Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

I learned at an early age to tie my self-worth to how productive I was. I got good grades, and teachers generally thought I was bright, so they encouraged me to work extra hard and take on more opportunities and responsibilities. Whether it was tutoring a struggling peer in civics class or running the arts and crafts table at Bible Camp, adults would constantly ask me to take on extra responsibilities, and I would always say yes. I wanted to be helpful, industrious, and successful. After all, working hard and doing a lot was how you ensured yourself a bright future.

She’s an intense person (a quality I admire), but her job has made her cranky and brittle. She doesn’t have patience for inefficiency or anything that strikes her as foolish. Her temper can flare at something as simple as the pizza delivery person forgetting to bring ranch dressing. She hasn’t written a short story in years.

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.

the immense relief that comes when we cease tying our self-image to how many items we check off our to-do lists.

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.

The word “lazy” is almost always used with a tone of moral judgment and condemnation. 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, that they deserve all the bad things that come their way as a result.

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.

Most of us tend to hold ourselves to ridiculously high standards. We feel that we should be doing more, resting less often, and having fewer needs. We think our personal challenges—such as depression, childcare needs, anxiety, trauma, lower back pain, or simply being human—aren’t good enough excuses for having limits and being tired. We expect ourselves to achieve at a superhuman level, and when we fail to do so, we chastise ourselves for being lazy.

The Laziness Lie is a belief system that says hard work is morally superior to relaxation, that people who aren’t productive have less innate value than productive people. It’s an unspoken yet commonly held set of ideas and values. It affects how we work, how we set limits in our relationships, our views on what life is supposed to be about. 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 talk to children and teenagers about the future, we ask them what they want to do—in other words, what kind of value they want to contribute to society and to an employer. We don’t ask nearly as often what they’re passionate about, or what makes them feel happy or at peace.

To fully appreciate its far-reaching impact and how it became so integral to our culture, we have to look back centuries, into the origins of capitalism.

The Laziness Lie is deeply embedded in the very foundation of the United States. The value of hard work and the evils of sloth are baked into our national myths and our shared value system. Thanks to the legacies of imperialism and slavery, as well as the ongoing influence that the United States exerts on its trade partners, the Laziness Lie has managed to spread its tendrils into almost every country and culture on the planet.

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.21 Even more disturbing, enslaved people who tried to run away from bondage were seen as mentally ill and suffering from “runaway slave disorder.”22 By not accepting their proper role in society, they were demonstrating that they were broken and disturbed. This worldview became the foundation for American capitalism.

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.

Our media rarely shows people setting limits, asking for help, or devoting their lives to the things that make them feel happy and safe.

Of course, it’s much harder to tell a story about a happy person with a fulfilling, healthy life than it is to show violence, toil, and struggle. Strong, independent heroes are captivating to so many of us because we long to have the power and dedication they possess.

there’s a real social cost to the fact that we’re taught time and time again that we should never give up or ask for help, when there are many times that a person needs and deserves a break.

I had asked Michael how he had the energy to constantly travel the world doing murals, applying for artistic grants, and producing digital art for freelancing clients, all at the same time. He shrugged at me and said that he had to push himself like this, because if he didn’t, he’d descend into laziness and never make another piece of art ever again. In his mind, being productive seemed somewhat binary: either he was grinding away constantly, painting murals by day and drawing on his tablet at night, or he was a total sloth with no creative drive and no professional prospects.

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

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.

When we stop fearing laziness, we can find time to reflect and recharge, to reconnect with the people and hobbies that we love, and to move through the world at a more intentional, peaceful pace.

“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.

When I met Julie, she was the executive director of a nonprofit here in Chicago. Her organization provided creative writing classes to Chicago Public School students, particularly those in underfunded, understaffed schools in the city’s south- and west-side neighborhoods.

three types of people who tend to get pigeonholed as “lazy” in our society: depressed people, procrastinators, and apathetic people who don’t see the point in caring about work or school. Managers and professors look down on folks like these. Friends and family find their inaction confounding. Society as a whole tends to resent them for not “contributing” enough to the world. But in these three groups of people, you can find clear illustrations of exactly why a lack of motivation isn’t a personal failing or the awful, morally negligent act the Laziness Lie wants us to believe that it is.

in 2018, over 30 percent of respondents agreed with a statement that depression is caused by having a “weak personality.”5 Our culture’s propensity to judge and blame the “lazy” still runs very deep.

