I struggled through high school, and then struggled through my bachelor's degree. Some teachers were empathetic and understanding, others were not. After getting my bachelor's degree, I struggled to find work in my field and eventually gave up. I found that the jobs where I did best were jobs others looked down on--minimum wage, heavy manual labor. People told me I was wasting my degree and my potential... and yet, the manual labor actually made me happy. Recently, I found out I've been dealing with undiagnosed, untreated ADHD all my life... and got my degree in spite of it. The manual labor works for me so well because it works my body and mind in ways that overcome executive dysfunction.... what I've thought of as "laziness" almost all my life. I still wish I felt more able to function in better-paying jobs, but at least now, I don't look down on MYSELF, regardless of what other people think.
Hello Vickie, I've never known any specific reasons why a person working in a 'manual labour' job would enjoy it. Thank you for sharing your experience! How do you see other types of jobs helping people with ADHD or otherwise overcome executive dysfunction?
Thank you for expressing so well what I try to practice and teach as someone who works with learners. This is a landmark piece. Trevor Noah once remarked that “context [rather than content] is king.” You’ve provided an expanded and comprehensible explanation of what lies beyond that statement.
I just got stuck into this book and it's as eye-opening to me as when I read Big Magic. It's not that the ideas in Big Magic were new to me, I just thought I was alone in believing them.
That's how I feel reading your book. And it's so clear that the lie is propagated because of our failure as a society to address the damage done by slavery. And therefore we all continue to be enslaved and indentured.
Found you on Amie and James' podcast and I'm so glad. Thank you for this book!
I've been writing my own dissection of social attitudes around laziness as part of a larger piece critiquing work from an anticapitalist environmentalist perspective and just wanted to let you know that your writing has played a big influence on my own. When "Laziness Does Not Exist" was published I was extremely excited - I was already doing my best to refute these attitudes on the job when I encountered them every day, but the book gave me a direction to point people towards. Thanks for your valuable work.
Me too. It's become clear to me since the 2024 election that this corrupt idea of work and productivity has roots in fascism. On the gates of Auschwitz was written, (the English translation) "work shall set you free". That was a lie.
I wonder why this essay doesn't didn't get more attention! I loved the idea you've defended here; it gave me a boost to keep doing my things, despite the insecurity and guilt 🤗 Thank you for this!
I confess that I've just started reading the book, but I guess that the idea is: if I react so weird that I just do nothing for hours and, in my case, for many years (not working), it means that my workload or burden is too high. And it is my responsibility that I do not do any change. In my case, this is how I participate in the life of my Mom, which makes me unable to function.
Vlad, not necessarily. Finish the book, it's an important work. And I encourage you to continue looking into what laziness means (or doesn't mean).
I don't believe people are lazy, because children will spend 12 hours in a day playing lego or whatever calls to them. Retired people are similar, they get so involved and energized by devoting themselves to something when there is no need for an income from it.
There is nobility in what we do, but our association with effort and work and duty has been twisted by society under-valuing art, overvaluing production, and putting heroes on a pedestal (the famous artist, athletes, scientists, etc.)
We in the West have a distorted view of work because of the unspoken messaging around it. Hard work means you don't want to do it, so why are we doing it? If you like something, you don't do it hard, to quote Sadhguru. You do it with intensity, there is a difference. Find it.
Andrew, thank you so much for your reply, so beautiful. I have so much to get done… I want to try now to recall two words, as often as I can: “financial freedom”. Why am I doing this, or that?… [Because this is a way to a] financial freedom…
Vlad, I don't know about you, but the first 2 chapters of the book hit me the hardest. I finished the whole thing, but they really resonated the most. I know you have (or feel like you have) a lot to do but I highly recommend you get that far in the book. Come back to it later if you have to. You can do it in an afternoon on the weekend or an evening after work
Thank you for this. I had started to come to this line of thought, but reading your explanation really helped. It's a struggle to not only receive the negative judgements of others, but to impose that same criticism on yourself.
I understand the impulse behind this piece, and the corrective it offers is genuinely valuable. We do over-moralize behavior and under-examine context. But the central empirical claim doesn't hold up.
