Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

When we write for other people, we censor ourselves and focus on whether what we’re creating is good enough. Expressive writing is specifically designed to be nonproductive. You allow yourself to write something messy, something that isn’t fit for anyone else to ever read, and then you throw it out. This can help a person connect with every feeling they have, no matter how unpleasant it is.

I’m not tough or super masculine, but I do hate the idea of sitting around and talking about my feelings. I find the whole process kind of cringe-inducing and shameful. Patriarchy and the Laziness Lie worked together for decades to make me suspicious of soft, feminine-seeming things such as crying or talking about emotions—even when my own repression started to eat me alive.

A lot of society’s most popular “self-care” methods have gotten an unfair reputation in this way. They’re seen as frivolous, feminine, and not suitable for anyone who wants to appear “strong.” Taking a bubble bath, lighting some candles, getting a massage—these are seen as lazy, wasteful extravagances, not essentials. Or so we’re taught.

After a couple of weeks of “feeling my feelings” like Jason recommended, I noticed I was no longer crying myself to sleep. I started communicating my feelings to my partner and my friends as soon as they came up instead of brooding for weeks. It suddenly felt less threatening to admit that I was sad or angry. Because I wasn’t constantly running away from those feelings, I was able to air them with significantly less shame.

Meditation is the most important place to start because it’s not intended to solve any problems. Like expressive writing and finding various ways to “do nothing,” it’s explicitly about abandoning goals for a little while, letting go of stress, and restoring energy and well-being in the process.

When we set priorities based on our real feelings rather than society’s “shoulds,” we feel a greater sense of authenticity.

Annette has an easygoing, open perspective on life. She has carved out an existence for herself that lets those wonderful qualities shine. But she was able to build that kind of existence only because she had the privilege and the knowledge to avoid what was bad for her: the conventional, restrictive, overly demanding workplace.

By 2014, the average American’s workweek had crept up from forty hours to over forty-seven.

at least 134 other countries have placed legal limits on how many hours a person is permitted to work,15

81 percent of food-industry workers have no employer-provided sick days.28

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.

when people don’t get access to breaks and “lazy” time, they think in more conventional, uncreative ways, and are more likely to get stuck.

subreddit r/MaliciousCompliance is filled with stories of jaded employees who follow their employers’ rules in a super-literal fashion, slowing down workplace processes out of spite.

Empathy requires a great deal of energy, and it’s painful and exhausting to relive other people’s suffering repeatedly without a means of escape.

Maslach found that burned-out people felt adrift and hopeless. As they lost empathy for their clients, they also started experiencing a profound loss of identity, with no sense of purpose. They described their jobs as utterly unrewarding. They became detached from all the things they used to love and be passionate about, including treasured hobbies that had nothing to do with work.

Perfectionists were particularly susceptible to burnout, for example, as were people who set unrealistically high goals for themselves.

The MBI describes burnout as consisting of three things: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (loss of identity), and a lost sense of personal accomplishment. Here are a few example items from the MBI; in them, you can hear the desperation and exhaustion that characterizes the condition: I feel like I’m at the end of my rope. I feel fatigued when I get up in the morning and have to face another day on the job. I feel emotionally drained from my work. I don’t feel that I’m positively influencing other people’s lives through my work. I have not accomplished many worthwhile things in this job.

being burned out actually makes us worse at thinking and making decisions across the board.

They experience far more depression and anxiety, and burnout can exacerbate the symptoms of any other mental illness they already have.

Because they see life as purposeless, burned-out people take more risks, which can lead to terrible consequences (burned bridges, wrecked cars) that they really don’t want. Chronic burnout can even cause a person to lose brain volume.

“When leaders push people to be more productive,” he says, “it’s basically against their human nature. 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,

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.

No matter our orientation or status in society, we’ve all been pressured to win respect by racking up accolades in this way. 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.

The Lie also implies that our intuition cannot be trusted; our cravings for rest must be ignored, our urges for pleasure, tenderness, and love must be written off as signs of weakness. Tobias believed the Lie, so he tried to hide his true self behind a wall of awards.

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

She often pushes people to help her accomplish her goals, ignoring their needs and priorities along the way. She doesn’t take no for an answer and often forces her husband and best friend to invest time in her schemes even when they don’t want to do it.

The show even goes out of its way to mock Leslie’s husband, Ben, for getting into stop-motion animation when he’s briefly unemployed. Ben’s stop-motion films are amateurish; they’re never going to win him any awards or help him secure a new job. So, in the eyes of the show and its characters, his interest in it is kind of pathetic. The mild depression he develops as a consequence of being unemployed is ridiculed too. The show consistently implies that a life of hard work and achievement is superior in every way to a life that goes at a slower pace. Unfortunately, a lot of us still believe that’s true in real life as well.

