Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

Most of us spend the majority of our days feeling tired, overwhelmed, and disappointed in ourselves, certain we’ve come up short. No matter how much we’ve accomplished or how hard we’ve worked, we never believe we’ve done enough to feel satisfied or at peace. We never think we deserve a break. 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.

Eventually, after a few hours of “recharging,” I’d start to feel guilty for not using my time in more productive ways. I should be out with friends, I’d tell myself. I should be working on creative projects. I should cook myself a nice, healthy dinner. I’d start to feel stress about everything I needed to accomplish the next day. And then, the next morning, the cycle of guilt, overwork, and exhaustion would start up all over again.

For years, I would berate myself for running out of steam. Whenever I didn’t push myself to the limit, I felt shame about being stagnant. Whenever I said no to a task at work, I’d worry I wasn’t earning my keep. If I failed to help a friend when they needed it or didn’t make it to a protest I’d planned to go to or a concert a friend was performing in, I’d feel certain everyone was judging me. I was terrified that anytime I took a break or drew a boundary, I was being lazy. After all, there was nothing worse I could be than that. As awful as being tired, overwhelmed, and burned out with no energy for hobbies or friends was, surely being lazy was worse.

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.

When people run out of energy or motivation, there’s a good reason for it. Tired, burned-out people aren’t struggling with some shameful, evil inner laziness; rather, they’re struggling to survive in an overly demanding, workaholic culture that berates people for having basic needs. We don’t have to keep pushing ourselves to the brink, ignoring our body’s alarm bells and punishing ourselves with self-recrimination. We don’t have to deny ourselves breaks. We don’t have to fear laziness. Laziness does not exist.

The people we’ve been taught to judge for “not trying hard enough” are almost invariably the people fighting valiantly against the greatest number of unseen barriers and challenges.

The people we dismiss as “lazy” are often individuals who’ve been pushed to their absolute limits. They’re dealing with immense loads of baggage and stress, and they’re working very hard. But because the demands placed on them exceed their available resources, it can look to us like they’re doing nothing at all. We’re also taught to view people’s personal challenges as unacceptable excuses.

We live in a world where hard work is rewarded and having needs and limitations is seen as a source of shame. It’s no wonder so many of us are constantly overexerting ourselves, saying yes out of fear of how we’ll be perceived for saying no. Even if you think you don’t fully agree with the three tenets of the Laziness Lie, you’ve probably absorbed its messages and let those messages affect how you set goals and how you view other people.

Chronic overcommitters are experts at ignoring their bodily needs. Our economic system and culture have taught us that having needs makes us weak, and that limits are negotiable. We learn to neglect ourselves and see health as a resource we can trade for money or accomplishments.

The Laziness Lie encourages you to ignore your body’s warnings, push through discomfort, and ask for as few accommodations as possible. And at the end of all that struggle and self-denial, there’s no reward. You never actually earn the right to take it easy, because the Laziness Lie also teaches you that you can never, ever do enough.

The Laziness Lie teaches that the harder you work, the better a person you are, but it never actually defines what an acceptable level of “hard” might look like. By forever moving the goalpost and never actually allowing a person to be vulnerable and have needs, it’s setting us up for failure right from the start.

One of the major factors that caused the Laziness Lie to spread throughout the United States was the arrival of the Puritans. The Puritans had long believed that if a person was a hard worker, it was a sign that God had chosen them for salvation. Hard work was believed to improve who you were as a person. Conversely, if a person couldn’t focus on the task at hand or couldn’t self-motivate, that was a sign that they had already been damned.15 This meant, of course, that there was no need to feel sympathy for people who struggled or failed to meet their responsibilities. By lacking the drive to succeed, they were displaying to the world that God hadn’t chosen them for Heaven. When the Puritans came to colonial America, their ideas caught on and spread to other, less pious colonists.16 For many reasons, a belief system that judged and punished the “lazy” was about to become very popular—and politically useful. Colonial America relied on the labor of enslaved people and indentured servants.17 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...

This obsession with the strong individualist character has permeated our culture for decades. Films like The Matrix, Star Wars, and the Harry Potter series all emphasize the importance of their lead characters’ being “chosen ones” who must sacrifice everything in order to defeat evil. These characters may have support networks and sidekicks who help them through the story, but when the final moment of triumph comes, they’ve almost always had to suffer and struggle alone to earn it. They’re told they possess a unique ability no one else has, and they have no choice but to use that ability to save the world. 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.

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. If there are always more items on your to-do list than you can possibly check off, you will never feel accomplished. If your boss is constantly e-mailing you with questions and requests, you can start to feel guilty for something as simple as turning off your phone to go to sleep at night.

Does looking at your calendar fill you with dread? Do you have a deadline that you keep pushing back because confronting it head-on seems impossible? Do you “waste” hours every day scrolling through Twitter or shopping online for things you don’t need? If so, you might be feeling very lazy right now—and that might actually be a good thing. When we feel unfocused, tired, and lazy, it’s often because we desperately need some time to rest our bodies and brains. Research has repeatedly shown that a person on the verge of burnout will have trouble staying focused and productive.40 No amount of pressure and stress can magically help a person overcome that lack of focus and motivation. The solution is to cut way back on expectations for a while. Overextended people have to find space in their lives to sleep, power down their stressed-out minds, and recharge their mental and emotional batteries. You can wait until you reach a breaking point like Max and I did, or you can prevent illness and burnout by being gentle with yourself before it’s too late.

“Wasting time” is a basic human need. Once we accept that, we can stop fearing our inner “laziness” and begin to build healthy, happy, well-balanced lives.

