In Defence of Sloth

Why laziness is an optical illusion

Harriet Lerner’s book “The Dance of Fear” gave me my first introduction to the idea of overfunctioning and underfunctioning. By Lerner’s description, overfunctioners are those who, in a relationship dynamic, overdo their involvement: they are usually high-strung, anxious, and pick up tasks compulsively for fear that those around them cannot handle the work. The classic picture of the overfunctioner is the suburban mother who is both exhausted and complaining that “no one does any work around here!” In a subtle way, she is blocking herself from receiving the help she needs.

Underfunctioners are the opposite: they are laid-back, calm, easygoing but also rather absent. They go with the flow so much that they they are often seen as “not achieving their full potential.” Underfunctioners can neglect their share of communal work, and sometimes even fail to notice unfinished tasks. They are checked out and too content for their own good, like the proverbial teenager on the TV couch, groaning when their schoolwork is mentioned.¹

An illustration of sloth. Image source: Wikimedia

I am, or have a tendency to be, an underfunctioner. I know this because, in situations of danger, I have a way of keeping myself calm by telling myself that the driver is in control. When I have to make an enormous choice for my own life, I tend to freeze, paralyzed by the feeling of power over myself that is so acute, it seems almost inappropriate. I shouldn’t have this much reign over my life, some part of me thrums quietly. And then, when a deadline veers its draconic head, I kick into high gear, finally able to work because the steady buzz of fear is external enough to compel me.

My ambition is quiet and my fear is large, in terms of why I move.

I don’t write this, though, to open a doorway to self-critique. Certainly it must be noted that under capitalism, under our culture of valorizing industriousness for its own sake, it’s better to be an overfunctioner than an underfunctioner; in other words, society already has plenty of words of critique for folks like me. Plenty has already been said about laziness, in its apparently infinite forms (including sloth and acedia, two words for the deadly sin of it). I know these arguments all too well, and have even employed my fair share of digital quick-cures: apps that promise to help build habits, establish routines, discipline, focus.

But if anything, I have found my own iPhone interventions too mild. Living as we are in the shadow of James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the intellectual mood of the day feels oddly behaviourist — as though we are each foremost and fundamentally a collection of habits, painted over with a thin veneer of values and beliefs. This kind of thinking yields solutions that are almost exclusively dedicated to tracking tiny actions with apparently intrinsic value, like whether you completed your streak of brushing your teeth — and not at all to changing your mind about what is worth doing, and why. An unfortunate side effect of this is, if your laziness spawns from a genuine skepticism about what is worth doing in the first place, an app cannot help you do the thing. Said again: in order to benefit from the productivity apps, I had to already, on some level, find order beautiful.

But what if I don’t find order beautiful? (I didn’t, necessarily.) What if I find discipline rather flat, unappealing as an idea… and what if I find work itself ugly? (I do, much of the time.) What if I think that most forms of societally-approved doing are rote frivolities that scoff in the face of the sacred?

A herd of goats passing in the night, Karakoram Highway.

I was reminded of all of this on my recent trip to Pakistan, when the sempiternal critique of laziness once again entered the room. I was nursing an illicit gin and tonic in a new friend’s pool room, making small talk with a Pakistani textile businessman, when he said, “Pakistanis are genetically lazy.”

Nearly spitting out my drink, I did my best to swallow calmly and set it on the stool beside me. I crossed my legs and looked at him with what I hoped was an open, feminine leniency.

“Really,” I said quietly. “Why do you think that? You’re Pakistani yourself.”

He shrugged and sat back in his chair. He was drinking, I think, whiskey neat, swirling the drink around thoughtfully. Earlier he had been enjoying a cigar in the corner of the room, his wan face almost disappearing into his strange, self-satisfied smile.

He said, “I work with Pakistanis all the time for my business. They don’t like to work!”

My friend and host chimed in from the kitchen, “It’s true! Pakistanis are naturally lazy. It’s just who they are as people.”

He was Pakistani as well, though he had spent much of his adulthood in the United States, including in the Navy. Now that he had returned, it seemed to me that he saw his time in the American militia as a crucial marker of difference, as though he himself had become a rare product, manufactured in some faraway factory.

This host pulled up a chair and smiled at me. “Let me tell you a story,” he said.

The story he told me was this: as a young boy, he had been invited to the home of a rich family friend. This family friend was relatively wealthy, and as such, had at his disposal a coterie of servants, each assigned to various duties: cooking, guarding the house, cleaning, and so on. One day, the family friend had on his mind some trifling household task — say, to polish the family car, or take this or that appliance for repair. He told the nearest servant, who promptly promised it would be done, and gracefully vanished the way trained servants do.