Our fear of being lazy can swallow up every source of pride and delight in our lives if we let it,

The more we adopt an accomplishment-based mindset, the more we come to catalogue, measure, and judge every single thing we do.

finding joy and meaning all comes down to “savoring.” Savoring is the process of deeply and presently enjoying a positive experience.6 It occurs at three time points: first, when anticipating an upcoming an event with excitement and optimism; then, when fully appreciating the positive moment as it’s happening; and finally, when looking back on the experience with a sense of reverence or gratitude after it’s over.

When a person savors, they relish the things they love and devote their full attention to experiencing them in a mindful, appreciative way.

When a person engages in savoring, time seems to slow down; the details of the moment become lush and vivid.7 Happy moments feel happier when they’re savored, and that happiness lasts longer after the experience is over.

Savorers also know how to look back on positive experiences and live them over again, which allows them to boost their happiness even when life isn’t going so well.9 Perhaps as a result, frequent savorers often have much higher levels of life satisfaction and more positive moods compared to people who don’t savor very much.

The Laziness Lie also loves keeping us distracted; as overachieving workaholics, we’re all expected to multitask all day long, never taking a moment to fully luxuriate in a good meal, a golden sunset, or a leisurely walk around the block.

Because the Laziness Lie encourages perfectionism, it makes many of us into expert faultfinders as well. We set unrealistically high standards of productivity and quality for ourselves, and then pick ourselves apart for coming up short.

take a step back, reconsider our values, and learn to see our lives as having innate worth, no matter what we do or don’t accomplish.

how do you go about getting awestruck? Novelty and wonder are the keys. Try habitually putting yourself into new situations or exposing yourself to novel, interesting stimuli.

If you’re a habitual overachiever and trophy hoarder, odds are you absolutely loathe doing things you’re bad at. This is a particularly common problem for people who were “gifted” students in school, or who were constantly told as children that they were smart. When you’ve spent your whole life chasing praise for being naturally good at things, it’s deeply unpleasant to do anything badly.

When we accept failure, we learn that our lives have meaning regardless of what we can (or can’t) do.

“In some ways I feel that the online community was exploiting my poor mental health at time for ‘content,’ ” she says. “I could certainly be witty and acerbic about my trauma, but at what cost?”

“Those bon mots and witticisms feel very good to write, are easy to write, and will get one a lot of traction, but a full-length project just feels more satisfying,” she says. “I had to take a step back and sacrifice the immediate rush of virality and likes for the sustained feeling of accomplishment that comes from a serious, larger project.”

The more she disconnects from the competitive, achievement-obsessed world of social media, the more Joan says she’s been able to enjoy her life.

The Laziness Lie loves keeping us insecure because it makes us easy to exploit. If I want to be the very best, I’m never going to stop to take a breather, because there will always be someone out there who is “beating” me in some way. This is a damaging worldview. It leaves no room for healing, experimentation, or quiet, unimpressive, reflective moments.

When we choose to feel compassion toward ourselves and stop expecting ourselves to be the very best, we can find joy in all kinds of slow, “unproductive” activities.

For decades, researchers have noted that consuming too much upsetting news can damage a person’s mental health, making them feel powerless and vulnerable.

Information overload can damage our decision-making abilities for similar reasons.21 In order for information to be useful to us, we have to find time to reflect on it, process it, and see if it lines up with the facts we already know. But when we’re in a state of information overload, this quiet contemplation can’t happen, leading us to make all kinds of errors and mistakes.

The absolute best way to combat the urge to overconsume information is to get comfortable with not knowing everything.

In a world poisoned by the Laziness Lie, the pressure to constantly improve ourselves is immense. Many of us want to fill our every waking moment with work, achievement, and the development of new skills. The more we strive to be productive and to improve ourselves, the logic goes, the more value we bring to society. Yet our minds need time to recharge, and our lives are more vibrant and pleasurable when we have time that isn’t focused on being productive. On top of all that, it’s arrogant and unrealistic for us to expect ourselves to be well-versed in all topics. A much healthier approach is to be humble about our limitations.

“Comment culture” has taught us to speak more than we listen,

we don’t have to sound off on every issue under the sun. We can choose to read slowly and think before we speak. As all the research shows, taking a more intentional, open-minded approach to these matters helps a person to experience less stress. It also makes us better citizens and more responsible consumers of information. Knowledge can empower us, but only when we take the time to wield it responsibly.