Do you ever feel like no matter how hard you work, it’s never enough? What’s the book Laziness Does Not Exist about?
Devon Price’s book Laziness Does Not Exist challenges the harmful belief that our productivity determines our worth. The book reveals how this toxic myth creates unrealistic expectations, damages our well-being, and teaches us to condemn ourselves and others for normal human limitations.
Read more in our brief Laziness Does Not Exist book overview.
Overview of Laziness Does Not Exist
You’re not alone if you’ve ever felt that despite how hard you work, it’s not enough. A lot of people feel trapped in a rat race of productivity, and for every task we finish or goal we achieve, a dozen more spring up to replace it. In our personal lives, we may feel stuck in a similar pattern. Whether you’re a parent, an active member in your community, or simply pursuing a hobby you love, you may feel pressure to always do more. To do any less would be contemptibly lazy—you’d be letting everyone around you down. Worst of all, no matter how much energy you spend or how many goals you accomplish, the neverending drive to do more sucks every bit of joy out of what you’ve achieved.
In his book Laziness Does Not Exist, published in 2021, Devon Price argues that the drive to push ourselves too hard is based on the lie that how hard we work determines our worth—an idea embedded so deeply into our culture that most of us accept it as fact. This underlying myth about our fundamental value is harmful in many ways. It creates unrealistic expectations for what we can achieve, how we should behave, and how we treat each other. Worst of all, our toxic myths about work and laziness teach us to condemn ourselves and others for not living up to the standards we create.
Price is a psychologist and professor at Loyola University Chicago, where his work focuses on social psychology, mental health, and challenging harmful ideas about productivity. As an openly transgender and autistic person, he also advocates for LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance of neurodiversity. Price’s other books include Unmasking Autism, Unlearning Shame, and Unmasking for Life.
The Myth of Laziness
When Price argues that “laziness doesn’t exist,” what he’s saying is that we’ve all bought into the myth that our value as individuals is directly tied to our productivity, and that people who don’t appear to be highly driven must be morally bankrupt in some way. The consequence of this cultural mindset is that many of us work ourselves to exhaustion, feel ashamed for all the things we haven’t accomplished, and discount the hard work and struggles of people who haven’t achieved as much as we have.
Price argues that contemporary beliefs about productivity and laziness are destructive to both the mind and the body. These beliefs can make you ignore your basic needs and work yourself beyond healthy limits while constantly shaming yourself for not doing enough, whether in your career or your personal life. Perhaps you regularly work overtime out of the fear that if you don’t, you won’t meet expectations and might even get fired. Perhaps you neglect your self-care to prioritize someone else’s needs, feeling that if you set aside time for yourself, you’ll let them down. Or, maybe you’ve put off vacations for years because you’re trapped in a cage of societal expectations and demands on how you should really spend your time.
Is Anyone Really Lazy?
So many of us have internalized the fear of being seen as lazy that no one’s immune to this toxic way of thinking. Price points out that many highly accomplished individuals secretly think of themselves as lazy, from the movie star who’s afraid that he’s not doing enough films to the successful entrepreneur who never leaves the office because she fears she’s not doing enough to keep her business afloat. Even though these people may have accomplished much that others only dream about, our society’s beliefs about hard work and laziness dictate that, no matter what, you could always be doing something more.
According to Price, the most pernicious aspect of our collective fixation on accomplishment is that we’re taught to apply the “lazy” label to people who haven’t achieved traditional measures of success. This mindset is especially harmful and unfair to those of us facing complex personal circumstances and systemic barriers. Price says that too often, those who struggle with financial problems, suffer from mental illness, or have to overcome prejudice daily are accused of being lazy when they don’t—or can’t—conform to society’s stereotype of success. Price argues that not only is calling these people “lazy” unhelpful, but it’s also a destructive lie that contributes to the problems they have to live with.
The Origins of Laziness
If our ideas about hard work and laziness are so harmful, then how have they become so widespread? In essence, we all learn these beliefs from a combination of early life experiences and societal messaging. Price describes how deeply the roots of these ideas are embedded in Western culture, particularly in the United States, and how they’re reinforced by pop culture, our teachers, our leaders, and even our parents.
