You Aren't Lazy. You Just Need To Slow Down

[GuideToACrazyWorld]

A surprising influence helped author Devon Price understand what's wrong with closely associating our worth with our work. A pet chinchilla, Dumptruck. "He's never been productive in his life," Price says. The social psychologist and author of Laziness Does Not Exist says Dumptruck is pretty much the opposite of productive, and frankly, rather destructive.

"I would never look at him and think of his life in terms of has he justified his right to exist? He's not paying rent. He's not performing any service. And it would be absurd to even think about his life in those terms," they say.

A pet chinchilla, Dumptruck, helped Devon Price realize that you don't have to be productive to earn the right to exist.
Devon Price

"So I think animals help us remember that we shouldn't have to earn our right to exist. We're fine and beautiful and completely lovable when we're just sitting on the couch just breathing. And if we can feel that way about animals that we love and about, you know, relatives that we love, people in our lives who we never judged by their productive capacity, then we can start thinking of ourselves that way, too."

Price says the idea of laziness has been effectively and expertly wielded to make people feel unproductive and unworthy. They call it a lie, and a trap that makes us believe there's always more we could be doing — at work, in our relationships, at home — and that worth is productivity. Instead of viewing "laziness" as a deficit or something we need to fix or overcome with caffeine or longer work hours, Price says to think of laziness as a sign you probably need a break instead.
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"Laziness is usually a warning sign from our bodies and our minds that something is not working," Price says. "The human body is so incredible at signaling when it needs something. But we have all learned to ignore those signals as much as possible because they're a threat to our productivity and our focus at work."

That achievement mindset might actually be hurting you. And rethinking "laziness" can lead to more compassion.

Price spoke with NPR's Life Kit about the problem with emphasizing "hard work" over our own health, the people who are often labeled as lazy and the positive impacts laziness can have in our lives.

Price is a social psychologist, a professor at Loyola University of Chicago's School of Continuing and Professional Studies and the author of Laziness Does Not Exist.
Left: Atria Books; right: Collin Quinn Rice

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
Why overemphasizing "hard work" is problematic

We live in a reality where people do accurately recognize that that we live and die by our ability to work. And so there's this self-defeating but also really rational quality to our compulsive overwork that a lot of us have. It becomes really self-defeating to say, "I'm in this on my own. I need to work really hard and make a lot of money so that I can take care of myself." Because when you think that way, you also take on a much gloomier view of other people. Anyone else and their needs is kind of a threat to my own kind of rugged individualism and independence. So it keeps us really isolated. It keeps us judging our co-workers for not pulling their own weight because we're suffering so hard. [It] can kind of create this downward spiral of just workaholism and isolation.


People who are dealing with any kind of anxiety, ADHD, depression, any kind of mental health struggle, those are people who tend to have been called lazy throughout their lives. Any time they're out of energy or just having trouble getting through a really overwhelming moment or day, people can't see that internal struggle. They just judge it as them lacking willpower or being lazy.
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Marginalized people, especially people of color, tend to be branded as lazy a lot in a lot of really insidious ways. There's a way in which learned helplessness is really just accurately recognizing that you're in a really difficult situation where people aren't giving you freedom and autonomy and not really respecting you or letting you feel heard. So a lot of times we call people lazy when they're just kind of checking out of a really unfair situation or really unmotivated situation.
How laziness actually helps us define our values and see ourselves more clearly

I think laziness really is this canary in a coal mine kind of emotion that tells us when our values are out of step with our actual lives. A lot of times we pour so much energy into being impressive at work, satisfying all the demands of our friends and family and just trying to overachieve in every possible way that we don't really listen to that inner voice that tells us, "Here's what matters most to me in my life. Here's what I really believe in and value. And here's how I really would live if I wasn't just setting out to satisfy other people."


I think when we start listening to laziness, we can really question a lot of unfair social standards like fat phobia. This social standard says that our bodies need to look a certain way and that we need to exercise and cook meals that look a particular way. And it's just all of this drive towards meeting a really arbitrary standard of perfection. When we stop pushing ourselves to kind of overachieve by this completely arbitrary metric, we can say, "OK, what actually feels good for my body? How do I actually want to spend my time?"
How to fight overwork and over-identifying "hard work" with our worth

I do have this exercise in the book, but you can also get it online. It's just called the values clarification exercise, and it's something that a lot of therapists give out where it's just a list of different values that a person might have. You're asked to rank order them. It can be things like achievement, family, connection, humility, care for other people. If you have to choose three of these values off of this really long list, what are the three that you're going to choose? Because you can't actually fulfill all of them equally all of the time. Once you have a sense of what really matters most to you in your life ... then you can look at how your actual life is out of step.


Most of us don't have that ultimate freedom to walk away from things that are exhausting to us and just work at a much slower pace. Unlearning the hatred of laziness isn't another thing to beat yourself up for not doing correctly, because most of us are in a situation where our freedom and our choice is pretty restricted. If you're in a workplace where you aren't kind of trusted to self-motivate and you aren't given the room to set limits, you are really in a coercive environment that's going to keep running you down. A lot of times it comes down to looking into things like unionizing, documenting problems as they occur, demonstrating how when one person leaves the company, all of their work is just dumped onto someone else instead of replacing them.

[GuideToACrazyWorld]

One of the many great gifts the Puritans gave us. The idea that working yourself to misery somehow brings you closer to God. Even though it's been adopted as part of our secular culture the roots are very much religious.

