Laziness Does Not Exist

From social psychologist Dr. Devon Price, a conversational, stirring call to "a better, more human way to live" (Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author) that examines the "laziness lie"--which falsely tells us we are not working or learning hard enough.

Extra-curricular activities. Honors classes. 60-hour work weeks. Side hustles.

Like many Americans, Dr. Devon Price believed that productivity was the best way to measure self-worth. Price was an overachiever from the start, graduating from both college and graduate school early, but that success came at a cost. After Price was diagnosed with a severe case of anemia and heart complications from overexertion, they were forced to examine the darker side of all this productivity.

Laziness Does Not Exist explores the psychological underpinnings of the "laziness lie," including its origins from the Puritans and how it has continued to proliferate as digital work tools have blurred the boundaries between work and life. Using in-depth research, Price explains that people today do far more work than nearly any other humans in history yet most of us often still feel we are not doing enough.

Filled with practical and accessible advice for overcoming society's pressure to do more, and featuring interviews with researchers, consultants, and experiences from real people drowning in too much work, Laziness Does Not Exist "is the book we all need right now" (Caroline Dooner, author of The F*ck It Diet).

ISBN-13: 9781982140113

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Atria Books

Publication Date: 01-04-2022

Pages: 256

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

Dr. Devon Price is a social psychologist and professor at Loyola University of Chicago’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. His work has appeared in Slate, Business Insider, Financial Times, HuffPost, Psychology Today, and on NPR and PBS. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One: The Laziness Lie — CHAPTER ONE — The Laziness Lie
I work in downtown Chicago, just off Michigan Avenue. Every morning, I make my way through throngs of tired commuters and slow-moving tourists, passing at least half a dozen people sitting on street corners asking for change. Many times, I’ve witnessed a suburban-looking parent discouraging their kid from giving money to a nearby homeless person. They say the typical things people say about giving money to homeless folks: they’re just going to spend the money on drugs or alcohol; they’re faking being homeless; if they want to improve their lives, all they need to do is stop being lazy and get a job.

It enrages me to hear people saying these things, because I know surviving as a homeless person is a huge amount of work. When you’re homeless, every day is a struggle to locate a safe, warm, secure bit of shelter. You’re constantly lugging all your possessions and resources around; if you put your stuff down for a second, you run the risk of it getting stolen or thrown out. If you’ve been homeless for more than a few days, you’re probably nursing untreated injuries or struggling with mental or physical illness, or both. You never get a full night’s sleep. You have to spend the entire day begging for enough change to buy a meal, or to pay the fee required to enter a homeless shelter. If you’re on any government benefits, you have to attend regular meetings with caseworkers, doctors, and therapists to prove that you deserve access to health care and food. You’re constantly traumatized, sick, and run ragged. You have to endure people berating you, threatening you, and throwing you out of public spaces for no reason. You’re fighting to survive every single day, and people have the audacity to call you lazy.

I know all of this because I have friends who’ve been homeless. My friend Kim spent a summer living in a Walmart parking lot after a landlord kicked them, their partner, and their two children out of the apartment they all shared. The hardest part of being homeless, Kim told me, was the stigma and judgment. If people didn’t realize Kim was homeless, then they and their kids would be allowed to spend the better part of a day in a McDonald’s, drinking Cokes, charging their phones, and staying out of the oppressive heat. But the second someone realized Kim was homeless, they transformed in people’s minds from a tired but capable parent to an untrustworthy, “lazy” drain on society. It didn’t matter how Kim and their children dressed, how they acted, how much food they bought—once the label of “lazy” was on them, there was no walking it back. They’d be thrown out of the business without hesitation.

Our culture hates the “lazy.” Unfortunately, we have a very expansive definition of what “laziness” is. A drug addict who’s trying to get clean but keeps having relapses? Too lazy to overcome their disorder. An unemployed person with depression who barely has the energy to get out of bed, let alone to apply for a job? They’re lazy too. My friend Kim, who spent every day searching for resources and shelter, worked a full-time job, and still made time to teach their kids math and reading in the back of the broken RV that their family slept in? Clearly a very lazy person, someone who just needed to work harder to bring themselves out of poverty.