The assertion that "situational constraints typically predict behavior far better than personality" is not well supported by the meta-analytic evidence. Mischel's original review found that personality correlates with behavior at around r = .30–.40 — modest, but not negligible. What's less often acknowledged is that situational variables don't fare better. The average effect size of situational factors in social psychology experiments is around r = .21, actually smaller than personality's range. Personality variables can predict behavioral criteria with accuracy likely to be correct roughly twice as often as wrong.
The honest summary is that situational and personality factors are roughly equivalent in predictive power -- and that they predict different things. Situational variables are more conclusive for specific behaviors in specific moments. Personality is more descriptive of patterns across situations and over time. So, if procrastination appears in one context, situational variables may be the right lens. If it appears across many contexts regardless of circumstance, personality, values, and biographical experience carry more weight. These are not competing explanations -- they are complementary ones, operating at different levels of analysis.
A holistic account of behavior requires holding context, role, personality, values, and experience together. To do otherwise is to set aside what Bowlby tells us about attachment, what developmental psychology tells us about early experience, what evolutionary biology tells us about motivation, and what personality psychology has built over a century of careful measurement. That's a lot to discount in service of a single-variable argument.
Your own examples make this point inadvertently. The student with mental illness, the procrastinator with anxiety, the person with executive functioning challenges, the neurodivergent learner -- these are not situational factors. They are individual-level clinical and dispositional variables. Invoking them while rhetorically insisting that context explains everything is smuggling personality and experience in through the clinical back door.
There's also a conflation here between explaining behavior and judging it. Those are different questions. You can hold both of these simultaneously — in fact, you have to, if you want an accurate model of people: "don't judge people as morally weak" and "personality, values, and biographical experience shape behavior." The Fundamental Attribution Error is real, and you're right that we over-index on character when explaining others' behavior. But the corrective to that error is not to swing to the opposite extreme — it's to hold context and person together, which is where the evidence has always pointed.
I was sent this article by a friend when i beat myself up for being "lazy", and told me "laziness doesnt exist" (which i believe is false, but i read the article) and the two main types of laziness talked about here (anxiety about attempts failing and confusion on the forst steps to take) just.. arent my type of laziness, im more lazy in a "I need to work but i dont wanna let's play a game instead"
One of my friends also told me i could have adhd, and i started comparing my symptoms, they're pretty similar, but i dont think i truly have adhd, and the fact that i think i do just makes me even lazier.
I'm late to this but I think there’s always a “why” behind what you do. “But I don’t wanna” could be because your brain cannot see any source of reward or basically any point in meaningless work. People with ADHD have dysfunctioning dopamine receptors - the neurotransmitter that rewards you for doing work. If you don’t get any reward, your brain thinks what’s the point? You may not have ADHD specifically, but it’s helpful to accommodate yourself as if you do. Personally I just force feed myself dopamine with like. Sugar. I talk on call with someone while I work. I play music while I work. Anything to stimulate my brain and create an external source of dopamine (reward) so that my brain sees a point in pointless work.
Other accommodation strategies is like, gameifying the task (speedrun this/we'll race to finish this, etc.) or doing super easy peasy stuff first or doing something not related to the task like cleaning your room (which will get you into Doing stuff mode anyway)
So hey! Thank ya for answering and it's fine lol, what's magical on the internet is that there's no such concept of "late".
So i have tried putting on music or stuff while working But it doesnt help me stay on it at all... i just know i can get those rewards without doing any of the stuff needed (i can just feed myself cubes of sugar without having to work for it first) ((yes i eat raw cubes of sugar))
I've also tried gameifying my work but it.. doesnt work. And cleaning my room (or any other productive task) make me productive as long as i dont start hw or stuff like that
I see, yeah. I think you’re just going to have to test out more things to find what works for you. Did the ADHD thing ever go anywhere, because there’s also (potentially) medication as an option if you do get tested as having ADHD.
