Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

I was forever spreading myself too thin, dragging myself from obligation to obligation, thinking my lack of energy made me unforgivably “lazy.”

They care about dozens and dozens of social issues yet always feel guilty about not doing “enough” to address them, because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

After a long day at work, they try to teach themselves Spanish on the Duolingo app on their phone,

or they try to learn how to code in Python on sites like Code Academy.

We’re committed employees, passionate activists, considerate friends, and perpetual students. We worry about the future. We plan ahead. We try to reduce our anxiety by controlling the things we can control—and we push ourselves to work very, very hard.

we remain convinced that having limitations makes us “lazy”—and that laziness is always a bad thing.

For years, I fell into an awful pattern where I’d work nonstop for the first five or six hours of the day, running through as many tasks as possible without any breaks.

I loved being superefficient like that, plugging away at all the items on my to-do list that had given me anxiety the night before.

My afternoons were utterly nonproductive, with me mindlessly scrolling through Instagram or Tumblr for hours. In the evening, all I had energy left to do was flop onto my bed, watch a few YouTube videos, and eat chips in the dark of my apartment.

Eventually, after a few hours of “recharging,” I’d start to feel guilty for not using my time in more productive ways. I should be out with friends, I’d tell myself. I should be working on creative projects. I should cook myself a nice, healthy dinner. I’d start to feel stress about everything I needed to accomplish the next day. And then, the next morning, the cycle of guilt, overwork, and exhaustion would start up all over again.

Whether it was tutoring a struggling peer in civics class or running the arts and crafts table at Bible Camp,

After all, working hard and doing a lot was how you ensured yourself a bright future. I had my reasons for worrying about the future.

Once someone was deemed lazy, they

were much likelier to get yelled at than they were to be helped. If a kid was lazy, there was no fixing it. It was their fault they were missing assignments, failing to grasp hard concepts, and not putting time into anything “productive” after school. Lazy kids didn’t have futures. And, the world seemed to be telling me, they deserved what they got.

the people I work with miss this stuff all the time, and my manager doesn’t actually manage them. So then I’m in the office from 6:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., fixing everybody else’s work so we have a chance at getting the contract.”

Her once-beloved hobbies, like witchcraft and embroidery, often go neglected.

“This fucking job ruined my health and my personal life. Last year I had an inflamed gallbladder, but I didn’t take any time off work because I knew my manager would pick apart my reasons for needing it and guilt me into coming in to the office. By the time I went to the hospital, I was vomiting constantly and had to crawl on my hands and knees to the toilet instead of walking.

The surgeon told me it was the most decayed one he’d ever seen, and asked me why I hadn’t come to them a month earlier. Then he gave me a big lecture about how I needed to take more sick days at work. I wanted to scream.”

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 abandoned my dream of becoming a tenured professor, which would require countless hours of research. Instead, I taught classes part-time as an adjunct, and sought out online teaching options as often as I could.

The Laziness Lie is a deep-seated, culturally held belief system that leads many of us to believe the following: Deep down I’m lazy and worthless. I must work incredibly hard, all the time, to overcome my inner laziness. My worth is earned through my productivity. Work is the center of life. Anyone who isn’t accomplished and driven is immoral.

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 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.

You’re constantly lugging all your possessions and resources around; if you put your stuff down for a second, you run the risk of it getting stolen or thrown out.

If you’ve been homeless for more than a few days, you’re probably nursing untreated injuries or struggling with mental or physical illness, or both.

You never get a full night’s sleep. You have to spend the entire day begging for enough change to buy a meal, or to pay the fee r...

If you’re on any government benefits, you have to attend regular meetings with caseworkers, doctors, and therapists to prove that you d...

You’re constantly traumatized, sick, a...

You have to endure people berating you, threatening you, and throwing you out of pub...

If people didn’t realize Kim was homeless, then they and their kids would be allowed to spend the better part of a day in a McDonald’s, drinking Cokes, charging their phones, and staying out of the oppressive heat. But the second someone realized Kim was homeless, they transformed in people’s minds from a tired but capable parent to an untrustworthy, “lazy” drain on society.

It didn’t matter how Kim and their children dressed, how they acted, how much food they bought—once the label of “lazy” was on them, there was no walking it back.

If every person who’s ever been jailed for drug possession was simply too “lazy” to get a real job, I don’t have to worry about drug policy reform. And if every student who gets bad grades in my classes is simply too “lazy” to study, then I never have to change my teaching methods or offer any extensions on late assignments.

most homeless teens are on the street either because homophobic or transphobic parents kicked them out, or the foster system failed them.

Many chronically unemployed adults have at least one mental illness, and the longer they remain unemployed, the worse their symptoms will generally get and the harder it becomes for employers to consider them as a prospect.

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.

I once had a student who experienced the death of a parent, followed by the destruction of their house in a natural disaster, then the hospitalization of their depressed daughter, all in one sixteen-week semester. That student still felt bad for missing assignments, despite everything she was going through. She was certain people would accuse her of “faking” all these tragedies, so she carried documentation with her everywhere she went to prove that these things had happened to her.

When you’ve been alienated by society over and over again, you tend to look totally checked out, even if you’re really busting your ass.

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.

Yet when potential employers look at Zee’s résumé, all they see is a gap in employment that’s several years wide, which makes it seem like Zee spent all that time doing nothing.

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 a TV show depicts a disabled person somehow “overcoming” their disability through sheer willpower rather than by receiving the accommodations they deserve, the Laziness Lie grows a bit stronger.

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.

As adults, we define people by their jobs—he’s an actor, she’s a mortician—categorizing them based on the...

When we don’t have work to do, it can feel like we don’t have a reason to live.

Since we live in a world that’s structured around work, not working can leave a person socially isolated, exacerbating whatever mental and physical health problems they might be dealing with.

Work had already made Michael puke blood in the past; from his perspective, risking acute respiratory syndrome didn’t seem all that different.

he struggles constantly with the fear that he’s going to screw up and lose everything. His fear comes from a very reasonable place: before he became an author, he was in prison. He knows, more intimately than most of us, that the comfort and security his work has brought him could dry up at any moment.

Having trouble focusing on something complicated? It’s not because you’re distracted and overwhelmed, it’s the opposite! You actually need to be taking more on in order to keep yourself sharp!