Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

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.

I also discovered the immense relief that comes when we cease tying our self-image to how many items we check off our to-do lists.

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.

The people we’ve been taught to judge for “not trying hard enough” are almost invariably the people fighting valiantly against the greatest number of unseen barriers and challenges.

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 people who log the most hours, who run themselves the most ragged, who say yes far more often than is actually sustainable for them are the ones who most suspect that they’re “lazy.” They seem plagued by the fear that deep down they’re selfish, needy, and unmotivated.

The Laziness Lie encourages you to ignore your body’s warnings, push through discomfort, and ask for as few accommodations as possible. And at the end of all that struggle and self-denial, there’s no reward. You never actually earn the right to take it easy, because the Laziness Lie also teaches you that you can never, ever do enough.

So many of my friends and loved ones are hurting themselves in similar ways, leaving their health, relationships, and years of their lives as offerings at the altar of hard work.

“This is totally a cliché,” she says, “but I do yoga, and every time I’m in a balance pose, I think about how much work balance is. It’s constant attention, and you have to keep shifting to find it.”

She can’t prioritize everyone else’s needs above her own. If she wants to thrive, she has to give some things up. She’s learned not to feel guilt over every opportunity she walks away from or every obligation she says no to.

That is an incredibly difficult lesson to learn. In a world that equates laziness with evil, saying no is often deemed unacceptable. Our culture looks down on people who quit things. Rather than encouraging their good judgment and self-respect, we perceive them as weak-willed or dishonest. 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? Can we see a person as impressive for admitting that they no longer want to carry something they’ve been shouldering for too long? Many of us never learned how to surrender, even when we desperately need to. We’ve been browbeaten into saying yes for so long that we don’t know what a confident no feels like.

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.3

So why are depressed people so “lazy”? The first thing to realize is that fighting depression is a full-time job. Depressed people sleep a lot because their brains get tired from fighting negative thoughts and feelings all day.6 Depressed people also have lower quality of sleep, meaning they get less energy from eight hours of rest than a nondepressed person does. When you’re severely depressed—particularly if you’re suicidal—sleep can be the only escape from misery you have. In a very real way, the apparent “laziness” of depressed people is a sign that their bodies and minds are protecting them and working to help them heal.

Procrastinators often get caught in a cycle of perfectionism, anxiety, distraction, and failure. Because they care a great deal about doing well, they hold themselves to an impossibly high standard. They want to do “perfect” work, but their early attempts are far from perfect, so they get discouraged and anxious. As time passes and the deadline approaches, they become even more nervous and concerned about failure. That fear makes it even harder to focus and make progress. To cope with their feelings of anxiety, they distract themselves in any way they can. And then, when the deadline finally arrives, the procrastinator must choose between submitting quickly thrown-together work that isn’t very good or giving up entirely.

Marvin discovered studies showing that cyberloafing helps work teams to function better, and that employees who cyberloaf come up with more unique solutions to work problems.26 It turns out that slacking can actually help you be creative and reflective.

The seemingly “bad” behaviors we tend to judge as laziness are really powerful signals that something in our lives needs to change. On the organizational level, patterns of employee laziness can tell us a workplace is being mismanaged. One workplace productivity expert I spoke to, industrial-organizational psychologist Dr. Annette Towler, told me that when employees are bullied or mismanaged, they often cope with it through subtle signs of “laziness,” such as increased absenteeism.

“That’s one of the early, subtle signs that a workplace is toxic,” she told me. “You see a lot of employees just not coming in to work, with no explanation or cause. Managers look at that and they think, Oh, everyone is being so lazy, or so unreliable—but often it’s that they’re trying to avoid an abusive or toxic environment.”

When we’re able to rest and be lazy, we can learn new things about ourselves, or have fantastic insights that would never have occurred to us when we were focused on work. Psychologists who study creativity are often very interested in these big “aha” moments and have put a lot of effort into studying what a person can do to promote them.

“It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life, perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life, came to me on vacation,” Miranda told an interviewer in 2018. “The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, Hamilton walked into it.”33

Expressive writing seems to work because it gives us the opportunity to locate and listen to the vulnerable side of ourselves that we spend all day silencing.

All this research makes it abundantly clear that the more we work, the less we’re able accomplish—and the less unique and meaningful our work becomes. An overly long, excessively demanding workday erodes a person’s capacity to think well, to care about what they’re doing, and to produce meaningful results. And that’s just what happens to the employee’s output.

Put this way, burnout is not just a labor issue, it’s a public health issue. Overwork strips many of us of our health, our cognitive capacity, and even our passion for life. It makes us less productive and wreaks destruction in our personal and professional lives. In its most extreme cases, it can take years off our life expectancy, or cause us to drop dead at our desks. Yet so many of us are still beguiled and tricked by the Laziness Lie and think burned-out people just need to buck up and try harder.

Wild Mind Collective,

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?

Advocate for Your Autonomy Focus on Quality, Not Hours Spent at Work Break the Work-Life Interference Loop

When workers are truly invested in the duties they take on, they work harder and deliver consistent, high-quality results. It turns out that trusting employees to get things done is vastly more beneficial than trying to police people’s work habits or forcing them to put in long hours.

“When people feel autonomy, when they feel like they’re accomplishing something, that gives them a sense of control over their work, and it leads to higher job satisfaction. And generally, what’s good for an employee’s well-being is good for the quality of their output and productivity.”

“Isn’t writing your book more important to you, in terms of your long-term goals and where you want to be in your life?” he asked. “Would you rather have this book be the best thing it can be, or would you rather be caught up on every single random e-mail every day?”

