â CHAPTER ONE â 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, Iâve 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: theyâre just going to spend the money on drugs or alcohol; theyâre 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 youâre homeless, every day is a struggle to locate a safe, warm, secure bit of shelter. Youâre 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 youâve been homeless for more than a few days, youâre probably nursing untreated injuries or struggling with mental or physical illness, or both. You never get a full nightâs 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 youâre 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. Youâre 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. Youâre fighting to survive every single day, and people have the audacity to call you lazy.
I know all of this because I have friends whoâve 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 didnât realize Kim was homeless, then they and their kids would be allowed to spend the better part of a day in a McDonaldâs, drinking Cokes, charging their phones, and staying out of the oppressive heat. But the second someone realized Kim was homeless, they transformed in peopleâs minds from a tired but capable parent to an untrustworthy, âlazyâ drain on society. It didnât matter how Kim and their children dressed, how they acted, how much food they boughtâonce the label of âlazyâ was on them, there was no walking it back. Theyâd be thrown out of the business without hesitation.
Our culture hates the âlazy.â Unfortunately, we have a very expansive definition of what âlazinessâ is. A drug addict whoâs 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? Theyâre 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 âlazyâ is almost always used with a tone of moral judgment and condemnation. When we call someone âlazy,â we donât simply mean they lack energy; weâre implying that thereâs something terribly wrong or lacking with them, that they deserve all the bad things that come their way as a result. Lazy people donât work hard enough. They made bad decisions when good ones seemed just as feasible. Lazy people donât deserve help, patience, or compassion.
It can be comforting (in a sick way) to dismiss peopleâs suffering like this. If all the homeless people I see on the street are in that position because theyâre âlazy,â I donât have to give them a cent. If every person whoâs ever been jailed for drug possession was simply too âlazyâ to get a real job, I donât have to worry about drug policy reform. And if every student who gets bad grades in my classes is simply too âlazyâ 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, theyâre typically facing additional challenges such as poverty and trauma, which make drug treatment very complex and difficult.4
The people weâve been taught to judge for ânot trying hard enoughâ are almost invariably the people fighting valiantly against the greatest number of unseen barriers and challenges. Iâve noticed this in my professional life as well. Every single time Iâve checked in with a seemingly âlazyâ and underperforming student, Iâve discovered that theyâre 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 âfakingâ 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 âlazyâ 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 theyâre dealing with an anxiety disorder, poverty, or caring for a sick child, Iâll never know. If I donât have a conversation with the homeless person near my bus stop, Iâll 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 theyâre running on fumes. When youâve been alienated by society over and over again, you tend to look totally checked out, even if youâre really busting your ass.
The people we dismiss as âlazyâ are often individuals whoâve been pushed to their absolute limits. Theyâre dealing with immense loads of baggage and stress, and theyâre working very hard. But because the demands placed on them exceed their available resources, it can look to us like theyâre doing nothing at all. Weâre also taught to view peopleâs personal challenges as unacceptable excuses.
Zee is reentering the job market after years of combating a heroin addiction. Heâs 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 Zeeâs rĂ©sumĂ©, all they see is a gap in employment thatâs several years wide, which makes it seem like Zee spent all that time doing nothing. Even some of Zeeâs 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 theyâre morally responsible for having them, and as if every relapse is a choice they gleefully made.5
This isnât 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 challengesâsuch as depression, childcare needs, anxiety, trauma, lower back pain, or simply being humanâarenât 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. Weâve been taught that any limitation is a sign of laziness, and therefore undeserving of love or comfort. This is the Laziness Lie, and itâs all around us, making us judgmental, stressed, and overextended, all while convincing us that weâre 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.
What Is the Laziness Lie?
The Laziness Lie is a belief system that says hard work is morally superior to relaxation, that people who arenât productive have less innate value than productive people. Itâs 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:
- Your worth is your productivity.
- You cannot trust your own feelings and limits.
- There is always more you could be doing.
How do we get indoctrinated with the Laziness Lie? For the most part, parents donât 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 âlazyâ to deserve it, the seed of the Laziness Lie is planted in the kidâs brain. When a TV show depicts a disabled person somehow âovercomingâ 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 personâs psyche.
We live in a world where hard work is rewarded and having needs and limitations is seen as a source of shame. Itâs no wonder so many of us are constantly overexerting ourselves, saying yes out of fear of how weâll be perceived for saying no. Even if you think you donât fully agree with the three tenets of the Laziness Lie, youâve 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 theyâre ingrained in your psyche, and how they might influence your behavior on a day-to-day basis.
Your Worth Is Your Productivity
When we talk to children and teenagers about the future, we ask them what they want to doâin other words, what kind of value they want to contribute to society and to an employer. We donât ask nearly as often what theyâre passionate about, or what makes them feel happy or at peace. As adults, we define people by their jobsâheâs an actor, sheâs a morticianâcategorizing 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 donât have work to do, it can feel like we donât 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 donât (or canât) 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 thatâs 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 futuresâwhich means feeling a ton of anxiety about how much weâre working.
Michael is a bartender. He lives in fear that heâs 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 thatâs always in demand. Now he canât say no to a job. When youâre a talented bartender in Chicago, you get asked to cover a lot of peopleâs 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.
âMy entire life has been burnout,â Michael tells me. âWhen I owned my own bar, I worked ninety hours a week, every week. I was sleeping on the floor of the menâs 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.â
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 heâs worked without relent for decades. Even when he travels, he puts out feelers for bartending shifts he can pick up while heâs in town. Heâs never known a break. He keeps a meticulous spreadsheet of his hours and earnings, and the figures are mind-boggling.
âI worked three hundred eighty hours this March,â he tells me. For reference, a standard forty-hour workweek adds up to about 160 hours per month.
The consequences of Michaelâs compulsive work habits mirrored mine and Maxâs 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 weâve been taught to make work the center of our identities, we donât 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 thatâs 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 Michaelâs non-service-industry friends were shocked that he would put his life and his friendsâ 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 Michaelâs 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 respira...