Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

“I told my husband, Look, I’m gonna start climbing again, and, like, one weekend a month, I want to go out to the state parks and go up some cliffs,” he says. “And my husband was like, Okay, I’m going to start scheduling Dungeons & Dragons sessions with my friends too.”

I’d talk to him late into the night, reassuring him that his life had meaning and that he should keep going. I researched therapists in his area and created a list of providers I thought would be a good fit for him.

“Ethan, I’m so sorry,” I wrote back. “I don’t know what to say. Did any of the therapists I recommended look like a good fit?” “All a therapist would do is tell me to look on the bright side or do yoga or something,” he replied grimly. “That’s not going to help me.”

“To be honest,” Ethan replied, “I haven’t even opened up the list you sent me.” In that moment, I realized I was trying harder to help Ethan than he was trying to help himself. I felt so used and underappreciated that I stopped talking to him right then and there. I was furious at Ethan, but even more disappointed in myself.

Questions to Ask before Trying to “Save” Someone: Can they solve this on their own? Do they want help? Do they want my help? Am I the right person to provide help right now? Can I direct them to seek help from a professional or a close loved one? What are my motives for helping? What will helping cost me?

I’d wasted hours making a list of therapists for him when that wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was for me to be on call to support him twenty-four seven.

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?

okay ow

I had always secretly hoped that somebody would notice how hard I was working and approach me out of the blue, saying, Oh, you poor thing, you’ve already done so much. Let me take care of you.

it’s normal to have somewhat selfish motives for helping other people.

If you’re always there to help your friends feel better when they’re down, you may accidentally train them to rely on you in order to feel better.

“The things that make people feel better the quickest,” Bernstein writes, “usually make them do worse.”

Months after we stopped talking, a mutual friend told me that he had a new job he liked and roommates who enjoyed spending time with him.

By setting myself free of Ethan’s unrealistic demands, I inadvertently liberated us both.

It wasn’t “lazy” or uncaring for me to detach from the relationship. ...

When my relatives left rural Tennessee for suburban Cleveland, they started trying to hide their hillbilly background.

Often these embarrassingly “hillbilly” acts were just sensible, thrifty behaviors, like trying to bargain for a cheaper price at a garage sale or taking a piece of decent-looking furniture from someone’s garbage.

Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, once said that the show was about “becoming white.”

Don Draper is already white at the beginning of the show, of course; what Weiner meant was that as Don ascends the corporate ladder, he learns to erase more and more of his former self until he fully embodies the wealthy, white Anglo...

In my family’s case, “becoming white” was a bit more literal. My family on my dad’s side is Melungeon, a mixed-race group of people from the Cumberland Gap region of Tennessee.4 Many of my hillbilly relatives were white or white-passing, but ...

When my family moved from Tennessee to northeast Ohio, it was easy for the light-skinned members to disappear into a privileged, middle-class life. All they had to do was hide their accents and “hillbilly” traits, and never acknowledge their nonwhite roots. Even as a kid, I learned to rebuff questions about...

From a young age, we’re taught to admire the women writers who had to take male pen names in order to be published,

The Laziness Lie wants us to believe that the solution to every social problem is casting aside your grievances and getting to work.

The more a person can buff out all their rough edges,

smooth and featureless and “normal-seemin...

“The organization focused on finding low-income youth of color who needed jobs, and then kind of transformed them into highly obedient corporate automatons,”

Kaitlin says the nonprofit trained Black youth to be endlessly polite and uncomplaining. Staff and volunteers policed the kids’ mannerisms and words; anything that made them seem at all “unprofessional” was harshly discouraged.

outrage in check, no matter how much unfairness or raci...

discouraged from wearing traditional jewelry to the office because it’s been deemed too big and “flashy.”

Transgender people like me are often punished for openly being ourselves in the workplace. Even something as simple as using the correct restroom can result in a reprimand or an attack.

Jacob wears a lot of bright, tailored dresses, chunky jewelry, and smart, work-ready heels. If they were a cisgender woman, no one in any office would have a problem with how they look. But because they’re a visibly nonbinary person with facial stubble and body hair, their cute, kicky workplace attire is deemed unacceptable.

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

If we don’t check off each of these boxes, we’re made to feel as if we’ve failed. Of course, we were always going to fail.

Instead of seeing your body as a fundamental part of who you are, you come to see it as a means to an end.

“The diet industry is the only industry I can think of that profits equally whether you succeed or fail,” she says. “If you don’t lose weight, you have to keep trying; if you succeed, they can sell you all these products to help you maintain your weight—because God forbid you ever become fat again.”

It tells us that all bodies are capable of resembling the bodies of the wealthy, white Europeans on whom the beauty standards were based.

a great deal of research shows that repeatedly losing and gaining weight is far worse for a person’s health than maintaining a consistent high weight.

Remember That Your Body Is Not an Object—It’s You

“self-objectification.”

In particularly damaging cases,

a collection of separate parts, all of which have their own perceived flaws,

Interestingly, the Joneses never actually appeared in the comic, though it ran for more than twenty-five years. You never get to see the perfect,

There are optimal times and days to post certain stories if you want to elicit a response, and I feel terrible when I miss those dates.”

Oh my God, this is the most important issue ever in history, and we must sacrifice everything for this cause,” she says. “People said that exact thing ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, about different issues.

When I think about this activism, do I feel excited, or do I feel guilty? If I say no to something or miss an event, do I worry that I’ll be judged by the activist community? How much time can I safely give to this cause every week? Every month? How will I know when I need to reduce my commitments or take a break? What other steps am I taking to make the world a better place?

“I think we don’t know how to grieve as a society,” ze says. “I think a lot of the conversation about activist burnout is actually about grieving, about being really able and willing to just sit in this space

The American Psychological Association issued a massive report on “climate grief” for the first time in 2017, with chapters detailing how fear about the planet’s future is linked to depression and anxiety

in 2018, found that 62 percent of people say they’re worried about climate change—up from around 30 percent back in 2015.38

if my goal is “fixing” a decades-old problem or making it go away, I’m destined to fail and burn out.

Lots of people have been taught to see homeless folks as the epitome of laziness,

When we view homeless, unemployed, or impoverished people as victims of their own “laziness,” our motivation to work backbreakingly hard gets stronger than ever.