Last weekend I started reading a book, Laziness Does Not Exist, which I bought simply based on the title and the fact that Mark said reading it felt like doing brain surgery on himself. A ringing endorsement! But almost as soon as I started reading, I began to worry that this book wasn't for me.
Like Max, I used to work to the point of exhaustion and illness, and had no idea how to make myself stop. Intellectually, I knew I was doing too much, but my fear of missing a deadline or seeming lazy kept me plugging away without breaks. I didn't learn to change my ways until overwork utterly destroyed my health.
The author had basically kept themself sick for a year after getting the flu and refusing to rest or take time off to recover. Whereas here I am eagerly anticipating my distant dream of a second vaccine does not just because I want to hug my mom but because I've heard the symptoms can be bad and maybe I'll get to spend a whole day in bed. A few pages later, they lay out the core tenets of The Laziness Lie:
Deep down I'm lazy and worthless.
I must work incredibly hard, all the time, to overcome my inner laziness.
My worth is earned through my productivity.
Work is the center of life.
Anyone who isn't accomplished and driven is immoral.
Oh no, I started to think. This book is not for me. I don't ascribe to any of these beliefs except the first one. Laziness Does Not Exist was starting to make me feel... lazy.
The Laziness Doctrine I personally ascribe to is more like:
Deep down I'm lazy.
I am apparently incapable of overcoming my inner laziness.
I would always rather be looking at twitter even though it doesn't make me feel good.
I would be happier if I worked less.
I have been paid an advance for my book, and if I don't finish it I have to give that back.
Other writers read a lot more than I do.
I've kept on reading the book, between checking twitter and playing Two Dots, and it's not as strictly aimed at workaholics as the first chapter made me think, but it's still not what I'd been hoping for. (To paraphrase,) "If all you want to do is look at twitter all the time, you're just really tired." Okay so I've been really tired since I was 22. "If you slack off at work all the time, it means your workplace is toxic." That was definitely true at the off-Broadway theater where I worked, where I read blogs all day instead of reading scripts, but seriously, I read blogs all day. I refuse to not take at least little personal credit for that failure.
Okay, but so then why did I read blogs all day. Why is it twitter now. What was I reaching for outside myself, outside my work, that was so unsatisfied? To paraphrase a good tweet, how is this the same brain that used to read a 500-page novel in three days back in middle school?
Also: If I could blame the toxic management at my old job for my slacking, whom do I blame now that I am self-employed, and management is me? I blame the pandemic, I blame parenthood—but it's not about blame, it's about acceptance, accepting that a brain can't work hard for eight hours straight, accepting that parenting and living are part of working hard.
The thing I mourn most about my "laziness" is that I think there are lots of writers out there who spend at least some of their free time reading and learning, digging into craft or theory or otherwise enriching their artistry and curiosity. I never really did that before I had a kid, before the pandemic, and I sure as hell am not doing it now. In my mind, those are the same people who say, I've been driven to be a writer since I was a kid, I wrote my first novel when I was eight and wrote ten more before college, here's my annotated and mapped-out copy of the complete Joan Didion, if I don't write I feel like I'll die.
I think I feel lazy because I'm not like that.
I've wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but I spent all my growing-up years wanting to be an actor, too (and there was for a while a vague dream of "physicist"). In college I just realized that I wasn't good enough at acting. I didn't get into the advanced level acting class; I got into advanced fiction off the last spot on the wait list, but a few weeks in my terrifying professor (picture Tilda Swinton) caught me in the hallway and said, "You know I didn't think you had it in you, right?" leaving unspoken that now she did think I had it in me, crystalizing my sense that I work best when I have an authority figure to be scared of.
Those imaginary un-lazy writers who haunt me never needed to be scared of a professor to write well. Intrinsic motivation, the parenting experts intone. Any motivation at all, just a crumb please, I whimper while holding out my empty bowl.
While I was grappling with the ideas of laziness and workaholicism (and how to absolve yourself of the label of laziness if you're also not ever a workaholic) I got an email that offered a different framework.
In a blog post called The Overwhelmed Mom Survival Guide You Need & Anti-Picky-Eating Meal Plan, registered dietician Jennifer Anderson (who runs the extremely helpful instagram account Kids Eat In Color) suggests thinking about choices, especially when we're overwhelmed, not in terms of "should" or "best," in terms of harm reduction.
