Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

She had a gut feeling that his actions were not a deliberate, malicious choice.

“I was going crazy,” Julie says, “because I was like, This is not my husband This is not the person I’ve known for so long. And we’ve been together since I was twenty, so we know each other pretty well.”

His symptoms were exacerbated by the stress of balancing parenting with a full-time job that required him to travel often. For years, Rich had been privately trying to manage his symptoms without even realizing it, but as the stress in his life continued to mount, his ability to cope got worse and worse.

“The other evening I was feeling anxious, and Rich was feeling anxious. We were doing things around the house, and I just said to him, I think we’re about to get into a fight,” Julie tells me. “I could feel this tension building up between us, and I thought, What if I just acknowledged that out loud?” As soon as Julie observed the anger building up, she and Rich were able to defuse it. “Rich was like, I don’t want to fight,” Julie says. “And I told him, I don’t want to fight either.

There’s a relaxed honesty between them that I’ve seen in only a handful of couples in my life. Together, they were able to take a relationship that was in tatters and rebuild it into something far more vulnerable and enduring. That never would have been possible when they were both overworked.

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?

In a world that’s beholden to the Laziness Lie, many of us feel we have to hide our desire for free time. I know that when I cancel plans, I try to find a really plausible, virtuous-seeming excuse. Sorry, I couldn’t make it to game night, I had to stay late at work! The truth (I just didn’t feel like going) seems unacceptable to voice.

He mentioned that his laziness came from having depression, but insisted that mental illness wasn’t a valid excuse for his “bad” behavior.

three types of people who tend to get pigeonholed as “lazy” in our society: depressed people, procrastinators, and apathetic people who don’t see the point in caring about work or school.

When an employee divulges to their manager that they have depression, they’re more likely to be punished for taking sick days than other employees are. Their odds of being fired go way up too, even if the quality of their work remains the same.

Something that might seem simple to a nondepressed person, such as doing a load of laundry, can become an overwhelming series of painful tasks to someone who’s depressed.7 It’s hard to take a large job and break it down into small steps when your brain is struggling to function.

Procrastinators often get caught in a cycle of perfectionism, anxiety, distraction, and failure.

Research has repeatedly found that people procrastinate more when a task is one that really matters to them.

When someone seems completely apathetic, I don’t see them as a failure. Instead, I tend to think that they’ve been failed in some way.

when I see that somebody doesn’t care about a particular goal—whether it’s becoming financially independent, finishing a degree, or even voting—I find myself wondering, Why does this activity seem pointless to them?

When you lose power over your own life, you don’t have much reason to stay energized and motivated.15 So, you protect yourself emotionally by checking out and giving up.

a majority of nonvoters are people of color and people living in poverty, who report that they do not feel their interests are being represented by the political options available to them.

He lives in his head, and thinks about long-term consequences rather than short-term impulses or needs. I think that’s why it was hard for him to notice his own needs and limitations at times. He has to hit a wall before he even starts to see that he’s tired.

“cyberloafing.”

The average person cyberloafs many times per day, but it’s particularly likely to happen when someone has just finished an intellectually strenuous task or when they’re about to mentally “shift gears” from one activity to another.

people tend to cyberloaf as a way to relax and reinvigorate their brains, which is essentially the same reason employees do things like chat over the watercooler or futz around in the supply closet looking for a pen they don’t really need.

When employees are blocked from engaging in their preferred forms of loafing, their brains still find ways to take breaks, even if the only method available is staring off into space.

She quickly took stock of his frantic mannerisms, the way his eyes darted anxiously around the room, and the distractibility and overexertion that defined his life, and took a guess at what the source of the problem was. “She asked me on, like, my second visit if I had ever been assessed for ADHD,” he says. “And when I did get tested, I was off the charts.” Before that moment, Leo had never considered it a possibility that he had ADHD.

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.