Sending dozens of e-mails every morning made me feel productive, but it was a big drain on my time, and reduced the energy I had available to do thoughtful, quality work on my book. So, I completely reversed my schedule. I put writing time at the top of my day, when I typically have the most energy. I still reply to my colleagues and students eventually, but instead of trying to chip away at every single thing on my digital to-do list, I focus more on doing what matters most—writing—and doing it well. Sometimes, doing a job well means letting other responsibilities drop, at least for a little while.

restorative idleness,

By convincing us that we’re lazy and not earning our keep, it pushes us into a constant state of feeling apologetic and paranoid. It’s nearly impossible to negotiate for better treatment when we’re trapped in a scarcity mindset. Often we need a big wake-up call to realize that we do actually have the skills and drive needed to succeed somewhere that’s less punishing.

While the show (and its fans) celebrate Leslie for being a feminist icon, part of me sees her as a spokesperson for the Laziness Lie. She accomplishes great things, yes, but she does so by disrespecting her body’s needs and ignoring the boundaries of her friends. Sadly, the show consistently rewards her for this success-obsessed behavior. There’s never a moment when she has to learn to take things easy, or when she develops an interest in activities outside of work.

The Laziness Lie has infected so much more than our careers. It has taught us to chase accomplishment in every imaginable realm, even those meant to be relaxing and nonproductive. In the process, it has sapped the joy and leisure out of even the most pleasant and nourishing of activities.

about what’s to come.” If you’ve been taught all your life to focus on accomplishments and to worry about the future, it will be hard to adopt these mental habits at first. But as Fred keeps reassuring me, very few people are naturally good at them. Most savorers got that way over time, by training themselves to focus on drinking in the positives. “It’s similar to musical talent,” he tells me. “Sure, some people naturally have a good ear, but everyone who plays an instrument has to practice. Savoring is the same. You have to work at it. And then you can get better at it.”

Visit a new city, with no agenda but to explore it. Take a new route to work or walk down unfamiliar side streets in your neighborhood. Study a subject you know absolutely nothing about. Look closely at an object and consider how many people were involved in creating it and getting it to where it is now. Attend a festival, meetup, or workshop for people who are passionate about an activity you know nothing about. Try to appreciate an art form you’ve never spent much time with before (poetry, short film, sculpture, dance, mash-up music, etc.). Ask a friend or coworker to tell you about a subject that excites them. Really listen, and try to learn something from them.

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.

The volume of unique information the average person encounters in a day is approximately five times what the average person encountered in 1986.7

“I have to strike a balance between affirming that there are situations that a client can’t control and problems that are systemic,” Sharon says, “and helping them look to the factors that they can control. Because constantly focusing on massive injustice that you can’t change is very unempowering.”

In fact, a loss of agency is one of the primary dangers of information overload.

I do a lot to fight transphobia and educate the benignly ignorant. I don’t have to fight online with people who wish I didn’t exist.

It’s not “lazy” to draw limits on the amount and type of information we consume. Doing so is actually an essential public service.

We need social connections and community in order to thrive, yet many of us live in such deep fear of disappointing other people that we compromise our own values and abandon our well-being in the process. 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.

The Laziness Lie has fundamentally warped our sense of boundaries, making many of us believe that other people’s problems are ours to solve. It tells us that if we care for someone, we have to suffer to help them. Unfortunately, we can’t actually fix another person’s problems. So, we end up frustrated and run-down, realizing we’ve been pouring energy into helping someone who can’t (or won’t) meet us halfway.

Stop Rewarding Inappropriate Behavior In his book How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People, the psychologist Albert J. Bernstein discusses how providing tons of mental-health support to demanding friends can create a self-defeating feedback loop. 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. Instead of using their own resources and problem-solving abilities to address their problems, they may begin to feel that they need you to fix things for them. “The things that make people feel better the quickest,” Bernstein writes, “usually make them do worse.”22

These ideals exist to set our priorities for us and to keep us busy, distracted, and feeling apologetic about our needs. But we don’t have to measure ourselves against these unfair yardsticks. If we take a step back and really reflect on all of the things society tells us we “should” be doing, we may find that many of them don’t line up with who we are at all. We shouldn’t have to struggle to make ourselves palatable, understandable, and small. Resisting these “shoulds” makes us strong, not lazy.

Now when I decide to fight for a cause, I ask myself a few quick gut-check questions about it: 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? When I reflect on these questions, I’m better able to make a reasoned decision about how much work I can afford to put in. Instead of seeing every single social issue as a blazing fire that I must personally snuff out, I can view activism as a regular, healthy habit, like exercise. I can’t do everything, but I can help chip away at big problems by doing my own small part.

Though society can take steps to reduce carbon emissions and slow the damage that’s occurring, there’s some harm that can never be undone. “The Amazon is burning. So many animals have gone extinct because of climate change,” ze says. “And there’s always, I think, this natural impulse to make sense of it all. Like, What are the ways in which you can take action? Like, you sign some petitions? Can you commit to not using plastic? And we can talk about those steps. But let’s start with the grief. Let’s start with the fact that even if I cut out all plastic from my life, that doesn’t take away all the plastic in the ocean.”

When we treat social problems as emergencies that we must fix, we delude ourselves into thinking that we can control them, if we only work hard enough.

Lots of people have been taught to see homeless folks as the epitome of laziness, and to believe that laziness is the root cause of homeless people’s suffering. This tendency to blame people for their own pain is comforting, in a twisted way: it allows us to close up our hearts and ignore the suffering of others. This same tendency also keeps us running endlessly on the hamster wheel of hyperproductivity.