Are you lazy, or is the world ending and it's making you sleepy?

Burnout, "Laziness Does Not Exist," and getting the rest you need.

When the next revolution comes, we’ll all be caught napping.

Let me rephrase that: the next revolution will come because we’ll all be napping. Global systems will fall apart as we snuggle under blankets. Highways will sit empty at rush hour while we open our windows so the room gets nice and cold and then huddle underneath our fluffy comforters in a tiny warm cave with our phones, tablets, and computers to watch episodes of Archer or Real Housewives for the 700th time. Mail will pile up underneath our mail slots, our bosses texts will go unanswered, and slowly, inexorably, this shitty system that’s destroying our planet will fall apart because we’re just too goddamn sleepy to keep it running anymore.

Eventually, when the electricity dies out and we’ve gone weeks without hearing anything from Donald Trump or Mark Zuckerberg or the brainworm that calls the shots inside RFK Jr.’s skull, we’ll all wake up, realize that we’re suddenly feeling okay, and we’ll take that first great step towards rebuilding civilization: we’ll put on pants. Or maybe we won’t! Maybe there’s no pants in our bright, shining future. We’ll cross the pants bridge when the idea of bridge-crossing no longer induces in us spells of ear-popping yawns.

If any part of you thinks this plan sounds appealing, it might be because you are burned the fuck out. You might be burned out because your job is meaningless and your boss sucks and you hate work you once loved. It may be because you are the parents of small children in a dying world. It may be because you have an internet connection and see all of the world’s suffering through a screen that sits next to your bed every day. Some of the suffering may even be paid for by your tax dollars, or is done by the hands of your elected officials which means that, in a way, the suffering is your fault. It may be because beautiful cities are burning to ash, or are being swept away by the sea, at the hands of a system that only benefits people you intensely dislike. It may be because you have been dealing with dysfunctional relationships for years and just can’t anymore. It may be because you have a chronic illness, or lingering trauma, or a broken heart.

Whatever the reason for your burnout, you are also probably saying, “this is all bad, and it is clearly all my fault. If I were less lazy, this would not be happening.” You are probably saying that because this attitude is deeply pervasive in western — particularly American — culture. I am happy to tell you that the idea that you are lazy is bullshit, and you deserve a nap. Go take one now — the rest of the article can wait until you’ve had one. The internet is not, sadly, going to blink off just yet.

“Laziness Does Not Exist”

In 2018, social psychologist Devon Price published an article titled “Laziness Does Not Exist” on Medium that went viral. The article argued that what we usually understand as “laziness” is actually a body’s normal response to intense stress or pressure. Specifically in the context of homelessness, Price argues that behaviors we usually deem as “lazy” are actually for a good reason: if you spent all day being homeless, for example, and then had to go sleep at night in the cold under a bridge, you might understandably want to use some of the money you begged for to get a goddamn drink or a smoke to take the edge off:

A lot of homeless people have to navigate bureaucracies constantly, interfacing with social workers, case workers, police officers, shelter staff, Medicaid staff, and a slew of charities both well-meaning and condescending. It’s a lot of fucking work to be homeless. And when a homeless or poor person runs out of steam and makes a “bad decision,” there’s a damn good reason for it.

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context.

You yourself have likely experienced this, albeit maybe in a lower-stakes context: you’ve lived through a day that got on top of you, and while you know that what you should do is meditate, exercise, go outside and touch grass or whatever, you instead choose self-destructive behaviors. You get drunk, you get high, you text an ex, you spend 17 hours playing Sid Meier’s Civilization V. The next day, you are even more worn out because of what you did the day before, and maybe you aren’t on the top of your game at work, at parenting, at doing basic household chores. In America, we are taught that these days where we aren’t firing on all cylinders are laziness, and that it is our own fault that things aren’t going well.

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Price later turned the article into a 2021 book in which he debunks what he calls “the Laziness Lie.” The Laziness Lie is the belief that our worth is measured by our productivity, and that anyone who is not successful has only themselves to blame. This lie is rooted in America’s Puritanical origins:

The Puritans had long believed that if a person was a hard worker, it was a sign that God had chosen them for salvation. Hard work was believed to improve who you were as a person. Conversely, if a person couldn’t focus on the task at hand or couldn’t self-motivate, that was a sign they had already been damned. This meant, of course, that there was no need to feel sympathy who struggled or failed to meet their responsibilities. By lacking the drive to succeed, they were displaying to the world that God hadn’t chosen them for heaven.

