laziness isn't real

how engaging in "lazy" behaviour is actually a rebellion against capitalism

Over the last few months, I’ve felt a perpetual sense of laziness take over my body. As a result, I have embedded “being lazy” into my identity, due to an inability to meet the myriad of unreasonable demands that I regularly bestow upon myself.

Due to my current circumstances, I have been grappling a lot with feelings of comparison, judging my accomplishments through the lenses of others’ successes. By current circumstances, I’m referring to my career, which is rather untraditional. One might describe my line of work as “risky” or “naive”, which is essentially throwing things at a wall until they stick (aka being a writer and business owner). I’ve never really followed the traditional path; after University I held a few contract tempt jobs while I travelled and finished my first book, Growing Pains. However, like any early 20-something, I spent that year bombarded by a constant need to prove myself, craving the external validation that success often brings.

Naturally, as those feelings inside me deepened, and I came back from backpacking across Europe broke, with no clue what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be, I found myself surrendering to corporate America after randomly applying to a position on LinkedIn. By a serious stroke of luck, I soon found myself at a desk job with a salary larger than I ever thought I would get, having gone to school for Cinema Studies. Over those next few months I settled into the comfort the position brought, nestling up in the security that a steady paycheque and free coffee inspired. However, in an unfortunate turn of events, I got laid off at the end of last summer, during a period of my life when I was already navigating some heavy emotional turmoil. Thankfully I had some of my freelance clients to fall back on and slowly signed more clients, building up a roster that allowed me to pay my rent and bills without worries. It was also around the same time that See You Next Tuesday started taking off.

Now why am I telling you all this? I say this to paint the picture that on an external level, one would assume that I am constantly busy, an overachiever with a taste for success. Yet, most days I’m uneasy with contempt for my seemingly uncontrollable thirst for laziness. But what is laziness, how do we define it and why does it seem like the worst possible thing a person can be?

Although there is a definition for the word laziness (: disinclined to activity or exertion), Dr. Rebecca Stafford states that “there is no legitimate psychological construct known as laziness… most people erroneously believe that procrastination is caused by laziness and, furthermore, that laziness is a hard-wired personality trait. However, even if laziness did exist, it only describes a set of behaviors - the symptoms. It doesn’t describe or explain the cause of so-called laziness.” Psychiatrist Neel Burton provides an evolutionary interpretation for laziness, “today, mere survival has fallen off the agenda, and, with ever-increasing life expectancies, it is long-term strategizing and effort-making that leads to the best outcomes, Yet, our instinct, which has not caught up, is still for conserving energy, making us reluctant to expend effort on abstract projects with distant and uncertain payoffs.”

In his book Laziness Does Not Exist, Dr. Devon Price explores how the way we commonly view laziness doesn’t exist, arguing instead that the behaviours we typically label as lazy are reasonable responses to various circumstances. These circumstances may be related to burnout, mismatched workplace expectations, undiagnosed disabilities, mental health issues, and/or societal pressures. Similarly, Christine Jeske in her book, The Laziness Myth looks at how the label of laziness is often unfairly applied to individuals based on biased assessments of worth and productivity, contending that these narratives ignore the complex socio-economic and psychological factors that influence people's work lives.

This juxtaposition between societal expectations and a biological reluctance to expend energy, suggests that laziness is both a physical and mental inertia that feeds into how we position laziness as reserved for weak, unsuccessful people. We use laziness as an excuse to outcast those who are not “carrying their weight in society”.

Being classified as lazy (whether it’s a label we give ourselves or one that’s hurled at us as an insult), feels inherently shameful, especially as we navigate modern-day society and its constant influx of information, opportunities, and experiences. This power struggle has been perpetuated further by the internet and our inability to escape being plugged in. Situational constraints and mainstream ideologies are typically the best predictors we have for individual behaviours; they are far more accurate than personality, intelligence, capability, and individual-level traits. It’s also important to highlight that we’re the first generation to be submerged into a world that’s full of never-ending demands, a world that looks down upon and actively shames laziness. In fact, laziness is just an overused criticism or character judgment we bestow upon ourselves (or others) when we feel like we aren’t doing what we’re supposed to be doing.

But what are we supposed to be doing?

Influenced by capitalism and the American dream (a mentality not confined to the borders of the United States but one that bleeds into the overarching mentality and ideologies we prioritise on a mass scale across North America), we are hard-wired to respond to moments of relaxation with stress, worried that if we don’t spend every waking moment alive being productive we’ve failed. We exist in an unprecedented time in society, somewhere between the post-industrial era and before the complete autonomous immersion of Artificial Intelligence: a neoliberal era that prioritises hyper-productivity over health, community, and general well-being. We’ve become so immersed in these particular sets of behaviours and their corresponding ideologies that it seems impossible to break free from the constraints that capitalism enforces on us all.

In an interview for Protean Magazine, Dr. Devon Price breaks down how our belief systems have influenced our view on laziness, saying that “a bunch of latent beliefs are really deeply embedded in our culture and date back centuries—beliefs that are really infused in how our educational system works, how we approach the workplace, how people think about a lot of societal issues such as unemployment, homelessness, and so on.”  He says our response to laziness has three main tenets, “the first is that your worth is defined by your productivity. The second is that you can’t really trust any needs and limitations that you feel in yourself—because those are just threats to your productivity that you’re supposed to ignore and push through. And then the last one is that there is always more that you could be doing.”

This idea of laziness hits especially hard for 20-somethings, as we struggle to navigate a society that’s breaking down right before our very eyes. There’s an endless litany of things we feel we must do and achieve, so much so that we actually feel like we’re never doing enough. We condemn ourselves for being lazy, viewing self-indulgence as a criminal offence that deserves judgement. However, our desire to conserve energy, relax, and simply unplug from the never-ending influx of everything all the time, that the digital era has normalized in our lives, is just a biological response to the demands of hyper-productivity. Really, it’s human nature to want to slow down; a by-product of obtuse evolution in a world that’s developing quicker than we can keep up.

Laziness isn’t real. It’s not a character trait we can bestow on ourselves, or use as an explanation for someone’s success, or lack thereof. Rather, it’s a fallacy used to critique individuals who don’t live up to the modern-day expectations imposed on us all. In a world that continues to scale at an alarmingly quick rate, the demands of the average individual continue to scale up with it, with no regard for the consequences of pushing people past the limits of their autonomy. To engage in “lazy behaviour” then, is counter-culture: an insult that actually should garner you some respect, because to step away, even for an hour, means to rebel against the unrealistic expectations imposed on us by a capitalist society.