted in capitalism and a particularly harsh breed of Christianity, and it preaches that salvation comes from hard work.

I’ve sometimes counteracted the (fake) Burke quote by telling people that all that’s needed for harm to persist in the world is for evil people to think they’re doing good. When productivity is equated with goodness, it becomes hard to tell the difference.

The Laziness Lie has a far-reaching history, one that’s deeply embedded in the legacies of industrialization, imperialism, and slavery.

You’re fine exactly the way you are. So is everyone else.