Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

When am I most in my element? What doesn’t bring me alive? What feels dreadful? What do I find inexhaustibly fascinating? When have I been most happy? Who are the people I want to work with? What do I need to be physically well?

Achievement-hunting can also make us competitive to a fault, seeing other people only as barriers to our next big success. Like Leslie Knope, we can become so intent on “winning” that we forget to take care of our friends or ourselves. We can even see the successes of our loved ones as threats, signs that they’re more hardworking and lovable than we are. Our fear of being lazy can swallow up every source of pride and delight in our lives if we let it, until there’s nothing left. The more we adopt an accomplishment-based mindset, the more we come to catalogue, measure, and judge every single thing we do. Unfortunately, the digital age has done a lot to facilitate this obsession. Today, we can easily monitor how much exercise we get, how many likes our Instagram posts receive, how many books we’ve read this year, and how our “performance” compares to that of our friends. Every enjoyable use of our free time, whether it be cooking, crafting, or travel, can be documented, shared, and assessed relative to other people.