Price explains that the belief that your productivity equals your worth is inextricably linked with the rise of American capitalism. He traces it back to the Puritan settlers who brought with them the conviction that hard work in this life would be met with heavenly rewards. In the US, at least, it was the Puritans who first equated the quality and quantity of your work with character and moral fiber.
However, this outlook on the moral value of work took a dark turn when it was used to rationalize slavery—if so-called “lesser” people were inherently lazy, as the cultural lie dictated, then forcing them to work became a twisted form of redemption. Price says that another (possibly intentional) effect of the hard work mentality is that it kept workers too exhausted and busy to organize, rise up, and rebel against their oppressors.
The Harm in 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.
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 ways that striving too hard does you harm.
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.
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.
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.
Laziness Is Good
If overwork is slowly killing us all, then clearly we need to set new expectations regarding how productive we can be. Price suggests a fundamental change in how we view “laziness”—not as a serious failure to be productive, but as a natural, positive biological response that lets us know when we need to slow down. Price argues that the urge to be lazy is a sign that you need rest, that regular down-time is a necessity, and that relaxation boosts productivity.
The first thing Price says you need to recognize is that when you feel tired and unmotivated, these are biological warning signs you should listen to. Perhaps you’ve simply been pushing too hard at work, doing too much at home, snacking instead of eating right, or not leaving enough time for sleep. These signals might also reveal underlying physical or mental health issues that need to be addressed, such as poor lifestyle habits, anxiety, depression, or a host of physical ailments whose symptoms include low energy and fatigue. For many of these conditions, trying to “power through” them delays proper treatment and makes matters worse.
The Importance of Rest
The next attitude Price says to adjust is the thought that “wasting time” is a waste of time. Instead, it’s healthier to acknowledge that human beings can’t be productive every moment of the day. Building time in your schedule to simply do nothing can improve your mood, boost emotional healing, and make space for self-reflection and discovery. In this way, “wasted time” isn’t wasted at all—it’s productive in that it helps you build a healthier, more well-balanced you. If you’re constantly giving your all to your job, other people, and your daily grind, you’re missing out on yourself to the point that you can even lose track of who you really are.
The benefits of rest go beyond self-care. Downtime is essential for creativity and problem-solving. Price cites studies demonstrating that breakthrough ideas often come during periods of rest or distraction, not during focused work time. Many creative professionals back this up with anecdotes about having their best ideas while exercising, walking through a park, or detaching in some other way. These creative benefits even apply when people slack off at work. For example, research suggests that when employees take breaks to browse the internet on company time, it actually improves their productivity and helps them stay focused throughout the day.
Deprogram Your Beliefs About Laziness
The biggest barrier to accepting that so-called laziness can be good for you is the cultural belief we discussed at the beginning of this guide— that how much you accomplish defines you. Price refutes any equivalence between your productivity, your moral character, and your worth as a person. To undo this belief, he says you’ll have to decouple your ideas about productivity from your self-image and your views of other people while learning to focus on personal growth and setting boundaries around how much you can do.
Price says the key to overcoming the belief that how much you do equals how much you’re worth is to learn compassion, both for yourself and others. In your own life, you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that letting yourself be lazy means you won’t achieve as much—and that’s OK. You won’t be the perfect worker, the perfect parent, or the perfect friend, but those were never achievable goals, and chasing them isn’t good for your physical or mental health. Instead, Price suggests that you can strive to be as good a worker, parent, or friend as you can while still prioritizing your personal needs. This isn’t selfish—it’s self-care that pays higher dividends than spreading yourself thin and working down to the bone.
Also, Price argues that you shouldn’t look down on those who don’t fit society’s “hard-working” standards. It’s important to acknowledge that systemic issues like racism, classism, and ableism affect what opportunities people have, what unseen struggles they face, and how much they can achieve. We’re taught to label those we believe to be underachievers as “lazy,” when instead we should ask what obstacles they have that we know nothing about. Perhaps that employee who’s chronically late is caring for an elderly parent. Perhaps a person who can’t get a job was forced to quit school for mental health reasons. Price says the “lazy” label masks a host of real problems that ought to be addressed with kindness, not scorn.
