Laziness does not exist. And neither do lazy people.
Laziness is a code word for a state where a person’s active principle has been repressed. This happens to people who were castigated for showing any initiative or making any decisions on their own when they were children. People who consider themselves lazy are mistaken. They are not lazy. They are afraid. The memory of being stopped, shut up, punished for acting, for making their own choices, for thinking unsanctioned thoughts and wanting unsanctioned things paralyzes them. They find it easier to do nothing than to face the terror of doing anything.
When I see children who are pushed around by adults (“Sit down!”, “Get up!”, “Turn off the computer!”, “Go do your homework!”, “Stop doing this, you are making a mess”, “Put on a hat,” “Here is a schedule I made for you and here is a list of goals”), I know that 20, 30 and 40 years from now, these grown children will be sitting in front of the TV or a computer, incapable of getting up and doing the multitude of things they need to be doing.
Clarissa's Blog 
I find that laziness for me is mostly a consequence of not enjoying whatever it is that I should be doing.
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And that’s a good sign to go and do what you really want to be doing. 🙂
Of course, I suspect you’ll have to finish that thesis first. 🙂
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That is true. I feel very tired when people give me multiple and conflicting demands, presented with threats. I stumble over my feet and get very little done in those instances.
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And there seems to be a pattern that occurs where people who want me to do something suddenly assert that I already know what I ought to do, without any guidance, and now they feel the need to threaten me into doing it. A threat means I become emotionally switched off, which makes interpersonal relations much more difficult, if they are required for the task. I can do a task that is impersonal with a threat hanging over me, but not a personal one that requires any emotional fine-tuning. At that point, I can’t work with threats.
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Good insight. I think people usually call this “learned helplessness.”
I have read several posts by people who were unlucky enough to have a lot of ABA-style training in childhood describing their intense fear that they were going to do something wrong, and their difficulty taking initiative because of that.
The one post I can think of right away is this one from chaoticidealism, but I’m sure I’ve read stories like hers on other blogs too.
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What I could never understand is people yelling at me to be nicer to people or give more attention to detail. The more insistent the yelling, the less I can attend to these things. Obviously, I’m not lazy, but my mind functions best in an abstract or analytic mode, so if you want me to become highly abstract and theoretical, yell at me about attending to people’s feelings and giving more attention to fine details. That way, I won’t be able to do either — but I will certainly post my analysis.
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“What I could never understand is people yelling at me to be nicer to people or give more attention to detail.”
– “Clarissa, be sexier! BE SEXIER, I TOLD YOU!!!” my tango instructor would yell at me. I normally don’t have trouble being sexy but on this one occasion I felt less sexy than a door.
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Yeah, that’s how it works. If someone is on your case about producing certain emotional or mental goods, it becomes much harder to produce them, especially against the rising curve of self-consciousness.
I think in many instances people have mistaken me for a conservative women, who should “naturally” be able to produce the qualities they expect from me. My most natural mode, however, is a step removed from being sociable and two steps removed from being able to focus very much on detail. I need optimal circumstances to be able to do either.
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For me, laziness equates with finding the most efficient way of doing something. I don’t want to waste my time do stuff I don’t have to do, or doing more than I have to.
I also like having lazy days, only possible when the boys are away, when I do nothing but read my Kindle, even if I have (not very important) stuff to do.
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I wonder if I’m reading too far into what you are saying. How do you recommend raising children without guiding their actions? Are you actually saying that parents shouldn’t tell their children to do their homework? Or is the issue about *how* that message comes across (guidance vs. barking orders, for example)? Of all the children I know, exactly none of them would pass a grade in elementary school without their parents on their backs!
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The best and the only effective teaching is by personal example. Show the child a parent who loves her job, who is constantly learning, who is developing professionally and intellectually with glee and joy, and you will never ever ever have to say anything about homework. My parents never even asked me about homework, let alone sat by me and “helped.” As we can see, I did not turn out too badly academically. 🙂
“Of all the children I know, exactly none of them would pass a grade in elementary school without their parents on their backs!”
– In the evenings and on weekends, what do these parents and children do? Sit behind a computer of one’s own? Stare at a TV screen? The parent who nags the child to do homework while she is blogging, facebooking or chatting on the phone is nothing but a hypocrite. All she has left as a remedy is to try to bully the child into doing homework.
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“Of all the children I know, exactly none of them would pass a grade in elementary school without their parents on their backs!”
– And now imagine living in a home where somebody, let’s say your husband, is constantly on your back about something he believes you need to do.
