Are you constantly exhausted but still feel guilty about taking breaks? Do you find yourself unable to focus for a full workday despite pushing yourself harder and harder?
Devon Price’s illuminating book, Laziness Does Not Exist, challenges our modern workplace culture of unsustainable productivity goals. His research reveals how being overworked at work not only harms employees but also damages the very organizations they’re trying to serve.
Keep reading to discover why your brain isn’t designed for eight-hour concentration and how to break free from the destructive cycle of overwork.
The Lure of Overwork
The most obvious place that we overwork ourselves is in the workplace itself. Price explains that modern workplace culture is rampant with unsustainable productivity goals that are harmful to employees and the organizations they work for. Being overworked at work happens when the mind and body are pushed past their limits, workers are made to feel guilty for resting, and many people being driven toward emotional burnout.
(Shortform note: As if to confirm Price’s criticism of work culture, the pressure to sacrifice rest for your job has only been exacerbated by the growth of remote work. In a 2024 survey, nearly half of workers who were traveling for the holidays reported that they still planned to work from their laptops. While the flexibility of remote work lets employees optimize their time, this supposed freedom can actually mask workplace pressure—over a quarter of employees work during vacation because their supervisors expect it, while nearly 30% do so out of fear of losing their job. This creates competing anxieties for workers—they feel guilty for working during family time, but they worry about falling behind on work when they try to relax.)
To begin with, Price states that the human brain is not designed to concentrate for an entire eight-hour workday. When your ability to focus and be productive at your job starts to wane midway through your scheduled work hours, this isn’t due to laziness but rather to the biological limits of human cognition. Price cites research that suggests most workers can only be fully productive for about three hours each day. This limit is felt hardest by knowledge workers who spend little time on rote, mindless tasks. These studies show that productivity declines sharply after 40 hours a week, and after 55 working hours, you may as well not even be at the office.
(Shortform note: Though Price largely argues against the quantity of work we do, it may also be that our approach to work is wrong. In Feel-Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal writes that building your work-life around discipline and endurance goes against the grain of how our bodies naturally function. The negative emotions associated with the “daily grind” produce stress hormones, which provide short-term motivation at the cost of harmful long-term side effects to your body and mind. Abdaal’s solution is to cultivate positive energy in your work by finding ways to enjoy it, to empower yourself, and to use your work to connect with other people. Harnessing these factors can make work energizing rather than a drain on your resources.)
The Consequence of Overwork
Nevertheless, we’ve been conditioned to feel shame if we can’t keep chugging away for eight hours or more every day. Price says that pushing yourself beyond your brain’s limits creates a cycle of overwork and collapse. People who are trapped in this cycle work intensely for as long as they can without breaks, then spend their time off incapable of doing anything but sitting on the couch and watching TV. And yet, you may feel guilty for taking even that much of a break, berating yourself for not doing more and pushing yourself to work even harder the next day and the next, to accomplish even more.
As a result, overwork leads to burnout, which is more than just exhaustion. Price describes several aspects of burnout, not the least of which is the erosion of your ability to find any joy or meaning in your work. Burned-out employees are often depressed, suffer from anxiety, show signs of reduced impulse control, and find it difficult to make good decisions. These consequences aren’t confined to your own work—when you burn out, it affects the performance of your whole organization. None of this should come as a surprise, yet we still feel compelled to work harder and harder, whether to climb the corporate ladder or just to keep from drowning in our growing to-do lists.
| But Don’t You Need to Test Your Limits? Price’s warning against working beyond your limits goes against the grain, as many other writers state that stretching your limits is necessary for growth. For instance, in Endure, Alex Hutchinson explains that in sports and exercise, persevering through your physical limits and mental barriers is crucial to learning resilience, increasing your stamina, and expanding your capabilities. Likewise, in The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter argues that without testing your boundaries, you can’t discover your full potential, and that pushing beyond them boosts your confidence and lets you do more than you previously thought. The problem, then, may be knowing the difference between your real limits and your perceived limits. For example, the world of extreme sports is full of athletes who pushed themselves past their limits to the point of injury and even death. In The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler—a proponent of testing your personal boundaries—warns that when you achieve ambitious goals, you’re tempted to set even more ambitious ones. When this happens, Kotler says that there’s a risk of burning out or raising expectations so high that they become unwise or even dangerous to pursue. However, if you’re mindful of the risks and take steps to mitigate unhealthy outcomes, then by pushing your limits, you can gradually learn to handle harder challenges in a way that isn’t as toxic as the chronic overwork cycle Price argues against. |
