Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

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.

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. Lazy people don’t work hard enough. They made bad decisions when good ones seemed just as feasible. Lazy people don’t deserve help, patience, or compassion.

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. I’ve noticed this in my professional life as well. Every single time I’ve checked in with a seemingly “lazy” and underperforming student, I’ve discovered that they’re facing massive personal struggles, including mental-health issues, immense work stress, or the demands of caring for a sick child or elderly relative.

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.

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.

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.

If you’re a diligent employee, the Laziness Lie will berate you for not volunteering more often, or for not doing enough for your family and friends. If you devote your life to serving other people and meeting their needs, the Laziness Lie will point out that you’re not working out enough, or that your home is a mess. If you win a massive award or hit some other life-changing milestone, the Laziness Lie will smile politely and say, “That’s very nice. But what do you plan to do next?”

We can see the dogma of the Laziness Lie in popular media from that period as well. In the late 1800s, the writer Horatio Alger published numerous stories in which struggling, impoverished characters were able to rise into the upper classes through hard work. The popularity of these books led to the idea that poor people simply needed to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” if they wanted to live a comfortable life.

It’s easy for a teacher to mistake exhaustion for apathy or lack of motivation, yet I almost always find that when I sit down with students who seem unmotivated, they’re impressively productive people who fill their days with full-time jobs, self-improvement, and service to others.

regimens. Everywhere we turn, we’re told we’re not enough. And when we finally disconnect from this constant stream of shame and pressure, we often feel guilty for “disappearing” on our colleagues, family, and friends.

In a world that equates laziness with evil, saying no is often deemed unacceptable. Our culture looks down on people who quit things. Rather than encouraging their good judgment and self-respect, we perceive them as weak-willed or dishonest. When a person juggles dozens and dozens of responsibilities, we laud them for “having it all,” but what happens if they decide they don’t want it all, or that the constant juggling isn’t worth it? Can we actually respect a person who revokes their consent? Can we see a person as impressive for admitting that they no longer want to carry something they’ve been shouldering for too long? Many of us never learned how to surrender, even when we desperately need to. We’ve been browbeaten into saying yes for so long that we don’t know what a confident no feels like.

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. And then, when the deadline finally arrives, the procrastinator must choose between submitting quickly thrown-together work that isn’t very good or giving up entirely.

It’s very common for people with ADHD to overcommit to a variety of things they’re passionate about, and then run quickly and dramatically out of steam because they haven’t realistically budgeted their time.

From there, Max scheduled meetings with upper management to discuss problems she’d noticed in how responsibilities were being assigned. This persuaded them to hire additional employees, who took on some of Max’s old duties. Her workload gradually lightened.

In what world lol

When companies fail to provide employees with adequate sick-leave policies and managers bully their workers into working while ill, the public health consequences are massive. Many sick employees spread the coronavirus to their coworkers and fellow commuters because they weren’t able to take time off from work in the early days of the pandemic.27 On a more mundane level, sick food-service employees often have no choice but to come in to work and spread their illness to fellow workers and patrons; 81 percent of food-industry workers have no employer-provided sick days.28

On the Wild Mind Collective site, she’s shared a series of questions that she uses to determine whether her life is on the right track.65 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?

If your boss might be receptive to changing their ways, point them to some of the sources in this book, or to Markus’s writing for managers on CQ Net or other science-backed articles on workplace productivity. Point to evidence of it in your own workplace—remind leadership of times when employees were happy and effective because they weren’t being pushed too hard. If you don’t have the power to influence a boss, educate your coworkers and friends about these facts, and consider organizing a union. The more informed people are, the more they can move toward an “evidence-based” workplace.

The Laziness Lie has infected so much more than our careers. It has taught us to chase accomplishment in every imaginable realm, even those meant to be relaxing and nonproductive. In the process, it has sapped the joy and leisure out of even the most pleasant and nourishing of activities.

In Fred’s work, 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.

The opposite of savoring is “dampening.” Dampening occurs when we suck the life out of a positive experience by distracting ourselves from it, worrying about the future, or focusing on small imperfections that we ought to just ignore.

You can’t savor your life—or even remember it in much detail—if your existence is nothing but a series of obligations you have to joylessly meet.

We’re living in an era of information overload—and the solution is not to learn more but to step back and consume a smaller amount of data in a more meaningful way.

The volume of unique information the average person encounters in a day is approximately five times what the average person encountered in 1986.7

Experimental research shows that when two people speak privately about a disagreement, they feel much greater satisfaction than when they speak to someone in a public, online venue such as a comment section. They also feel more emotionally close to their conversation partner and are more likely to share personal information.40 The warmth and emotional complexity of a real-time conversation can help two people reach common ground when they disagree, and can foster feelings of friendship and mutual respect.

“Comment culture” has taught us to speak more than we listen, to form an opinion based only on a headline, and to rush into conversations when we lack relevant expertise.41 But 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.

If a cisgender woman decides to fight the power and say, Hey, I’m not doing all the household chores anymore, it’s a feminist act. But if I refuse to do those “womanly” activities as a trans woman, people go, Oh, you’re so entitled and lazy—you’re acting like a man.

Rather than scrambling to do it all—maintaining a clean house, doing countless volunteer duties, working long hours, and supporting our friends—we often need to free up our schedules (and our minds) by doing much less. When we say no to the things that aren’t the most meaningful to us, we have the capacity to deeply invest in the things that are meaningful.

The Laziness Lie demands perfection, and it defines perfection in very rigid, arbitrary ways: a body that conforms; a tidy, presentable life; a day filled with “productive,” virtuous activities that benefit society; a life that has no room in it for rebellion or complaint. If we don’t check off each of these boxes, we’re made to feel as if we’ve failed.