Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

Clarify confusing passages and unfamiliar terms.

Question the author’s assumptions and point of view.

Predict what will come next.

Connect the writing to things you already know.

Evaluate the qualities of the writing.

As Gibson writes, “Covering up your deepest needs prevents genuine connection with others.”

The Laziness Lie actively encourages this painful self-erasure by teaching us that our value is defined by what we can do for other people.

Emotional overexertion can be just as damaging as professional overwork.

Sharon Glassburn helps her clients work through these decisions using a worksheet on values clarification:

a process in which a person examines their choices and actions and asks whether those choices line up with the ideals that matter most to them.

How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People, the psychologist Albert J. Bernstein

In our deeply victim-blaming, Laziness-Lie-loving culture, marginalized people are often told that they must solve the problem of their own oppression.

The very concept of what counts as “professional” behavior is rooted in the desire for social control.

In our culture, lots of people are told that honest expression of their selfhood is distracting or unprofessional.

Disabled people are discouraged from asking for accommodations because it might make them seem “weak” or “lazy.”

The Laziness Lie demands perfection, and it defines perfection in very rigid, arbitrary ways:

But we don’t have to measure ourselves against these unfair yardsticks.

The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” comes from the title of a comic strip by Arthur “Pop” Momand, first published in 1913 in the New York World.

The Laziness Lie teaches us that people who do more are worth more. When we buy into that method of assigning value to people, we doom ourselves to a life of insecurity and judgment.

The remedy for all of this is boundless compassion.

Curiosity about a person’s context helps us to be understanding when their actions strike us as ineffective or bad, and that’s a great place to start. But it’s even more radically compassionate to stop labeling behaviors as “bad” at all.

The Laziness Lie is rooted in capitalism and a particularly harsh breed of Christianity, and it preaches that salvation comes from hard work.

The Laziness Lie pushes us into unfettered, frantic individualism, leaving no room for reflection, listening, or quiet, inward growth.

a quote often attributed to Irish statesman Edmund Burke

never appears to have said it.3

Burke’s actual words are far less individualistic: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”4

it’s a call for good people to band together and stand firm against the evil forces attacking them.

it praises community.

Sometimes, the best thing good people can do is hunker down, care for one another, and survive.

I’ve sometimes counteracted the (fake) Burke quote by telling people that all that’s needed for harm to persist in the world is for evil people to think they’re doing good.

Here are some indications that you may still be associating productivity with goodness: When you get less done during the day than you anticipated, you feel guilty.

You’ll never be perfect, and that’s okay. You’re fine exactly the way you are. So is everyone else.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,