Laziness Is Not About Work
A friend once asked me to define laziness.
I, of course, am very dissatisfied with the common definition of the term: that you are lazy in your moments away from work. That taking a break is lazy, because you are not working. That doing overtime or hustling twelve hours a day is productive, because you are working.
That is why, before even defining it, I responded: “It is not about work.”
The explanation is simple: it encapsulates so much more of a person’s life.
Laziness is when you spend time on something that interferes with your personal mission in life. Your mission consists of the strivings that give you a sense of meaning and personal fulfillment: it links your deepest values to your goals and relates to the things you wish to accomplish in terms of your career, social life, or mental and physical development. You are lazy when you choose to do tasks or activities that disturb or directly oppose these overarching aims.
Therefore, the old definition does not work any longer.
Firstly, it rests on the flawed premise that everyone’s mission is to be successful in their careers. That way, a person who strives to fulfill their mission to establish healthy relationships and have a good mental health, might be seen as lazy just because they never take on extra responsibilities at work. But working overtime or during weekends would actively interfere with this person’s values and goals in life — and therefore, their decision to be less involved at work would not actually make them lazy.
Secondly, the old definition implies that work counters laziness, when in fact, many of the most hard-working people are lazy. As Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) aptly claims, laziness shows itself in those who spend their time doing things that have a negative or no impact on the mission (values and goals) they hold dear. Therefore, the student who reads for twelve hours a day is infinitely more lazy than the one who spends only two hours on a chapter and takes regular breaks: the same goal is achieved more effectively (that is, in less time and with more energy to spare).
This new idea of laziness is captured beautifully in one of my favorite philosophical quotes from The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry):
Strangely enough, a person can be both faithful to their job and lazy at the same time.
Here, we meet a man who lives alone on a tiny planet, who chooses not to sleep or rest or take the walks he so desires, because his job demands him to repeat a task every sixty seconds. The message is clear: If your work — or whatever else you do with your time — intervenes with the things that would give you a sense of meaning and fulfillment, it is not a productive pursuit. Like the hard-working man, you will be spending your time on urgent tasks at the cost of the ones that are actually important to you in the long term.
Therefore, laziness is not about choosing not to work.
It is about choosing to work on the wrong things.
As with anything, you have a responsibility. You need to ask yourself: What is it that you want to achieve in your work time, social time, and spare time? Are you spending your precious, limited hours on earth doing something that genuinely satisfies (or contributes to) your long-term mission in a time- and energy-effective way?
Or are you actually, ironically, lazy?
