Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

children who did not receive adequate care and attention from their parents learn that the only kinds of relationships they deserve to have are unbalanced ones. She writes: Emotional loneliness is so distressing that a child who experiences it will do whatever is necessary to make some kind of connection.… These children may learn to put other people’s needs first as the price of admission to a relationship.

When a person believes that the only way to be loved is to please somebody else, they end up in all kinds of overly demanding relationships, forever giving more than they receive and never feeling truly seen.

There’s nothing wrong with these loving gestures, of course, but in Grace’s case they aren’t reciprocated. She never learned how to ask for the same kind of support she compulsively doles out. She tells me it feels incredibly lonely. As Gibson writes, “Covering up your deepest needs prevents genuine connection with others.”

The Laziness Lie actively encourages this painful self-erasure by teaching us that our value is defined by what we can do for other people.

In order to form authentic, safe bonds with others, we must get comfortable with letting other people down. We have to be able to say no in our relationships, just as we must learn to dial back our punishingly heavy workloads and other commitments. Emotional overexertion can be just as damaging as professional overwork. The answer to both is to embrace our authentic needs and to stop worrying that saying no makes us lazy.

“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.”

Overall, 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.

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.

Love

Honesty

Morals

Knowledge

Friends

Respect

Stability

Freedom

Fun

Creat...

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it’s the comfortable, self-accepting imperfection of the good-enough parent that helps a child learn how to deal with life’s inevitable setbacks and disappointments.18

When parents discuss mistakes with their children, they create an open line of communication that makes the relationship more resilient and capable of growth. Research also suggests that parents who are comfortable with making mistakes are more accepting of their children’s flaws and screwups as well.19

The Laziness Lie has fundamentally warped our sense of boundaries, making many of us believe that other people’s problems are ours to solve. It tells us that if we care for someone, we have to suffer to help them.

guilts us into taking on responsibilities that aren’t ours to carry. Before we get wrapped up in yet another dramatic, ill-fated attempt to “save” someone, we ought to ask ourselves if another person’s problems truly warrant our involvement, and if so, which kinds of involvement. From there, we can begin breaking out of the insecure, approval-seeking patterns that make us throw away hours of effort trying to help a person who isn’t receptive to that help.

Do you believe that if you take care of enough people, Danny mused, eventually someone will notice and finally decide to take care of you? Danny’s question might as well have been directed at me. The Laziness Lie had browbeaten me into hiding every vulnerability and need and left me obsessed with proving my worth to other people. I couldn’t imagine asking for emotional support or care. Whenever I felt lonely or sad, I would try to boost my mood by helping somebody else.

it’s normal to have somewhat selfish motives for helping other people. None of us is perfectly altruistic. But if you find yourself compulsively helping other people in a desperate bid to win their approval, it’s time to dial back your commitments. 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.

Each of us has an opportunity to push back against the dictates of the Laziness Lie and ask ourselves how we truly wish to live. But doing this requires staring down some of society’s most pernicious “shoulds” and rejecting them, because we’ve finally recognized that those rules don’t serve us.

Studies show that when we expose ourselves to diverse images of fat people, our negative stereotypes of them begin to go away.

Exposure to positive images of people of a variety of sizes and shapes helps us become compassionate toward our own bodies as well.

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.

Our culture’s hatred of the “lazy” is all-encompassing. It bleeds into how we view relationships, child-rearing, body size, barriers to voting, and so much more. The Laziness Lie teaches us that people who do more are worth more. When we buy into that method of assigning value to people, we doom ourselves to a life of insecurity and judgment.

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.

It’s normal to have these disapproving thoughts. The Laziness Lie has indoctrinated us into having them. These knee-jerk reactions are reflections of the society that we were raised in and the biases that were ingrained in us.1 Thinking this way doesn’t make me a bad person; if you’re similarly short-fused, you’re not a bad person either. What matters most is how we deal with these feelings. 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.

when you find yourself inclined toward judgment, try reflecting on why a person might do the things they do. Here are some questions to ask yourself: What need are they trying to meet by acting this way? What challenges or barriers are getting in the way of their making a change? What hidden struggles (such as physical disability, mental illness, trauma, or oppression) might explain the difficulties they’re facing? Who might have taught them to act this way? Do they have other options? Are those options really attainable for them?

What kind of help might they need?

Research shows that exercising curiosity is a fantastic way to unlearn our...

The Laziness Lie is rooted in capitalism and a particularly harsh breed of Christianity, and it preaches that salvation comes from hard work. That belief system carries over into how we talk about productivity, effort, and achievement. It teaches us to view idle time as a waste and to try to constantly keep ourselves occupied. It leads us to assume that there is more virtue in doing something than there is in doing nothing, no matter what that “something” is.

The Laziness Lie pushes us into unfettered, frantic individualism, leaving no room for reflection, listening, or quiet, inward growth.

Burke’s actual words are far less individualistic: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”4 This is not a statement about how “good men” must be active and engaged in order to fight evil head-on; rather, it’s a call for good people to band together and stand firm against the evil forces attacking them. This quote doesn’t praise activity for the sake of activity, it praises community. It suggests that not all battles for good are direct clashes of power, and that violent “contemptible struggles” often will fail. Sometimes, the best thing good people can do is hunker down, care for one another, and survive.

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.