Her example, from when she was overworked and overwhelmed (and depressed and anemic) as a mom of two:
On a bad Friday, I was pulled toward the option of only nursing the baby and letting the toddler fend for himself. Not feeding a toddler is probably the greatest harm in this situation. He would feel food insecurity because he hadn’t been given a meal, or he may have eaten something unsafe for toddlers.
In this scenario, making any food at all that is edible and safe for the toddler and serving it to him is less harm than not feeding him.
So giving her toddler Cheerios for dinner, then, was not a nutritional failure. It was a less-harmful choice, and what she could muster.
Most of us (most of the time), do have the capacity to reduce harm a little. That is important.
If part of you is saying something like, “But I’m still causing harm, I’m a bad person,” keep reading.
[...]
When I look back on feeding my kids O’s for dinner, a small part of me says, “Wow, that wasn’t a great dinner.” But all the rest of me says, “My toddler had a safe meal and knew that he could depend on me for food.” I remember how hard those days were, and I am proud of myself for serving O’s for dinner.
I’m also proud of you if you’re serving O’s for dinner.
And maybe the most important part:
Only we can know what harm reduction looks like for us based on our capacity each day.
I love that. It means it didn't matter why I read blogs all day at my desk when I was 22, and it doesn't matter why I got such a slow start on my book research. Those days are done. It doesn't matter that I didn't do every page of my reading in grad school or that I didn't read critical theory for fun when I was pregnant. I have today ahead of me, and I can make the less-harmful choices, the ones that keep my mind clearer and my creativity stoked and that get me a few steps closer to doing what I need to do. Laziness doesn't exist because those sorts of broad summations don't exist. I was unfulfilled when I was 22 and had lots of homework when I was in grad school, and now, no matter how I've worked in the past, I'm trying to write a book while raising a kid in a pandemic.
There's still something I want to read about laziness, which may exist or may not, something that doesn't frame our sense of laziness as the engine of workaholicism but illuminates its roots in attention, executive function, working memory, pleasure-seeking, and resistance (you can't make me work! when the you is also the me). It feels related to intuitive eating, in a way: We stress and suffer over every food choice until we stop seeing food as moral, stop seeing weight as moral, and release the idea of using food to control the size of our body. Once junk food is never off-limits, bingeing so quickly loses its appeal. What's the work/laziness equivalent? (I worry it's "Take an unlimited vacation from work and writing until you feel truly motivated to start again." It might be "Look at twitter until you get truly sick of it," but that feels more like the equivalent of being made to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes.)
I keep coming back to twitter because twitter isn't simply not-work—social media has its own draws and appeals, its own twitchy finger on the dopamine switch. It doesn't just fill the space we create when we take a break from working, it pulls our attention away. Again, back to when I was 22 and not doing my work: What was I reaching for, what was my unfulfilled need?
I was talking with Mark about Laziness Does Not Exist—in instagram DMs because Mark left twitter for Lent—and we were lamenting the catch of twitter: It's where our friends are. (Here is where I try not to spiral about my lack of half a dozen vibrant group-chats.) We shared some ideas for making twitter a keep-up-with-your-friends space and not a mind-suck information-firehose. (Make a list of close friends and just look at that, turn off RTs.) And Mark said something that stuck with me. He said, "My big goal with Lent this year is to communicate with my friends in a non-ambient way."
That's not a cure for laziness (which I guess doesn't exist), but I think it's what I'm reaching for when I'm drawn away from work (and actually really wish I were working! this is not about not knowing how to relax). Writing is always lonely, and everything is a million times lonelier this year. My job when I was 22 was lonely, and we had blogs and g-chat then. I don't berate myself when I stop writing to look out the window—it's big fat snowflakes right now, which will turn to rain in an hour—to take a breath, to think, to stop thinking, to connect in a small way to the world. The snow's already looking slushier, I'm glad I caught it when it was good.
My son's home from daycare this week—a covid exposure, though he's fine—and I just spent the first hour of his nap writing this. I probably should've been working, transcribing interviews or reading or, I know, actually sitting down to write. I don't think I was lazy for taking this hour elsewhere, though perhaps slightly misguided. Misguidedness does exist. But it's a choice I made, not a verdict.
I finally learned, recently, how to believe both "I did my best" and "I can do better next time." It's about, between this time and next time, changing your circumstances, giving yourself a different set-up, different tools—more of whatever it is that you need.