What are the best Laziness Does Not Exist quotes? Do you constantly push yourself to the limit, believing your worth is tied directly to your productivity?
Social psychologist Devon Price challenges this harmful mindset in his book, Laziness Does Not Exist. Price’s work reveals how our productivity-obsessed culture damages our well-being and perpetuates harmful myths about human value.
Read below to discover how embracing so-called “laziness” is a healthy decision.
Quotes From Laziness Does Not Exist
Do you feel that no matter how hard you work, it’s never enough? Are you often pressured to do even more—whether at your job, at home, or with friends? Do you sometimes feel that to do any less would mean letting everyone around you down?
In Laziness Does Not Exist, Devon Price argues that your drive to constantly push yourself is based on the lie that how hard you work determines your worth. This mindset creates unhealthy expectations and sucks all the joy out of your achievements. Worse yet, societal beliefs about work make us condemn ourselves for not living up to the high standards we create.
Let’s look at the five best Laziness Does Not Exist quotes to get the main ideas.
“The Laziness Lie has three main tenets. They are: Your worth is your productivity. You cannot trust your own feelings and limits. There is always more you could be doing.”
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.
“We live in a world where hard work is rewarded and having needs and limitations is seen as a source of shame. It’s no wonder so many of us are constantly overexerting ourselves, saying yes out of fear of how we’ll be perceived for saying no.”
Price argues that modern media and popular culture constantly reinforce the myth that accomplishment is everything. In movies and TV, we’re bombarded with tales of leaders and heroes who succeed through relentless hard work and sacrifice, whether in politics, business, or even fiction. The protagonist is always the brave visionary, the lone entrepreneur, or the dauntless fighter who overcomes countless odds through sheer grit. What Price says is missing from these stories is the value of rest, relying on others, and taking time to heal. Also missing from this message is the fact that the success of “great people” nearly always relies on the hard work of others who don’t get rewarded with fame and fortune for their efforts.
Given the messaging we’re constantly exposed to, it’s logical that we value work so highly. Price points out that as we grew up, we were taught that success through hard work is all that matters. We watched our parents work to put food on the table, while at school we were graded on our work every day, with successes earning praise and shortcomings marked as failures. We also watched adults blame people who fell short of society’s standards for their own misfortunes. Maybe a friend’s parents struggled with depression, couldn’t cover their bills, or faced some other hardship. Those we looked up to—like our parents and teachers—called these people lazy, implying that we should do anything to avoid that label ourselves.
“Wasting time” is a basic human need.”
The 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.
“When we view homeless, unemployed, or impoverished people as victims of their own “laziness,” our motivations to work backbreakingly hard gets stronger than ever. The fear of ending up homeless morphs into the fear of not working hard enough, which in turn makes life an endless slog of pushing ourselves past the brink and judging anyone who doesn’t do the same. Lacking compassion for a struggling group of people actually makes it harder for us to be gentle with ourselves.”
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.
“I found that by advocating for our right to be “lazy,” we can carve out space in our lives for play, relaxation, and recovery. I also discovered the immense relief that comes when we cease tying our self-image to how many items we check off our to-do lists.”
The biggest barrier to accepting that so-called laziness can be good for you is the cultural belief— 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.