These ideas, incidentally, provided a really useful motivational tool for the rich slaveowners and capitalists who needed their slaves, indentured servants, or wage slaves to work hard so that they could make enormous amounts of money. By tying hard work to religious understandings of salvation, they were making “hard work” something that God was asking for, rather than something they were exploiting for their own economic gain.

American Christianity vs. "My body, my choice."

As I’ve written elsewhere, America’s Puritanical form of Christianity has taught us not to trust our bodies when they say “I’m tired, I’m exhausted, I need a goddamn nap.” Instead, we believe that we are lazy, and this is a sign that we are damned to hell. Even if you don’t believe in God, Hell, or even capitalism anymore, you have likely still internalized this idea that you are somehow inferior for needing a rest.

Ending the “Stress Cycle”

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In Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s excellent Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, they discuss the way that human bodies evolved to respond to stress. When we were living in small tribes out on the savannah, we would get stressed, for example, when we were being chased by a lion. If this happened, there were one of two options:

1. You get caught and are eaten, and therefore stress is no longer a problem.

2. You escape, are happy about it, and therefore stress is no longer a problem.

In modern life, though, our stressors are not things we can necessarily escape from — there’s no point where we’re able to “escape” a shitty boss, or a bad relationship, or climate change. The stress cycle, as the Nagoskis call it, simply never completes for most modern stressors. What this means is that most days, our bodies are holding onto years, even decades, of accumulated stress. This is not good for a body. It increases blood pressure, it wears you out a lot quicker, and if you get stressed enough over a long period of time, it will kill you. This is a shame, as stress is designed to keep you alive. It’s supposed to be a survival mechanism, but if we’re in survival mode all the time, it will slowly kill us.

The Nagoskis point out that one thing we have to do to complete the stress cycle is to do what we did back on the savannah: run. The single best way for our bodies to cope with stress is to move, preferably with some intensity, with some regularity. This movement signals to our body that the stressor has been evaded, and that we are safe.

The problem here, of course, is that this is not how physical exercise was ever framed to any of us. For years, I thought physical activity wasn’t for me because the only exercise offered to a young man from the American Midwest was competitive sports, which I fucking hated and wasn’t very good at. The only other reason to exercise was to lose weight and look a certain unattainable way, which, it turned out, was a terrible way to motivate me to exercise regularly, because it was really hard and took a long time before I could see any real benefits¹.

Only in recent years, when I got into yoga as a form of non-competitive physical activity, did I realize that exercise actually could be for me. And even then, long after I had reframed exercise as a form of self-care, I continued to push myself too hard with intense daily routines. I’d pull a muscle and be thrown off my routine for weeks on end, or I’d get so exhausted trying to keep up the pace that I’d give up and feel like a failure. We’ve been so thoroughly taught to not listen to our bodies when they are tired, when they are hungry, when they want something nice, that when we finally do start paying attention to them, we are like Lennie with the puppy in Of Mice and Men.

Get some goddamn rest

The Nagoskis point out that dealing with the stress and dealing with the stressor are two fundamentally different things. We do not have the luxury of only being stressed by attacking lions anymore, we instead have complex, difficult problems that can’t ever be fully escaped.

But we do need to actually take care of the stress. We do need to get some rest. We do need to be a whole lot kinder to ourselves and others when we are burned out, exhausted, and doing our absolute best to stay afloat in a world that is not designed for human flourishing.

The problems of the world seem incredibly pressing, to the extent that it feels like if we take a break for ourselves it’s irresponsible. The work that we’re doing may be extremely urgent, but a mindset that teaches you that the only thing that’s valuable is your output, your ability to change the world around you, is exactly the problem with the world as it is. If we take that with us into the new one, what are we fighting for?

It seems to me that most people who are involved in activism, in politics, or in any sort of transformative work are trying to get to a world where we’re allowed to just enjoy our lives, where we’re allowed to relax. But most of these people do not allow themselves the same luxury. The enormity of the world’s suffering has convinced most of us that we need to strip all of the joy out of our lives so that we can end the suffering. This is a faulty calculation: if you want there to be more joy and happiness out there in the world, then you need to make more space for joy and happiness in your own life.

Take care of yourself. If you’re not sleepy, help out someone who is. We all need naps. Just give it a fucking rest.

1. Worth noting here: I am a dude, and I got so much less of the body-shaming that literally every single woman of my generation got. The Nagoskis spend a good chunk of their book looking at how modern burnout hits women hardest.