This was timely to me. I'm in the middle of a mid life crisis. Not the cliche, buy a sports car and cheat on my wife with a 20 year old kind, but the I can't find any satisfaction at work and find myself wondering if this is all there is to life. There have been a lot of changes in the last year and its understandable. It does make pushing through tough some days.

[Slip Shod]

Life has a pace. Look around, non-stop almost robotic ants to a tree-hugging sloth. So what's the meaning of lazy here ? And we all have our own pace as well. Fast get it done vs. slower and steady. Whatever floats your boat

[Tarmaque]

I make no bones about it: I'm a lazy fuck and I own that.

I've worked a grand total of two days this week.

I'm not proud...

Or tired.

[Mike]

most of us are in a situation where our freedom and our choice is pretty restricted.

Hmmm. I wonder if that powerlessness to change circumstance, to change what we have inherited, might have effect on something other than workaholic-ism.

[GuideToACrazyWorld]

Hmmm. I wonder if that powerlessness to change circumstance, to change what we have inherited, might have effect on something other than workaholic-ism.

The importance of inheritance is grossly over exaggerated. There was a study a few years back and they found that 79% of the millionaires they surveyed received 0$ in inheritance. Only 3% received $1,000,000 or more in inheritance.

https://cdn.ramseysolutions.net/media/c ... 1632846864

[Mike]

Millionaires? Aside from the fact that I was not addressing dollars when I spoke of “what we have inherited”, a million dollars is a useless gauge nowadays. Consider this: if your entire estate - house, insurance, savings, portfolio - was $200K back in 1962, you were nowhere near a millionaire. You were doing fairly well, but you were far short of millionaire.

Some financial math: with inflation averaging three percent annually, a million today is equal to $200K in 1962.

So if you’re wondering why 79% of millionaires today received 0$ in inheritance, it’s because that would be expected. It was not required to receive an inheritance to have accumulated $200K in total assets by retirement age in 1962…. and one need not receive an inheritance today. I’m nowhere near retirement. I have gotten no inheritances, and I’m well beyond that inflation-adjusted threshold.

The Ramsey ‘Solutions’ data/analysis is garbage

[Z is for Zangie]

Good piece, that was interesting, I suffer from this all the time, and it has amplified during not working for a year...I feel pretty useless and the guilt is killing me, which makes me less likely to do anything at all that I don't have to.

But, killing myself to look good to other people is pretty dumb...

[Randi]

I make no bones about it: I'm a lazy fuck and I own that.

I've worked a grand total of two days this week.

I'm not proud...

Or tired.

Give yourself some grace Doug
You are dealing with your Mom’s condition as well as having health issues yourself
You are doing everything you can

[Randi]

That article resonated with me
As a kid, if I did something I found enjoyable instead of the exact thing, at the exact moment the adults around me wanted to do, I was lazy. I realize that’s the way they were brought up, that their lives had been incredibly difficult. At one point they all faced near starvation. But when I wanted to learn to play tennis one summer, all hell broke lose I got to go to a few lessons before the fight just wasn’t worth the aggravation
Too many times I’ve chosen working for money, over my personal relationships. I defend this by saying I had bills to pay but now I wish I had spent more time with Harry than at work. I thought we would have more tine. He was only 67

[Slip Shod]

I make no bones about it: I'm a lazy fuck and I own that.

I've worked a grand total of two days this week.

I'm not proud...

Or tired.

It's your call, but a redeeming quality about you that I appreciate is that you're forthright ✔

[Tarmaque]

It's your call, but a redeeming quality about you that I appreciate is that you're forthright ✔

“Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?”
-Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai! 1959

[Tarmaque]

Give yourself some grace Doug
You are dealing with your Mom’s condition as well as having health issues yourself
You are doing everything you can

Sure, but I'm also a lazy bastard. Some things you gotta do, but they don't necessarily define you.

[Mike]

It's your call, but a redeeming quality about you that I appreciate is that you're forthright ✔

“Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?”
-Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai! 1959

Because. That’s why.

[Tarmaque]

It's your call, but a redeeming quality about you that I appreciate is that you're forthright ✔

“Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?”
-Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai! 1959

Because. That’s why.

"Sure, I'm a crazed genocidic meth addict with delusions of godhood and only one testicle, but I brought Germany out of a terrible economic recession. That's got to excuse some personal vices, right?"
— A. Hitler

[Z is for Zangie]

That article resonated with me
As a kid, if I did something I found enjoyable instead of the exact thing, at the exact moment the adults around me wanted to do, I was lazy. I realize that’s the way they were brought up, that their lives had been incredibly difficult. At one point they all faced near starvation. But when I wanted to learn to play tennis one summer, all hell broke lose I got to go to a few lessons before the fight just wasn’t worth the aggravation
Too many times I’ve chosen working for money, over my personal relationships. I defend this by saying I had bills to pay but now I wish I had spent more time with Harry than at work. I thought we would have more tine. He was only 67

yeah, me too...it was a work ethic thing drummed into me and I always felt guilty when I wanted to do something fun or that interested me...I have mostly as I have gotten older done what I wanted, but still notice other people's opinions of this...work isn't everything, and if you work at something you like, but, it isn't a passion, it is because you need to pay bills, but, it doesn't define you...though, I know that once employed again, my view of myself will tick back up...