The word “lazy” is almost always used with a tone of moral judgment and condemnation. When we call someone “lazy,” we don’t simply mean they lack energy; we’re implying that there’s something terribly wrong or lacking with them, that they deserve all the bad things that come their way as a result. Lazy people don’t work hard enough. They made bad decisions when good ones seemed just as feasible. Lazy people don’t deserve help, patience, or compassion.

It can be comforting (in a sick way) to dismiss people’s suffering like this. If all the homeless people I see on the street are in that position because they’re “lazy,” I don’t have to give them a cent. If every person who’s ever been jailed for drug possession was simply too “lazy” to get a real job, I don’t have to worry about drug policy reform. And if every student who gets bad grades in my classes is simply too “lazy” to study, then I never have to change my teaching methods or offer any extensions on late assignments.

Life, however, is not that simple. The vast majority of homeless people are victims of trauma and abuse;1 most homeless teens are on the street either because homophobic or transphobic parents kicked them out, or the foster system failed them.2 Many chronically unemployed adults have at least one mental illness, and the longer they remain unemployed, the worse their symptoms will generally get and the harder it becomes for employers to consider them as a prospect.3 When a drug addict fails to recover from substance use, they’re typically facing additional challenges such as poverty and trauma, which make drug treatment very complex and difficult.4

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. I’ve noticed this in my professional life as well. Every single time I’ve checked in with a seemingly “lazy” and underperforming student, I’ve discovered that they’re facing massive personal struggles, including mental-health issues, immense work stress, or the demands of caring for a sick child or elderly relative. I once had a student who experienced the death of a parent, followed by the destruction of their house in a natural disaster, then the hospitalization of their depressed daughter, all in one sixteen-week semester. That student still felt bad for missing assignments, despite everything she was going through. She was certain people would accuse her of “faking” all these tragedies, so she carried documentation with her everywhere she went to prove that these things had happened to her. The fear of seeming “lazy” runs that deep.

Why do we view people as lazy when they have so much on their plates? One reason is that most human suffering is invisible to an outside observer. Unless a student tells me that they’re dealing with an anxiety disorder, poverty, or caring for a sick child, I’ll never know. If I don’t have a conversation with the homeless person near my bus stop, I’ll never hear about his traumatic brain injury, and how that affects basic daily tasks like getting dressed in the morning. If I have an underperforming coworker, I have no way of knowing that their low motivation is caused by chronic depression. They might just look apathetic to me, when really they’re running on fumes. When you’ve been alienated by society over and over again, you tend to look totally checked out, even if you’re really busting your ass.

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.

Zee is reentering the job market after years of combating a heroin addiction. He’s been hard at work fighting his addiction in rehabilitation programs, learning life skills in group therapy, and rebuilding his sense of self by doing volunteer work. Yet when potential employers look at Zee’s résumé, all they see is a gap in employment that’s several years wide, which makes it seem like Zee spent all that time doing nothing. Even some of Zee’s family and friends think of those years of recovery as wasted time. We know that drug addiction is a behavioral and mental disorder, and we know that statistically, most people attempt sobriety several times before they succeed. Yet we tend to view people with substance-abuse disorders as if they’re morally responsible for having them, and as if every relapse is a choice they gleefully made.5

This isn’t just true of how we view and judge other people; we also do this to ourselves. Most of us tend to hold ourselves to ridiculously high standards. We feel that we should be doing more, resting less often, and having fewer needs. We think our personal challenges—such as depression, childcare needs, anxiety, trauma, lower back pain, or simply being human—aren’t good enough excuses for having limits and being tired. We expect ourselves to achieve at a superhuman level, and when we fail to do so, we chastise ourselves for being lazy.