My parents think "oh yeah adhd is only like people who have bad grades and stuff" when.. i dont? But idk dude i aint askin them for an adhd test i'll js figure out myself when i'm 18
Same here 💔 I have good grades as well and I did at least influence my parents enough to ask my physician but their first question was about school and we ended up waving the whole thing off as “you don't need meds” and “you don't want that on your medical record”
I struggled through high school, and then struggled through my bachelor's degree. Some teachers were empathetic and understanding, others were not. After getting my bachelor's degree, I struggled to find work in my field and eventually gave up. I found that the jobs where I did best were jobs others looked down on--minimum wage, heavy manual labor. People told me I was wasting my degree and my potential... and yet, the manual labor actually made me happy. Recently, I found out I've been dealing with undiagnosed, untreated ADHD all my life... and got my degree in spite of it. The manual labor works for me so well because it works my body and mind in ways that overcome executive dysfunction.... what I've thought of as "laziness" almost all my life. I still wish I felt more able to function in better-paying jobs, but at least now, I don't look down on MYSELF, regardless of what other people think.
Hello Vickie, I've never known any specific reasons why a person working in a 'manual labour' job would enjoy it. Thank you for sharing your experience! How do you see other types of jobs helping people with ADHD or otherwise overcome executive dysfunction?
Thank you for expressing so well what I try to practice and teach as someone who works with learners. This is a landmark piece. Trevor Noah once remarked that “context [rather than content] is king.” You’ve provided an expanded and comprehensible explanation of what lies beyond that statement.
I just got stuck into this book and it's as eye-opening to me as when I read Big Magic. It's not that the ideas in Big Magic were new to me, I just thought I was alone in believing them.
That's how I feel reading your book. And it's so clear that the lie is propagated because of our failure as a society to address the damage done by slavery. And therefore we all continue to be enslaved and indentured.
Found you on Amie and James' podcast and I'm so glad. Thank you for this book!
I've been writing my own dissection of social attitudes around laziness as part of a larger piece critiquing work from an anticapitalist environmentalist perspective and just wanted to let you know that your writing has played a big influence on my own. When "Laziness Does Not Exist" was published I was extremely excited - I was already doing my best to refute these attitudes on the job when I encountered them every day, but the book gave me a direction to point people towards. Thanks for your valuable work.
Me too. It's become clear to me since the 2024 election that this corrupt idea of work and productivity has roots in fascism. On the gates of Auschwitz was written, (the English translation) "work shall set you free". That was a lie.
I wonder why this essay doesn't didn't get more attention! I loved the idea you've defended here; it gave me a boost to keep doing my things, despite the insecurity and guilt 🤗 Thank you for this!
I confess that I've just started reading the book, but I guess that the idea is: if I react so weird that I just do nothing for hours and, in my case, for many years (not working), it means that my workload or burden is too high. And it is my responsibility that I do not do any change. In my case, this is how I participate in the life of my Mom, which makes me unable to function.
Vlad, not necessarily. Finish the book, it's an important work. And I encourage you to continue looking into what laziness means (or doesn't mean).
I don't believe people are lazy, because children will spend 12 hours in a day playing lego or whatever calls to them. Retired people are similar, they get so involved and energized by devoting themselves to something when there is no need for an income from it.
There is nobility in what we do, but our association with effort and work and duty has been twisted by society under-valuing art, overvaluing production, and putting heroes on a pedestal (the famous artist, athletes, scientists, etc.)
We in the West have a distorted view of work because of the unspoken messaging around it. Hard work means you don't want to do it, so why are we doing it? If you like something, you don't do it hard, to quote Sadhguru. You do it with intensity, there is a difference. Find it.
Andrew, thank you so much for your reply, so beautiful. I have so much to get done… I want to try now to recall two words, as often as I can: “financial freedom”. Why am I doing this, or that?… [Because this is a way to a] financial freedom…
Vlad, I don't know about you, but the first 2 chapters of the book hit me the hardest. I finished the whole thing, but they really resonated the most. I know you have (or feel like you have) a lot to do but I highly recommend you get that far in the book. Come back to it later if you have to. You can do it in an afternoon on the weekend or an evening after work
I've made some progress...
Thank you for this. I had started to come to this line of thought, but reading your explanation really helped. It's a struggle to not only receive the negative judgements of others, but to impose that same criticism on yourself.
I understand the impulse behind this piece, and the corrective it offers is genuinely valuable. We do over-moralize behavior and under-examine context. But the central empirical claim doesn't hold up.