“Elizabeth, you need to be making more money. Why are you sitting there watching the TV? I said, you should be working extra. Hang up the phone now and go do some work.’
Or:
“Elizabeth, how many times did I tell you that you need to lose weight? Put down that sandwich now! Go do some exercise. Have you worked out today? How come I didn’t see it? Show me how you worked out. No, you need to work out some more.”
Imagine a year of this, day in and day out. How soon will your psyche – the psyche of a grown person – crack? Now imagine what this does to a child.
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I’m sorry I seem to have upset you, I certainly didn’t mean it. I agree completely about nagging. However, I think it is impossible to raise healthy and successful children without ever using commands or asking compliance. For example, “After dinner, you need to finish your math sheet.” I notice you just posted that “Children Are People.” I haven’t read that one yet, but I imagine it’s related to this conversation. I agree completely that children need to be treated with the same respect due any person. However, children also need parenting, which includes guidance and reminders. Most eight year olds would never remember their homework (or medicine, or what have you), let alone wish to complete it.
I really don’t mean to raise your hackles. I think it’s a question of degree, and I’d actually bet you and I would often agree on appropriate child-rearing in specific situations.
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“I’m sorry I seem to have upset you, I certainly didn’t mean it. ”
– You haven’t upset me at all. 🙂 Seriously, I had no idea I started to write in an annoyed tone in response. maybe I need to discuss this with my analyst yet again.
“Most eight year olds would never remember their homework (or medicine, or what have you), let alone wish to complete it.”
– When I turned 4, my father gave me a little notebook where he would create a fun and complicated sentence in English and Russian and leave it for me before going to work. I would have to analyze the sentence according to its parts of speech and function in the sentence. A little later, I would also do a morphological analysis (using words like “morpheme”, etc.) Nobody had to remind me to analyze these sentences.
Now, as for reminders: from personal experience, I can tell you that it is a very very detrimental practice. People who grow up in the environment when they are constantly reminded to do the most basic things (brush their teeth, put on a scarf when it’s cold, do their homework), end up with a deeply damaged mechanism of motivation and a damaged decision-making capacity. They end up staring for 15 minutes at 2 bottles of shampoo at the age of 30, completely incapable of deciding which one to use. They come up with very weird, complicated, and often dangerous ways of trying to self-motivate.
It is incredibly hard – again from personal experience – to learn to self-motivate. One example: say, you were always told to go to bed at a certain hour when you were a child. What happens when you are an adult and living on your own and there is nobody to tell you to go to bed? What happened to me is that I wouldn’t go to sleep. I would go without sleep for up to 40 hours, and then just collapse whenever I had no more energy. I’m 36 now and the problem hasn’t gone away. I have no idea how to determine that I’m sleepy and it’s time for me to go to bed.
“I really don’t mean to raise your hackles.”
– I apologize for sounding aggressive. This was one of those rare situations where I didn’t feel any aggression. 🙂 🙂
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I am always intrigued by hearing that people think that laziness does not exist – since it seems to be so real to me. I agree that fear is a big component of the root problem. But, if indeed laziness does not exist, then doesn’t that kind of eliminate moral responsibility? Also, laziness is (traditionally) one of the seven deadly sins. (If you dont like the word sin, then maybe we could just think of them as mal-adjustments.) Do the other six mal-adjustments also not exist?
My definition of laziness is: a willful lack of reasonable self-exertion in a situation in which a) self-exertion is morally required and b) the individual has the capacity to self-exert.
I used to work in a warehouse job. From hind site, I would say that one of the roles of my manager was that he was a “professional judge of self-exertion”. In other words, when I was slinking around in the back of the building taking an unauthorized break, he would catch me and tell me to get back to work. So, when he caught me, was that an example of bullying a person (me) who had been disabled by fear? Or was that an example of confronting a worker who was willfully failing to reasonably self-exert?
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Maybe it would be a good idea to read the entire post, not just the first line.
” In other words, when I was slinking around in the back of the building taking an unauthorized break, he would catch me and tell me to get back to work. So, when he caught me, was that an example of bullying a person (me) who had been disabled by fear? ”
– Was the manager your parent? No? Then why ask questions that have been amply answered in the post.
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This is extremely true.
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How does one overcome this ??
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The first step is to discover the roots of the problem. Then you trace it in every aspect of your life. And then you start looking for internal motivation, very slowly and gradually. It’s like a house that was razed to the ground. You can’t rebuild it in one day. It will be a process.
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