Laziness Does Not Exist

People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s inaction and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. 

I suspect that we don’t address the issue as much as we should because people with problems usually make our lives more difficult. In fact, that’s pretty much what we mean by ‘lazy’ – if inaction has no harmful effects, then it is just relaxation. It seems to me, therefore, that ‘laziness’ characterizes a harmful effect, whether on self or others, rather than being a psychological characteristic of a person. Laziness is not a state of mind. It is a harmful effect of any number of different states of mind.

If someone is not doing what is expected of them, whether in work, study, or play, it normally makes our own lives more difficult. In the workplace this is usually pretty obvious: if someone is not working as much as they should, everyone else has to work more in order to compensate. It might not always be so clear cut, though. For instance, a lazy student might sometimes reduce our workload as teachers because we don’t have to mark work that is not submitted, and we don’t have to engage with a student that fails to show up.It affects us deeply because, if a student is failing, we have failed. The fact that they are the ones that receive the ‘F’ is a consequence of a stupid power relationship that institutionally absolves us of virtually all responsibility for our own failure, but the fact remains that a failing student is also a failed student, and no one likes to fail. If we were truly great teachers, none of our students would ever fail, so a student that fails is a clear sign that we are not truly great. Maybe it’s because we are too lazy.

Devon Price, psychology professor since 2012, and according to her she has witnessed many students procrastinating on assignments, papers, skipping presentation , letting due dates fly by, graduate students missing deadlines for applications or taking months to revise a simple dissertation draft or paper draft.

when she sees students being “lazy” she ask herself: What are the situational factors holding this student back? What are the barriers to action that I can’t see? 

For her, it is important that professors see those barriers and recognize them as legitimate. This is the first step to break “lazy” behavior patterns.

She says: “If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple”.

If laziness does not exist, and we are bumping up against barriers, what do we actually address?

Barriers are both systemic and individual. Systemic barriers like racism, classism and ableism are alive and kicking. While we need to collectively address these issues as a society, it’s also important to empower ourselves as much as we can as individuals.

Let’s dig under laziness as it pertains to our day-to-day lives.

Pema Chödrön observes three states underneath what we label as laziness – seeking comfort, loss of heart, and couldn’t care less.

Seeking Comfort:-

Laziness is either rushing from one thing to the other to seek comfort or the typical manifestation of inaction. In either case she says, “we look for oblivion: a life that doesn’t hurt, a refuge from difficulty or self-doubt or edginess.

Loss of Heart:-

Loss of heart is defined by not measuring up. She observes “We tried just being ourselves and we didn’t measure up. The way we are is not okay… We took time off, went on vacation, learned to meditate, studied spiritual teachings, or spent years dedicated to certain political or philosophical views. We don’t even want to move. Our life feels meaningless. Loss of heart is so painful that we become paralyzed.”

Couldn’t Care Less:-

This is the cynic’s laziness. “We feel that we just don’t give a damn anymore. We feel lazy and mean at the same time. We feel mean toward this disappointing and lousy world, and toward this person and that person.

When I was a boy, one of my parents’ most frequent complaints about me was that I was lazy. As an adult, most people think of me as very hard working, often to a fault. It’s pretty clear to me now that my parents had it wrong.

I think what they called lazy actually was that I didn’t show a lot of enthusiasm for the things they thought I should be doing. I’m old enough now to understand that that was the issue, but as a child, I took that into my core and thought of myself as a lazy person. No surprise that I have overcompensated for their judgment most of my life by making sure no one can think I’m lazy!When I was a boy, one of my parents’ most frequent complaints about me was that I was lazy. As an adult, most people think of me as very hard working, often to a fault. It’s pretty clear to me now that my parents had it wrong.

I think what they called lazy actually was that I didn’t show a lot of enthusiasm for the things they thought I should be doing. I’m old enough now to understand that that was the issue, but as a child, I took that into my core and thought of myself as a lazy person. No surprise that I have overcompensated for their judgment most of my life by making sure no one can think I’m lazy!

We generally judge others as lazy when they are not doing what we think they should be doing, like paying their taxes on time, cutting the grass, doing the dishes, or taking out the garbage. It’s understandable that people might judge you as lazy if you don’t do these things—after all, they want you to do them.

When someone says they want to lose weight and then goes back for second helpings, they’re not ready to lose weight yet. They have shamed themselves or been shamed into believing that they should want to lose weight, but their behavior makes it clear that they are not ready to do that yet. People judge others as lazy because they think it’s socially unacceptable to not want to do the things they are supposed to do, so they pretend to want to do the right things, then attribute it to laziness. 

What project are you putting off right now? Is there an important task you could be doing now, but are unnecessarily saving for later?

Voluntarily delaying anything may lead you to believe that you are an inherently lazy worker. But are you truly lazy if the task, project, or undertaking at hand asks that you be detail-oriented or focused? Procrastination isn’t about laziness.

Here’s an example of executive functioning in action: I completed my dissertation in a little over a year. I was able to write my dissertation pretty easily and quickly because I knew that I had to a) compile research on the topic, b) outline the paper, c) schedule regular writing periods, and d) chip away at the paper, section by section, day by day, according to a schedule I had pre-determined.

Nobody had to teach me to slice up tasks like that. And nobody had to force me to adhere to my schedule. Accomplishing tasks like this is consistent with how my analytical, Autistic, hyper-focused brain works. Most people don’t have that ease. They need an external structure to keep them writing — regular writing group meetings with friends, for example — and deadlines set by someone else. When faced with a major, massive project, most people want advice for how to divide it into smaller tasks, and a timeline for completion. In order to track progress, most people require organizational tools, such as a to-do list, calendar, datebook, or syllabus.

Needing or benefiting from such things doesn’t make a person lazy. It just means they have needs. The more we embrace that, the more we can help people thrive.