We have all been lied to about laziness. Our culture has us convinced that success requires nothing more than willpower, that pushing ourselves to the point of collapse is morally superior to taking it easy. We’ve been taught that any limitation is a sign of laziness, and therefore undeserving of love or comfort. This is the Laziness Lie, and it’s all around us, making us judgmental, stressed, and overextended, all while convincing us that we’re actually doing too little. In order to move past the Laziness Lie, we must confront it and dissect it so we can see the poisonous influence it has exerted on our lives, our belief systems, and how we relate to other people.

The Laziness Lie is a belief system that says hard work is morally superior to relaxation, that people who aren’t productive have less innate value than productive people. It’s an unspoken yet commonly held set of ideas and values. It affects how we work, how we set limits in our relationships, our views on what life is supposed to be about.

The Laziness Lie has three main tenets. They are:

1. Your worth is your productivity.
2. You cannot trust your own feelings and limits.
3. There is always more you could be doing.

How do we get indoctrinated with the Laziness Lie? For the most part, parents don’t sit their kids down and feed them these principles. Instead, people absorb them through years of observation and pattern recognition. When a parent tells their child not to give a homeless person money because that homeless person is too “lazy” to deserve it, the seed of the Laziness Lie is planted in the kid’s brain. When a TV show depicts a disabled person somehow “overcoming” their disability through sheer willpower rather than by receiving the accommodations they deserve, the Laziness Lie grows a bit stronger. And whenever a manager questions or berates an employee for taking a much-needed sick day, the Laziness Lie extends its tendrils even further into a person’s psyche.

We live in a world where hard work is rewarded and having needs and limitations is seen as a source of shame. It’s no wonder so many of us are constantly overexerting ourselves, saying yes out of fear of how we’ll be perceived for saying no. Even if you think you don’t fully agree with the three tenets of the Laziness Lie, you’ve probably absorbed its messages and let those messages affect how you set goals and how you view other people. As I break down each of these statements, consider how deeply they’re ingrained in your psyche, and how they might influence your behavior on a day-to-day basis.

When we talk to children and teenagers about the future, we ask them what they want to do—in other words, what kind of value they want to contribute to society and to an employer. We don’t ask nearly as often what they’re passionate about, or what makes them feel happy or at peace. As adults, we define people by their jobs—he’s an actor, she’s a mortician—categorizing them based on the labor they provide to others. When a formerly productive person becomes less so due to injury, illness, tragedy, or even aging, we often talk about it in hushed, shameful tones, assuming the person has lost a core part of their identity. When we don’t have work to do, it can feel like we don’t have a reason to live.

It makes complete sense, of course, that many of us think and talk in these ways. In our world, a comfortable, safe life is far from guaranteed. People who don’t (or can’t) work tend to suffer; unemployed and impoverished people die at much younger ages than their employed or middle-class peers.6 Since we live in a world that’s structured around work, not working can leave a person socially isolated, exacerbating whatever mental and physical health problems they might be dealing with.7 The stakes of not being productive are dire. As a result, many of us live in a constant state of stress about our financial and professional futures—which means feeling a ton of anxiety about how much we’re working.

Michael is a bartender. He lives in fear that he’s not working enough. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a working-class Italian family that dealt with a lot of dysfunction and mental illness. He carved out a life for himself despite all that, and learned a skill that’s always in demand. Now he can’t say no to a job. When you’re a talented bartender in Chicago, you get asked to cover a lot of people’s shifts. Michael snaps up every job offered to him, hopping from bar to bar all across the city, even if it means getting only a couple of hours of sleep in the wee hours of the morning. It took me weeks to even schedule an interview with him because his schedule was so overfilled.

“My entire life has been burnout,” Michael tells me. “When I owned my own bar, I worked ninety hours a week, every week. I was sleeping on the floor of the men’s bathroom at night. I was booking the events, writing the food menu, writing the cocktail menu, getting orders from our suppliers, and doing the actual bartending. Then the bar went under, and I had to start taking whatever other jobs came my way.”

