Do you feel exhausted even after a “normal” workday? What would happen if you stopped pushing yourself beyond your natural limits?
Devon Price’s book Laziness Does Not Exist challenges our deeply ingrained beliefs about productivity and work ethic. The consequences of overworking extend far beyond simple fatigue, affecting everything from your mental health and family relationships to your ability to enjoy leisure time.
Here’s how breaking free from unrealistic productivity expectations might be the most courageous decision you’ll ever make.
The Harm of Doing Too Much
Despite the challenges and obstacles it presents, isn’t hard work something to be admired? Aren’t persistence and perseverance values we should practice? According to Price, the problem is that we’ve become acclimated to insanely high standards for work and responsibility that exceed what’s healthy for the human mind and body. Price details the effects of overwork on your career, your home life, and your ability to care for others, while highlighting how the “overwork culture” disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.
(Shortform note: While Price insists that modern workload expectations are too high, labor statistics show that on average, people work less today than they did a century ago, and that the downward trend in hours per week has been steady for more than a century. Nevertheless, the world’s leisure time isn’t evenly distributed—workers in the US spend more time on the job than their counterparts in many other developed countries. Meanwhile, the data backs up Price’s assertions that overwork is a bigger problem farther down the income ladder, as people in poorer countries work longer hours than those in wealthier nations.)
The pull to do too much and give too much of ourselves is so deeply ingrained, however, that for many people it’s hard to resist. At the very least, you may fear that dialing back on your efforts and commitments might make people think you’re lazy. However, Price insists that resisting society’s unrealistic expectations is an act of courage that will let you live more authentically. To understand why, let’s look at the consequences of overworking.
(Shortform note: In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey expands on the idea that taking a stand against productivity culture is both positive and courageous. Since valuing work over human well-being is oppressive, taking a step back and allowing yourself to heal gives you the cognitive space and physical energy to imagine and explore new possibilities—such as ways of living your life that challenge the toxic status quo. Hersey argues that rest can even be viewed as a spiritual experience, since it affirms your inherent right to simply exist without proving your value through soul-crushing labor.)
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. Work culture does this by pushing the mind and body past their limits, making workers feel guilty for resting, and driving many people toward emotional burnout.
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.
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.
How to Ruin Your Personal Life
Unfortunately, our cultural myths about the sins of laziness follow us home from work into our private lives. The expectation that you should do your best at everything can warp your self-image and your relationships in several unhealthy ways. Price describes how the overwork cycle impacts your family life, your self-esteem, and even your enjoyment of leisure time.
First, Price explains that trying not to seem lazy can trap you in unhealthy family patterns. For instance, you may feel pressured to care for your parents to such a degree that you neglect your own needs and fail to set boundaries on how much they’re allowed to intrude on your life. Likewise, if you are a parent, you probably feel the weight of society’s countless, contradictory expectations for how you should be raising your kids. For many parents, the question always looms over their heads of how involved they should be in their children’s lives and what more they should be doing to guarantee the brightest future. Therefore, your family life can produce the same overwhelming overwork cycle that you may suffer at your job.
Similar pressures to do too much for others can reach beyond your immediate family. Price discusses how placing other people’s needs above your own can lead you to assume inappropriate responsibility for others’ emotional well-being. For instance, if you have a friend with financial or emotional problems, you can easily become trapped in a cycle of always having to do more to help them. This draws from the same emotional well as feeling that “you can always do more” at work or in your family life. In friendships, this hurts you by making your relationships one-sided and draining. It also hurts your friend if they reflexively turn to you to solve their problems instead of changing their behavior or seeking professional help.
Keeping Up Appearances
Meanwhile, thanks to social media and the entertainment industry, we’re bombarded with unrealistic lifestyle expectations that would take endless work to live up to. Images of fancy homes and sportscars might drive you to work excessive overtime, neglecting the good things you already have. Pictures of models and actors with giant muscles, trim figures, and perfect skin might make you feel ashamed for not working out more or following the latest skincare trend. Price writes that constant exposure to these fantasies of perfection is deadly to your self-esteem, and yet they’re everywhere—we can’t escape them.
As if dictating lifestyle expectations weren’t enough, social media has “gamified” our lives, says Price, turning even hobbies and leisure activities into chances to compare our achievements to others. For instance, if you post your workout stats online, you’ll feel a brief reward as others “like” your progress, but then you’ll feel compelled to work even harder to outdo those who exercise more than you. The same goes for any activity—sharing how many books you read online, showing off your latest crafting projects, or posting how quickly you solved an online crossword. When hobbies turn into competition, the need to one-up other people can sap out all the joy from what you do while pressuring you to work harder at it.
Carrying the Weight of the World
Price says that for some people, unhealthy views on productivity drive them to try to stay constantly informed, both by following the news at all hours and by sliding down informational rabbit holes on every topic that strikes them as important. While it may be important to keep abreast of current events, studies show that too much news exposure leads to anxiety, stress-induced physical ailments, and a decreased sense of personal agency. Still, you might feel you’d be lazy if you were to reduce your information intake—shouldn’t you try to know everything you can? Price reminds us that consuming an endless flood of information isn’t as empowering as we tend to assume; instead, it usually makes us feel hopeless.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the overwhelming amount of bad news we’re exposed to, many people feel motivated to make a positive change in the world. This is fine—Price doesn’t argue against activism, but once again, he points out that too much is too much. Unrealistic productivity expectations might drive you to support too many causes, eventually resulting in burnout. Price argues that even with all the world’s problems, you should focus just on those that are closest to your heart and trust other people to care about the rest. You can be more effective if you concentrate and moderate your altruistic efforts without giving up your well-being in the process. Otherwise, you won’t be able to help anyone.
The Added Weight of Marginalization
While the fear of being considered lazy plagues every level of society, Price argues that it’s especially hard-hitting for people who face discrimination due to ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. People in these groups often feel compelled to work more than others just to prove their worth, while societal roles and expectations can add to their already-heavy loads.
Price says that to succeed professionally, members of underrepresented groups are often forced to suppress their identities and conform to cultural norms in the workplace. Many marginalized people use achievements to “earn” acceptance in their careers. Their fear that they’ll be labeled as lazy for not overperforming is valid, thanks to a long history of prejudice that promotes that message. However, constantly trying to prove your worth is exhausting and unfulfilling. Regardless, our productivity-obsessed culture makes lots of people work doubly hard—both to overcome harmful identity-based stereotypes and to conform to societal expectations about achievement.
Stereotypes and expectations don’t stay confined to work—they follow many of us home. In particular, Price writes that thanks to traditional gender norms, women shoulder an unequal burden of domestic labor on top of their careers. This includes housework, parenting duties, arranging social gatherings, and providing emotional care for family members. For modern women, all this work comes after being drained and exhausted by overwork at work. And yet, even in the 21st century, many women find themselves taking on the weight of what Price argues are long-outdated gender role expectations.