The assertion that "situational constraints typically predict behavior far better than personality" is not well supported by the meta-analytic evidence. Mischel's original review found that personality correlates with behavior at around r = .30–.40 — modest, but not negligible. What's less often acknowledged is that situational variables don't fare better. The average effect size of situational factors in social psychology experiments is around r = .21, actually smaller than personality's range. Personality variables can predict behavioral criteria with accuracy likely to be correct roughly twice as often as wrong.
The honest summary is that situational and personality factors are roughly equivalent in predictive power -- and that they predict different things. Situational variables are more conclusive for specific behaviors in specific moments. Personality is more descriptive of patterns across situations and over time. So, if procrastination appears in one context, situational variables may be the right lens. If it appears across many contexts regardless of circumstance, personality, values, and biographical experience carry more weight. These are not competing explanations -- they are complementary ones, operating at different levels of analysis.
A holistic account of behavior requires holding context, role, personality, values, and experience together. To do otherwise is to set aside what Bowlby tells us about attachment, what developmental psychology tells us about early experience, what evolutionary biology tells us about motivation, and what personality psychology has built over a century of careful measurement. That's a lot to discount in service of a single-variable argument.
Your own examples make this point inadvertently. The student with mental illness, the procrastinator with anxiety, the person with executive functioning challenges, the neurodivergent learner -- these are not situational factors. They are individual-level clinical and dispositional variables. Invoking them while rhetorically insisting that context explains everything is smuggling personality and experience in through the clinical back door.
There's also a conflation here between explaining behavior and judging it. Those are different questions. You can hold both of these simultaneously — in fact, you have to, if you want an accurate model of people: "don't judge people as morally weak" and "personality, values, and biographical experience shape behavior." The Fundamental Attribution Error is real, and you're right that we over-index on character when explaining others' behavior. But the corrective to that error is not to swing to the opposite extreme — it's to hold context and person together, which is where the evidence has always pointed.
I was sent this article by a friend when i beat myself up for being "lazy", and told me "laziness doesnt exist" (which i believe is false, but i read the article) and the two main types of laziness talked about here (anxiety about attempts failing and confusion on the forst steps to take) just.. arent my type of laziness, im more lazy in a "I need to work but i dont wanna let's play a game instead"
One of my friends also told me i could have adhd, and i started comparing my symptoms, they're pretty similar, but i dont think i truly have adhd, and the fact that i think i do just makes me even lazier.
What uh do you think?
I'm late to this but I think there’s always a “why” behind what you do. “But I don’t wanna” could be because your brain cannot see any source of reward or basically any point in meaningless work. People with ADHD have dysfunctioning dopamine receptors - the neurotransmitter that rewards you for doing work. If you don’t get any reward, your brain thinks what’s the point? You may not have ADHD specifically, but it’s helpful to accommodate yourself as if you do. Personally I just force feed myself dopamine with like. Sugar. I talk on call with someone while I work. I play music while I work. Anything to stimulate my brain and create an external source of dopamine (reward) so that my brain sees a point in pointless work.
Other accommodation strategies is like, gameifying the task (speedrun this/we'll race to finish this, etc.) or doing super easy peasy stuff first or doing something not related to the task like cleaning your room (which will get you into Doing stuff mode anyway)
So hey! Thank ya for answering and it's fine lol, what's magical on the internet is that there's no such concept of "late".
So i have tried putting on music or stuff while working But it doesnt help me stay on it at all... i just know i can get those rewards without doing any of the stuff needed (i can just feed myself cubes of sugar without having to work for it first) ((yes i eat raw cubes of sugar))
I've also tried gameifying my work but it.. doesnt work. And cleaning my room (or any other productive task) make me productive as long as i dont start hw or stuff like that
I see, yeah. I think you’re just going to have to test out more things to find what works for you. Did the ADHD thing ever go anywhere, because there’s also (potentially) medication as an option if you do get tested as having ADHD.
My parents think "oh yeah adhd is only like people who have bad grades and stuff" when.. i dont? But idk dude i aint askin them for an adhd test i'll js figure out myself when i'm 18
Same here 💔 I have good grades as well and I did at least influence my parents enough to ask my physician but their first question was about school and we ended up waving the whole thing off as “you don't need meds” and “you don't want that on your medical record”
This is one of my favorite essays and has been for years. I revisit it and with each reading, it leaves me with something new to ponder about.
I'm also a therapist who works with disabled and neurodivergent folks and I send this to my clients very often!