Michael has always lived this way. As a teenager, he was a ballet dancer. The unforgiving, workaholic world of ballet taught him to fill every waking hour with training and practice, and to ignore any signs that his body was breaking down. He carried that same level of commitment into the adult world, where he’s worked without relent for decades. Even when he travels, he puts out feelers for bartending shifts he can pick up while he’s in town. He’s never known a break. He keeps a meticulous spreadsheet of his hours and earnings, and the figures are mind-boggling.

“I worked three hundred eighty hours this March,” he tells me. For reference, a standard forty-hour workweek adds up to about 160 hours per month.

The consequences of Michael’s compulsive work habits mirrored mine and Max’s in many eerie ways. A few years ago, when the bar Michael owned was failing, stress caused him to start vomiting blood. He also developed a nasty chill that would overtake him every evening, as would happen with me. Yet he kept pushing through his illness, hoping that by working harder, he could save his business.

Those of us who are particularly lucky get to retire after years of living this way. But because we’ve been taught to make work the center of our identities, we don’t know how to handle the change of pace. Retired people often become depressed and see their lives as devoid of purpose.8 Like unemployed people, retired folks often report feeling directionless and lonesome. Their isolation and lack of daily structure can make them sick, putting them at an elevated risk of heart disease.9 Many of us spend our entire adult lives dreading this period of life, or we put it off by continuing to work past the point that’s healthy for us.10

When the coronavirus hit Chicago and all the bars shut down, Michael was immediately overtaken by panic and dread. He had worked nearly every day of his adult life, and with the bars closed, he had no idea what to do with himself or how he would go about making money. So, he set out to open a speakeasy in an empty storefront in the city. He knew a lot of other service-industry folks, and some of them knew which vacated buildings he could sneak into to set up an illegal bar. Many of Michael’s non-service-industry friends were shocked that he would put his life and his friends’ lives at risk in this way, exposing himself and everyone he knew to the virus by opening up shop. Eventually, someone persuaded him to reconsider.

While I was also dismayed by Michael’s speakeasy plan, I understood why it made sense to him. Life had forced him to be self-sufficient, and his only escape from adversity was to work hard without consideration for how much it might hurt him. Work had already made Michael puke blood in the past; from his perspective, risking acute respiratory syndrome didn’t seem all that different.

Two weeks into social distancing, Michael texted me: “I can’t wait to have a damn job again. This is the most time off I’ve had since I was fourteen, and I’m going crazy.”

Lots of us are like Michael, even if our choices don’t always look as extreme. We’re unable to cut back on work, always reflexively taking on new responsibilities out of a compulsive fear that if we don’t, our lives will fall apart. We’ve had to trade our health for our financial or professional well-being, choosing between getting adequate time for rest, exercise, and socializing and logging enough hours to get by. Tragically, many of us do this not out of paranoia but because we know just how economically vulnerable we really are. An international disaster like COVID-19 only convinced Michael he was smart to have overworked as much as he did in the past. If he hadn’t, he would have had an even smaller financial nest egg to survive on.

Chronic overcommitters are experts at ignoring their bodily needs. Our economic system and culture have taught us that having needs makes us weak, and that limits are negotiable. We learn to neglect ourselves and see health as a resource we can trade for money or accomplishments. This brings us to the second tenet of the Laziness Lie: that we cannot trust our own feelings of exhaustion or sickness, and that none of our limitations are acceptable.

Eric Boyd is a successful fiction writer, but he struggles constantly with the fear that he’s going to screw up and lose everything. His fear comes from a very reasonable place: before he became an author, he was in prison. He knows, more intimately than most of us, that the comfort and security his work has brought him could dry up at any moment. As someone with a prison record, he can’t dive into the workforce with the same ease that many of us can. So even though his schedule is filled with speaking engagements, teaching opportunities, and paid writing gigs, Eric keeps signing up to participate in paid clinical trials and other side hustles. He never says no to a writing or performance opportunity, even if it means traveling in the middle of the night from one city to another. He still fears that if he doesn’t keep pushing himself to the limit, he will descend into laziness and never recover.

I’ve talked to dozens and dozens of overworked people, and this fear is one almost all of them share. 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. It may sound like a paradox, but it’s a core part of the Laziness Lie—perhaps the one with the most dangerous consequences.