My friend — then a child — was seated in the living room at the time, looking out the bay windows that overlooked the home owner’s grounds. As he watched, he saw the original servant cross the lawn and take up with the gardener. He exchanged a few words with the gardener, then the gardener hurried off — this time to speak with another servant. On and on this exchange went until, in its final instance, the youngest servant — a boy scarcely older than my friend himself — received the message and, with an air of scuttled pride, left the grounds entirely. As it turned out, the young boy ended up doing the task. The original servant returned and reported it had been done.

“So you see,” my friend concluded, “none of them wanted to do the work. Their first thought was to get someone else to do it — which is exactly how most Pakistanis act. That’s why when you try to get some paperwork done in this country you have no idea how long it will take. People just don’t want to do work.”²

A shopping mall in Islamabad.

I, of course, was deeply offended by this line of thinking. But I also wasn’t surprised. Despite the fact that I was hearing this story in Islamabad, on a glittering compound hidden away between open air cafés and mosques, it sounded eerily familiar. In fact, I had heard it before. “Filipinos are a lazy people” was what I had been told by Filipinos in hushed tones in 2019, when I travelled to the Philippines for work. At the time, I read this racist narrative as the noxious residue of colonial domination, but I was still discomfited to find it repeated by locals who I thought should know better.

It’s one thing to believe this when you consider yourself a superior race, but it’s wholly another to count yourself among the supposedly defective. What was going on?

As the night wore on, I had a chance to probe the thinking of my companions: Were there people who were not genetically lazy? Americans, one said. The Chinese, another said. How did they get that way? Culture. But culture wasn’t genetic, I pointed out. I also pointed out that they themselves were Pakistani, but considered themselves hardworking. At this, they shrugged. “This is an exception,” the host said.

He went on to say, “This spirit of actually doing things, making things happen, is so rare here that when I was building my rental business, I had to do so much of it myself. I designed the rental home myself for easy assembly, I hired drivers to transport the materials of the home on the Karakoram Highway, I had to get permits, local permission, buy land… at every stage the system resisted me. This place is not built for people who want to work.”

At this, something opened up in my understanding.

It seemed possible to me that, upon going to the Western world, so to speak, each of my interlocutors had internalized a certain set of values of what it meant to “get things done.” They themselves had submitted themselves to these values, mastered them. Now that they had come home, they couldn’t take this cultural lens off, they couldn’t stop using it to judge the people around them.

And yet, right under their noses, the real source of the problem was clear: the system simply wasn’t built to make so-called “hard work” worth it. Rewards were unpredictable and tenuous; political footholds disappeared as warring groups continued their never-ending turf war, as in Karachi. Nepotism and classism reigned supreme. Bribery was a key part of getting things done, as was plain old brute force via the mafia. My host friend knew all of this because he had had to navigate it in order to manifest his particular dream. And yet, he couldn’t recognize that the same conditions that he complained so vigorously about could be fully preventative for others — it was easier for him to chalk that up to character.

Parable of the Wheat and the Tares by Abraham Bloemaert. Source: Wikimedia

Laziness is rarely laziness; certainly not as we like to construct it: as some deformation of character, a flaw in an individual’s personality. Often what we call laziness is a entirely rational response to a set of conditions that mean working hard can in fact be more harmful than helpful. Or sometimes it is a cry for greater clarity or renewed meaning. In either case, laziness is better thought of as a trick of the light, a way we all too often explain away a valid response to a set of conditions that deserve our critical attention.

Call me idealistic, but I do believe in Marx’s revolutionary idea that it is in man’s nature to create things, and to work. What we long for, though, is not just any kind of work; it is labor that is unalienated: in which the products of our work go on to directly benefit those we care about, in ways that are both tangible and enduring. We imbue the world with meaning through our work; it is not our fundamental goal to stop working altogether. (And by “our” here, I mean human beings. The great anthro-we.)³

When we blame various social ills on laziness, we fall for a trap. We begin to frame systemic design failure as moral failure, and moral failure as essential, and inevitable. After all, if Pakistanis are genetically lazy, we might as well throw our hands up now and say they’ll never be able to solve their issues of drought, or their geopolitical tangles, or issues of violence against women. As scary as it is to see the system for what it is — a system, complete with laws, mores, protectors, defenders, cultural beliefs, values, religious practice, all interlocked — it’s only until we accept its enormity that we can begin to chip away at it. We built this, but we’re also outside of it. That’s why we can change it.