A great deal of research actually supports the notion that our lazy feelings are protective and instructive, and that our lives can improve a great deal when we decide to stop judging our desire for idle, “lazy” time and start trusting those feelings instead.

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.

Embracing laziness can have a revolutionary impact on our quality of life. When we stop measuring our worth by how many items we check off of a to-do list, we can finally begin to seek out the activities that truly matter to us. When we set priorities based on our real feelings rather than society’s “shoulds,” we feel a greater sense of authenticity. And when we savor our free time and work to move at a slower, lazier, more intuitive pace, we begin to repair the damage that years of overwork has done.

Attention fluctuates naturally because the human brain is constantly scanning the environment for new information, potential threats, opportunities for social contact, and more.41 Even when we’re intently working on something, part of our attention is tracking our surroundings, ready to interrupt us if any distractions or threats happen to pop up.42 Our attention is less like a laser beam (which can be pointed at any single specific point we desire) and more like a rotating lighthouse lantern, temporarily bathing individual rocks in light as it continues to spin across its surroundings.

Burnout had robbed them of the people they used to be. Sometimes, there was no bringing those people back.

Maslach and her colleague Susan Jackson developed a measure of burnout: the 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.

Sometimes, doing a job well means letting other responsibilities drop, at least for a little while.

The Laziness Lie thrives on making us believe we have no options. By making us feel insecure and like we’re never doing enough, it convinces us that we don’t deserve to find another job or to leave an organization that mistreats its employees. By convincing us that we’re lazy and not earning our keep, it pushes us into a constant state of feeling apologetic and paranoid. It’s nearly impossible to negotiate for better treatment when we’re trapped in a scarcity mindset. Often we need a big wake-up call to realize that we do actually have the skills and drive needed to succeed somewhere that’s less punishing.

The Laziness Lie has taught us that work is the altar at which we must worship. It’s scary to step away from constantly churning out productivity—particularly when we believe that our worth is determined by how much we do and what we accomplish.

An awe-filled life is much easier to appreciate. Unfamiliar places and experiences take longer for our brains to process, which actually creates the illusion that time is slowing down. This is part of why the drive to a new place always seems to take longer than the drive home.24 When all our senses are focused on taking in the details of a novel experience, it’s easier to forget our daily obligations and our worries about the future and to remember that the world is large and filled with possibility.

Knowledge can empower us, but only when we take the time to wield it responsibly.

Information can be used to motivate and inspire. Knowledge can be shared in a way that encourages critical thought and careful decision making, rather than prejudice and panic. The Internet has gotten us addicted to a constant drip of low-quality information, but we can refuse to be overwhelmed into passivity. It’s not “lazy” to draw limits on the amount and type of information we consume. Doing so is actually an essential public service.

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. It’s a toxic mindset that can erode their mental and physical health, as well as their sense of boundaries.

It’s hard to set reasonable work-life boundaries when matters seem that dire. If you care deeply about a variety of social issues, it’s easy to feel that you must sacrifice your own well-being in order to save the world.

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.

When we treat social problems as emergencies that we must fix, we delude ourselves into thinking that we can control them, if we only work hard enough. Realistically, though, that just isn’t the case. I can fight and fight to make the world more just, but if my goal is “fixing” a decades-old problem or making it go away, I’m destined to fail and burn out. Sometimes, the best way to deal with those feelings of panic and guilt is to really let them wash over us for a moment, and really accept that we’re not fully in control—or fully responsible for it. This can be an immensely sad experience, but it can also be liberating. When we mourn the losses that cannot ever be brought back, we come to accept the reality we’re living in. This allows us to address problems realistically and sustainably.

The remedy for all of this is boundless compassion. If we really want to dismantle the Laziness Lie and set ourselves free, we have to question every judgment of “laziness” society has taught us to make, including those that are very challenging for us to unlearn. If you’re entitled to moments of rest, of imperfection, of laziness and sloth, then so are homeless people, and people with depression, and people who are addicted to drugs. If your life has value no matter how productive you are, so does every other human life.

We always have the option of reflecting on where our negative thoughts came from, challenging them, and releasing them when they’re no longer doing us any good.

We often dismiss people as “lazy” when we can’t understand the reasons for their inertia or inaction. If someone’s behavior makes no sense to us, passing judgment on it feels very natural. He won’t apply to jobs, he sits on the couch all day, and he hasn’t washed a dish in weeks—he must be lazy. Labeling someone as “lazy” can turn a complex, challenging situation into an open-and-shut case.

If standing by and doing “nothing” is the same as permitting evil, then almost any action you take in an attempt to fight evil can be seen as justified. If doing nothing is evil, then doing something is good, even if that something is foolhardy and destructive.

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.

Here are some indications that you may still be associating productivity with goodness: When you get less done during the day than you anticipated, you feel guilty. You have trouble enjoying your free time. You believe you have to “earn” the right to a vacation or a break. You take care of your health only in order to remain productive. Having nothing to do makes you feel “useless.” You find the idea of growing old or becoming disabled to be incredibly depressing. When you say no to someone, you feel compelled to say yes to something else to “make up” for it.

Taking breaks, drawing boundaries, and learning to listen to our internal feelings of “laziness” are each worthwhile for their own sake, not because they make us better workers. If you really learn to prioritize your health, it’s likely that you’ll become less productive overall. That’s because you were always doing too much from the outset. Learning to take care of yourself in a holistic way means accepting that you might never be as prolific as you once were, and coming to see that as a good thing.

It’s wonderful to realize that all people are deserving of love and comfort, and that this worthiness has nothing to do with productivity. I don’t always remember this, but when I do consciously take the time to focus on it, it fills me with a feeling of peace.