The Laziness Lie tells us that we’re all at risk of becoming slothful and unaccomplished, and that every sign of weakness is suspect. It has many of us convinced that deep down we’re not the driven, accomplished people we pretend to be. That the only way to overcome our selfish, sluggish instincts is to never listen to our bodies, never give ourselves a break, and never use illness as a reason to slow down.

This aspect of the Laziness Lie teaches us to fear and loathe our own basic needs. Feeling tired? That isn’t a sign that you need sleep; you’re just being lazy. Having trouble focusing on something complicated? It’s not because you’re distracted and overwhelmed, it’s the opposite! You actually need to be taking more on in order to keep yourself sharp! Do you find yourself hating a job you once loved? You’re just being a baby. You need to push yourself harder to overcome how shamefully unmotivated you’re feeling.

When we buy into this belief system, it becomes very difficult to identify our needs and advocate for ourselves. Back in 2014, when I was debilitatingly sick, I found myself doubting my illness at times. I’d wonder if I was somehow making the fevers up in my mind and secretly manipulating my friends and loved ones into feeling sorry for me. Even my doctor doubted I was as sick as I said I was. He made me record my temperature every evening, in a little journal that I brought to his office. We both discovered I’d been running a fever of 103 degrees nearly every evening. Even then, I still felt guilty about being such a bother. I couldn’t understand why willpower wasn’t enough to make me well.

Our bodies and minds have many early alert signals that warn us about oncoming colds, hunger, dehydration, or mental fatigue. If you wake up with a sore throat or a sour taste in your mouth, you can plan ahead, rest up, and nip a virus in the bud. If you find yourself distracted by persistent thoughts of food, it might remind you to grab a snack instead of waiting for full-blown hunger pangs to come.11 And if reading a single page in a book is too mentally taxing, you can take that as a sign that your brain needs to do something more relaxing for a while.

According to the Laziness Lie, however, these are not useful warning signs—they’re deceptions. You don’t need a snack, a cup of tea, or a languid Sunday in bed. Those are just your worst impulses, trying to tempt you into behaving badly. 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.

The Laziness Lie encourages us to aspire to an impossible level of productivity. It sets us up to expect full, eight-hour workdays of unbroken focus, followed by evenings filled with exercise, Instagram-worthy home-cooked meals, and admirable side projects. According to the Laziness Lie, a worthwhile person fills their days in ideal, industrious ways. They don’t skip doctor’s appointments, fail to get their oil checked, or miss days at the gym. If someone lacks the energy to make it to the polls on Election Day because they just finished working a grueling third-shift job, the Laziness Lie says they’re to blame for everything going politically awry in this country. When a part-time student doesn’t have the mental energy to study after caring for her children all day, the Laziness Lie says she isn’t smart enough or virtuous enough to get a college degree.

There’s no limit to what the Laziness Lie will do to persuade us that we need to be doing. Our aspirations can climb and climb, but they’ll never hit the ceiling, because the ceiling doesn’t exist. If you’re a diligent employee, the Laziness Lie will berate you for not volunteering more often, or for not doing enough for your family and friends. If you devote your life to serving other people and meeting their needs, the Laziness Lie will point out that you’re not working out enough, or that your home is a mess. If you win a massive award or hit some other life-changing milestone, the Laziness Lie will smile politely and say, “That’s very nice. But what do you plan to do next?”

We’re all taught to take immense pride in our achievements, but we’re also discouraged from resting on our laurels when we do accomplish something great. No level of success grants a person the social permission to stop and catch their breath. We’re forever left wondering What’s next? What else? The Laziness Lie teaches that the harder you work, the better a person you are, but it never actually defines what an acceptable level of “hard” might look like. By forever moving the goalpost and never actually allowing a person to be vulnerable and have needs, it’s setting us up for failure right from the start.

This past year, my mom suffered a hip injury that would not heal. Instead of resting and attending physical therapy, she kept aggravating the injury by standing all day long at her job as a dental hygienist. She kept dragging herself to work for weeks (which became months) even though it was clear her body couldn’t sustain it.