Finally, this: the insistence on laziness has one last problem. It comes with the assumption that the opposite of laziness — hard work — is a natural good. I wrote earlier that I didn’t find order particularly beautiful, that I didn’t find discipline particularly appealing. I think one reason is, it is too easy to hide inside the perfection of your diligence. We live in a culture that so celebrates hard work that to quote merely the unreasonable hours you worked this week — I worked 60 hours! Me, 80! — invites the adulation of strangers. We describe this as a work ethic, not-so-subtly aligning effort with morality.

But what if hard work isn’t necessarily good? What if hard work, when done blindly, or in an alienated fashion, is just… samsara, more of the same evil, the same grindstone that constructs this inadequate manmade world? Shouldn’t it matter what you are working on — and how you do the work, not merely how much of it there is?

In this I see an opening for the lazy, an invitation for our inaction to not merely be self-defeatingly anti. Underfunctioning, perhaps, can become a window to otherfunctioning: turning our energy willfully towards lusher ends. Yes, we must make a new world in the shell of the old. But we’ll see it first in daydreams, in the velvet space between acts.

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Thanks for reading Chasing the Sundog, the newsletter where we pry apart social norms lovingly, and try to create little snowglobes in the gaps. If you liked this post, you might like this other essay on my time in Pakistan. You might also like this essay on lucid dreaming. As always, here is the complete archive of past essays. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Acknowledgements

Daanish Shabbir has been my steadfast editor since this project started. He also invited me to Pakistan and insisted I pay attention. Without his keen eye, killer sense of humour and very very sharp mind in my life, I wouldn’t have essays at all, I would have a tangle of ideas I was taking to an early grave.

This post was also somewhat inspired by Molly Mielke’s essay “on courage,” which argued that we are suffering from a society-wide paucity of courage/ambition. I became very animated upon reading this because I vehemently disagreed; that disagreement (which you can read in the comments section) became one important germ of this essay.

1. To be clear, this is a relational dynamic, meaning that without overfunctioners, underfunctioners would not exist, and vice versa.

Counter-intuitively, when the overfunctioner is alone, they are often able to calm down and take stock of what actually needs to be done — which is usually less than what they had imagined, given their problematic appraisal of their loved ones as fundamentally incapable.

On the other hand, it’s usually only when the overfunctioner has left the picture that the underfunctioner can take stock of their own life, waking as it were to its actual conditions not as a matter of someone else’s critique (“You’re so slovenly!”) but as a matter of their own preferences and power to change (“Holy shit, I was living like this? I better clean up!”)

In their own ways, each casts the other in their imagination in a dance — as per Lerner’s favourite metaphor — in which they cannot escape their painful roles. The problem is essentially mental, in that it is rooted in belief: I believe you cannot; I believe you are so, and thus I believe I must act as I do.

2. Of course, as my friend d. pointed out after hearing this story, there’s more to this story than just laziness: it’s also a story about the “10,000 intersectional forms of inequality” that are at play in Pakistani society. Part of the wonder of the story is its air of mundanity, as though each servant is moving through a societal script that is constantly being co-written, determining who speaks with whom and who gets to assign whom which task. Of course, it is also societally determined — by these quietly agreed-upon forms of power — who has to do the work, in the end.

Another way to read the so-called laziness in Pakistani culture, then, is to think about the energy that goes into “invisible work”: the sussing out of rank, of proper procedure according to this complex set of overlapping privileges and positions in society. In other words, the apparently lazy guard at the door of the shopping mall isn’t simply lolling in the heat, but rather constantly calculating whom to stand on guard for, and in what way, and reserving his energy for an expenditure appropriate to the patterns of society itself. Contrast this with the way that automobile traffic works in much of North America, for example: we all know the rules — which are supposed to be absolute and true everywhere — and so we use this internalized knowledge of an apparent absolute as a way to stop paying attention to individual cars.

(Obviously, via the traffic example, this isn’t true everywhere because there is such thing as a “driving culture,” which is what makes driving in LA different from driving in NYC or Toronto. In a way, we can think of “driving culture” as the distance from this idealized, automated reality in which each person is essentially alone on the road, obeying rules that are also perfectly obeyed by others. It all occurs on a spectrum.)

3. This debate has somehow risen from the ashes recently, due to the so-called “Great Resignation” — the question of whether humans are essentially lazy or industrious. Why not neither? Why not look at, as so many leftist thinkers have urged us to do, the conditions that lead to an enormous wave of people deciding, seemingly independently of one another, that they would rather not work right now?