Laziness is a Lie

Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I want to talk about the idea of being lazy. I personally believe that no one is lazy. I think that the word lazy is nothing more then a tool for shame and I strongly wish that we would stop using it. There is a more helpful way of looking at our behavior if we are interested in creating change.

Lazy: unwilling to work or use energy.

-Oxford Dictionary

Human will, like everything else about us, is a spectrum. It isn’t something that is either on or off, but rather something that we have as a resource that is spent and then needs to be restored. Think of it like having a battery, or as being a spoon in the common chronic illness metaphor. This is important as we consider laziness, because will is at the heart of the idea that people are lazy.

When we think of will as something that we can either turn on or off in order to perform, it becomes a choice. Will is having the capability of conscious choice or decision making and intention or desire. There are always times that we do not have this in our lives. Let’s look at a really concrete and overly simple example. If you tie a person up so they are unable to move their body, they loose their ability to choose or make the decision to move despite their intentions or desires. In order for will to be present, a person must have both the intention or desire to do something as well as the capability of making the choice or decision to do it.

It is the capacity for choice or decision making that makes will a spectrum rather then a polarity. Our environments and the people around us impact our capacity for choice and decision. You might want to go home, but you are limited by the reality that you need your paycheck to sustain your life and leaving early will result in you getting fired. You have the intention or the desire, but your environment or circumstances are hindering or modifying your will. And everything in our lives is like this.

So, when we are looking at someone’s behavior, it is more useful to ask what the barriers are rather then declaring someone lazy when they have an intention that they do not have the will to act upon. What is hindering that action? Sometimes, the things hindering the action completely prohibit the intention and other times it simply makes it much more difficult. This is how will becomes a resource that we spend and then restore.

Humans have a limited amount of resources that they can spend. These resources include our time, our physical energy, our emotional tolerance, our money and many others. Every time we have an intention, we must consider if we have the resources available to act upon that intention. And we never have just one intention in our lives. That’s what really makes this all so complicated. We can want to spend time with our loved ones, but also need to work so that we can feed them. Both those intentions require us to spend the finite resources that we have. In this example, time being the biggest factor.

Thus, our willingness to act upon an intention is largely based upon a complex assessment of our current stock of resources. This means that it is impossible to always have all the resources for all the intentions that we have in our lives. Instead, we must invest in the things that have the highest priorities in our lives. Working to feed our loved ones will often take priority over spending time with them because if they starve to death we aren’t going to get to spend that time with them anyway.

When we call someone (even ourselves) lazy, we are dismissing this complex relationship between our environment and our will. Dismissing the complexity prohibits problem solving and this is why calling someone lazy is about inflicting shame. On top of this, calling someone lazy assumes that you have a good understanding of their intentions. Often times, people project their intentions onto other people. Just because you think it is important to do your laundry every day and have that intention doesn’t mean that others will or should also have that intention.

If you are interested in creating change, consider starting with this frame shift. When you find yourself considering yourself or someone else lazy try asking these two questions:

1. What are the person’s intentions or desires in this situation?
2. What could be going on to keep this person from acting upon those intentions and desires?

When we start looking at the barriers, the possibility for problem solving opens itself up to us. Instead of wondering why this person cannot get their life together, you can look at how you can remove or reduce the barriers that are keeping that person from being successful as they have defined it with their intentions or desires. Because our intentions or desires for someone else is never the actual measure for success. Each of us must decide for ourselves what our purpose or goals in life will be. Which means that we are the only people that can decide for us what it means to be successful.

Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!