I’ll never forget the first time I hung out with Leo after he started taking ADHD medication and working on his overcommitment with a therapist. He didn’t interrupt me with tons of observations and questions I couldn’t follow the logic of. He had an easy sense of humor, and could speak candidly about how hard his college years had been. He wasn’t constantly flitting around the living room, anxiously tidying things or letting out his nervous energy in little verbal tangents and ticks. He could sit through a movie without getting up or being distracted. He had also started recreationally smoking weed from time to time, a thing his younger, driven type-A self would have found downright shameful.

In the couple of years that they’ve been dating, they’ve gone on several long vacations and adventures, visiting national parks and museums, mountaineering, and kayaking.

I never thought a straitlaced, politics-obsessed person like him would turn into a chilled-out nature-loving weed smoker, but I’m so happy for him that he did.

They’ll have less drive to do chores or cook meals and may take frequent naps or zone out by playing repetitive video games.

I’ll give up another organ if I can get some more rest.”

Though she was an avid lover of horror movies, true-crime documentaries, and all things gruesome and dark, the demands of her job had zapped her energy so drastically that she could no longer focus on them. “For a whole year,” she says, “all I watched was Bob’s Burgers. Which is a great show! I like that show. But it was the only thing simple and comforting enough for my mind to handle.

anything that was upsetting or had a complicated plot was just too much for me to process.”

Once she finally had a few days to sleep and recuperate, Max found that she was able to sit through long movies and documentaries again. On bed rest, she had renewed interest in her hobbies. She started making witchy handcrafts again. Soon she felt far less hopeless and depressed.

Though we normally think of a medical emergency as being a traumatic and taxing experience, Max’s gallbladder surgery marked a significant, positive turning point in her life.

Me with my broken ankle

When she had the chance to relax, she started reevaluating her life.

Good ideas often come to us when we’ve stopped trying to come up with them, such as when we’re in the shower or on a leisurely walk.

For example, if they repeatedly miss household-chore goals but don’t feel particularly bad about it, that may tell them that having a perfectly tidy house isn’t such an important goal.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer and star of the musical Hamilton, famously came up with the concept for the show while reading a history book on vacation with his wife.32 He didn’t go on vacation hoping to come up with a concept for a new musical; he was just trying to find a way to relax after seven nonstop years of performing in his show In the Heights. Yet the moment he had time to truly recharge, he arrived at a creative breakthrough that changed his life forever.

When my therapist, Jason, first told me to try sitting around and doing absolutely nothing for half an hour so I could truly “feel my feelings,” I thought he was absolutely full of shit. “Nobody does that,” I told him. “Literally no human has ever just sat perfectly still and calmly done nothing for that long.”

Ha. Ahaha.

government had just withdrawn its antidiscrimination protections for transgender people. People were being held in cages at the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of my friends were living in fear that the Affordable Care Act was going to be overturned, causing them to lose access to lifesaving medical care.

I went to protests and rallies. I called my political representatives. I supported my scared friends and tried to stay strong. At night, when I was trying to fall asleep, I’d experience a flood of emotions, either sobbing or seething with rage.

“I can’t imagine somebody just sitting there and crying for no reason,

Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma & Emotional Upheaval

I also started noticing patterns in the things I chose to write about each week. I saw that certain obligations, like a weekly genderqueer support group I used to attend, always came up in my writing as a source of stress. Every single week, I dreaded going. Once I noticed this pattern, I found it a lot easier to stop attending the group.

Though there was a time when the average workweek kept getting shorter and shorter in length (thanks in large part to unions and the labor movement),5 that pattern has sadly reversed in recent years.

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

44 percent of respondents said they worked more than forty-five hours per week.

12 percent reported working sixty or more hours per week.

While at least 134 other countries have placed legal limits on how many hours a person is permitted to work,15 in the US there is no legal maximum,

it now takes the average worker just eleven hours to complete what would have been forty hours’ worth of work back in 1950.17

Many companies have moved toward relying on part-time employees instead of full-timers so they don’t have to offer benefits.