Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

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 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.

The solution is to cut way back on expectations for a while. Overextended people have to find space in their lives to sleep, power down their stressed-out minds, and recharge their mental and emotional batteries. You can wait until you reach a breaking point like Max and I did, or you can prevent illness and burnout by being gentle with yourself before it’s too late.

“Wasting time” is a basic human need. Once we accept that, we can stop fearing our inner “laziness” and begin to build healthy, happy, well-balanced lives.

Whenever I talk to Julie and Rich, I can’t help but notice how comfortable, candid, and downright silly they are with each other. 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. I

how resting, quitting things, cutting corners, and all the other actions we typically write off as “laziness” can actually help us heal and grow. A great deal of research actually supports the notion that our lazy feelings are protective and instructive, and that our lives can improve a great deal when we decide to stop judging our desire for idle, “lazy” time and start trusting those feelings instead.

This research became the basis of Pennebaker’s landmark book Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma & Emotional Upheaval

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?

The Laziness Lie tries to tell us that we must earn our right to be loved, or to even have a place in society, by putting our noses to the grindstone and doing a ton of hard work. The Lie also implies that our intuition cannot be trusted; our cravings for rest must be ignored, our urges for pleasure, tenderness, and love must be written off as signs of weakness.

Failure] quietly loses,” Halberstam writes, “and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”26 In other words, when we fail, we become free to choose what we want our actual goals and priorities to be, rather than following the expectations of others. The Laziness Lie wants us to keep being productive in areas where we’re skilled—so when we choose to stick with an activity we’re horrible at, we’re able to make a choice motivated by genuine love rather than by the external pressure to succeed.

I’m not in the same line of work as he is, and I don’t want to emulate his career path myself, but his victories remind me that I can be my own best, weird self and make a place for myself in the world.

Fighting the Laziness Lie, after all, isn’t about abandoning all goals. It’s about connecting with the goals that truly light a fire inside us—and pursuing them in a healthy way.