When a person procrastinates, it’s typically because they’re paralyzed in some way: by anxiety, by confusion about how to get started on a big, complicated project, or both.

Procrastinators often get caught in a cycle of perfectionism, anxiety, distraction, and failure.

Because they care a great deal about doing well, they hold themselves to an impossibly high standard. They want to do “perfect” work, but their early attempts are far from perfect, so they get discouraged and anxious. As time passes and the deadline approaches, they become even more nervous and concerned about failure. That fear makes it even harder to focus and make progress. To cope with their feelings of anxiety, they distract themselves in any way they can.

With help and encouragement, a procrastinator can be taught to divide large responsibilities into small microtasks, each with their own very short-term deadlines. Something as big and vague as “write a ten-page paper” can be paralyzing, but “write two paragraphs per day” can be manageable. This, combined with treatment for their anxiety, can help procrastinators become far more productive, reliable, and confident in their abilities.12

When someone seems completely apathetic, I don’t see them as a failure. Instead, I tend to think that they’ve been failed in some way.

So, when I see that somebody doesn’t care about a particular goal—whether it’s becoming financially independent, finishing a degree, or even voting—I find myself wondering, Why does this activity seem pointless to them?

Of course it’s hard for a teenager to self-motivate when they’ve had adults telling them what to do and how to do it all their lives! If James’s school had given him and his peers more freedom and agency, they might have risen to the challenge instead of checking out.

Sometimes people become apathetic because of depression or trauma.13 Other times, people turn to apathy after repeatedly being disenfranchised. Psychologists call this “learned helplessness,”

you protect yourself emotionally by checking out and giving up. 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.

Feelings of laziness are often a sign that someone hasn’t been managing the demands of their day-to-day life in an optimal way.

Research suggests that people tend to cyberloaf as a way to relax and reinvigorate their brains, which is essentially the same reason employees do things like chat over the watercooler or futz around in the supply closet looking for a pen they don’t really need.22

So often, the urge to engage in behaviors that seem “lazy” is a sign that a person has worked hard enough and should just sit and be calm for a little while. Most of the jobs that humans perform require time for reflection, planning, or creativity. We aren’t computers or robots. Just as we need to eat and sleep, we need time for goofing off and doing nothing. When we ignore that impulse to recharge for fear of seeming “lazy,” we risk facing dire consequences.

The seemingly “bad” behaviors we tend to judge as laziness are really powerful signals that something in our lives needs to change.

Slacking off is a normal part of life; people require idle time in order to remain clearheaded and healthy. Feelings of laziness are also a powerful internal alarm signaling to us that we need additional help, more breaks, or reduced demands. By listening to this laziness, we can better understand our needs and construct lives that are truly worth living.

anything that was upsetting or had a complicated plot was just too much for me to process.”

Psychologists who study creativity are often very interested in these big “aha” moments and have put a lot of effort into studying what a person can do to promote them. It turns out that laziness is one of the most effective steps to getting there.

Moments of insight and creativity don’t come by trying to force them—they require a period of mental inactivity.29 Good ideas often come to us when we’ve stopped trying to come up with them, such as when we’re in the shower or on a leisurely walk.

Psychologists call this productive downtime the “incubation period.” Like an egg that must be kept warm and safe in order to develop into a healthy chick, the creative parts of our minds require safety, rest, and relaxation in order to produce unique ideas or insights.

All day long, I’d push back any feelings of sadness or anxiety so I could focus on work and activism. I

Emotions were for weak, unproductive people, I thought. I just had to just keep them at bay.

Over the decades, research has demonstrated that finding time to sit still, be nonproductive, and become attuned with one’s emotions can be therapeutic and improve a person’s physical and mental health.

Pennebaker and others found that writing about feelings in this way helped a person to ruminate less on the things that bothered them and improved their coping skills.

Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma & Emotional Upheaval

Why does expressive writing work so well? Because it forces us to confront painful feelings that we usually downplay. We live in a world that preaches the gospel of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and that lionizes the strong and invulnerable. Because of this cultural messaging and all the pressure it places on us, we learn to ignore our needs. We may even hate ourselves for having feelings of weakness or for harboring difficult emotions. Expressive writing seems to work because it gives us the opportunity to locate and listen to the vulnerable side of ourselves that we spend all day silencing.