It got harder for my mom to walk or stand, and she was starting to dread going into the office. Still, she kept putting off retirement. She’d been a dental hygienist for over forty years, she kept reiterating to me; it was who she was, the only job she’d ever done as an adult. So the inevitable kept getting delayed, until my mom’s pain got so intense that she had no choice but to call in sick for every shift she had on the schedule. Instead of being the planned, scheduled affair she wanted it to be, my mom’s retirement became an emergency decision, announced to her coworkers via text message.

The Laziness Lie kept my mom from admitting to herself that it was time to stop working. It keeps many of us from taking the time we need to recoup, or from spending our younger, typically healthier years doing things we genuinely love. 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 what the Laziness Lie has done to us. It has made us terrified of living at a slower, gentler pace.

This understanding of the world has left many of us constitutionally incapable of caring for ourselves, let alone extending full compassion to others. What’s worse, the Laziness Lie is so deeply ingrained in our culture and our values that many of us never think to question it. To fully appreciate its far-reaching impact and how it became so integral to our culture, we have to look back centuries, into the origins of capitalism.

The Laziness Lie is deeply embedded in the very foundation of the United States. The value of hard work and the evils of sloth are baked into our national myths and our shared value system. Thanks to the legacies of imperialism and slavery, as well as the ongoing influence that the United States exerts on its trade partners, the Laziness Lie has managed to spread its tendrils into almost every country and culture on the planet.

The word “lazy” first appeared in English around 1540; even back then, it was used in a judgmental way to mean someone who disliked work or effort.12 Many etymologists believe it came from either the Middle Low German lasich, which meant “feeble” or “weak,”13 or from the Old English lesu, which meant “false” or “evil.”14 These two origins illustrate the odd doublespeak at work whenever we call someone lazy. When we say someone is lazy, we’re saying they’re incapable of completing a task due to (physical or mental) weakness, but we’re also claiming that their lack of ability somehow makes them morally corrupt. It’s not that they’re tired or even dispirited in some way we might sympathize with; the word implies that they’re failures on a fundamental, human level. The idea that lazy people are evil fakers who deserve to suffer has been embedded in the word since the very start.

One of the major factors that caused the Laziness Lie to spread throughout the United States was the arrival of the Puritans. The Puritans had long believed that if a person was a hard worker, it was a sign that God had chosen them for salvation. Hard work was believed to improve who you were as a person. Conversely, if a person couldn’t focus on the task at hand or couldn’t self-motivate, that was a sign that they had already been damned.15 This meant, of course, that there was no need to feel sympathy for people who struggled or failed to meet their responsibilities. By lacking the drive to succeed, they were displaying to the world that God hadn’t chosen them for Heaven. When the Puritans came to colonial America, their ideas caught on and spread to other, less pious colonists.16 For many reasons, a belief system that judged and punished the “lazy” was about to become very popular—and politically useful.

Colonial America relied on the labor of enslaved people and indentured servants.17 It was very important to the colonies’ wealthy and enslaving class that they find a way to motivate enslaved people to work hard, despite the fact that enslaved people had nothing to gain from it.18 One powerful way to do so was through religious teachings and indoctrination. A productivity-obsessed form of Christianity evolved from the older, more Puritanical idea that work improved moral character, and it was pushed on enslaved people. This form of Christianity taught that suffering was morally righteous and that slaves would be rewarded in Heaven for being docile, agreeable, and, most important, diligent.19

On the flip side, if an enslaved person was slothful or “lazy,” there was something fundamentally corrupt and wrong with them.20 Enslavers made it a point to keep enslaved people as busy and exhausted as possible out of fear that idle time would give them the means to revolt or riot.21 Even more disturbing, enslaved people who tried to run away from bondage were seen as mentally ill and suffering from “runaway slave disorder.”22 By not accepting their proper role in society, they were demonstrating that they were broken and disturbed. This worldview became the foundation