Where Does Laziness Come From?

Nov 3

Takeaway Points:

Everyone has periods of laziness - it’s part of being human.
Our brains have two thought systems: fast and slow. The fast system makes snap decisions that aren’t always the best option. The slow system makes smarter decisions, but is harder to access and sustain. This setup means that more often than not, people are using their fast brain and doing the minimum to get by, which can be classified as being lazy.
Work - any type of work including jobs, creative endeavors, or chores - is harder to do when it’s not comprehensive, meaningful, well-structrued, urgent, and stress-free. The lack of any of these qualities can lead to people avoiding that work.
People probably aren’t inherently lazy; there are environmental and situational factors that contribute to why we procrastinate or avoid doing “work.” If people take the time to examine why they’re being “lazy,” they’ll most likely realize the reasons behind their behavior.

I was an absolutely awful teenager. I tried to stay up all night to watch the late night cartoons on Adult Swim after my parents went to sleep, and I slept all day through many of my classes. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and without any motivation, my grades suffered. I was about as lazy as it was possible to be, and it was because I mostly just wanted to spend my time playing video games and watching anime, and not much else mattered.

This ended up leading to a terrible depressive period, and I eventually turned to exercise as a way to work my way out of it. Then, the structure that exercise gave me, turned into an overall for self-improvement, and I slowly began to dig myself out of the hole that I found myself in.

Today, I’m one of the hardest workers I know, and it’s mostly just because I actually enjoy it. I have a day job, a side job from the business I created by starting this blog, and plenty of other creative projects. I am in the process of actively learning two new languages. Meanwhile, I exercise daily for at least a couple of hours. In short, I’m about as busy as it’s possible to be.

More recently, I realized that I’ve been pushing myself too hard - and I took a step back and had to hire someone to help me. In short, I was addicted to being busy.

In the process of my own self-improvement journey, I became a personal trainer because I was interested in helping others, and in particular, helping them to accomplish the same things I had. But what I discovered along the way, is that it’s not really as simple as that.

The reality is that some people will pay for personal training sessions, only to never come back and actually use them. People will hire a trainer but then never follow the workouts. People will purchase a gym membership and then never return. It’s not as simple as “show someone what to do and they’ll do it”. In reality, people make irrational decisions all the time - and working around that irrationality, is an inherent part of being human.

My pursuit of self-improvement led me to the self-evident truth that people are often lazy and shortsighted. They’re anxious, neurotic, and self-focused. None of these things are necessarily faults - in many cases, they’re just a symptom of the human condition. And not just other people, of course, either - these things apply to EVERYBODY, myself included.

This further led me to wonder - why are people like this? What about us makes us so prone to errors in our judgment? And in particular - why are people, like I once was, sometimes very intensely lazy?

Thinking, Fast And Slow

I had a huge revelation when I read the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. It opened my eyes, and a lot of human behavior which was previously incomprehensible, suddenly fell into place.

The book analyses the neuroscience of how human beings make decisions, and it posits a two-brain model of cognitive behavior. The brain is made up of two primary systems - a “fast” system which is responsible for snap decision making, and a “slow” system which is responsible for sustained effort and longer term intellectual processes.

The fast system is responsible for everything that has to happen quickly. It makes snap judgments, acts by instinct, and is responsible for everything that has to be done in a short period of time. However, it’s also imprecise - it functions on speed and being “good enough” rather than being perfect, so it is often subject to errors of judgment. This is where a lot of the common cognitive biases (which I’ve written about before), tend to come in.

In contrast, the slow system is responsible for everything which requires greater precision. When I sit down to read a book, when I sit in front of the computer for a few hours doing some work, or when I’m meditating - these are all examples of the slow system in action. The slow system is a lot more accurate - but it’s also a lot more exhausting. As a result, our bodies don’t like to be in slow mode for too long, and we tend to get distracted.

Cognitive biases and logical fallacies arise in large part because we tend to let that fast brain take over and make decisions when the slow brain should really be doing the work - it’s not easy to do!

The fact that the slow brain requires more energy and focus, means that it’s not easily accessible. Our days are filled with distractions which can break us out of our slow brain activity and force us into fast brain activity. When we’re stressed, juggling a lot of responsibilities, or exhausted from a long day, our patience gets shorter and our fast brain takes over.

When the fast brain is in control, we can make impulsive decisions - buying a gym membership we know we aren’t going to use, because we insist that we actually will, this time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been convinced into buying something I didn’t really need, because a pushy salesman was able to convince me. The decisions our fast brains make aren’t always guided by logic, and that’s a normal part of being human.

Laziness

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a pretty out there hypothesis: I’m not sure if laziness exists.

I don’t mean this in the sense that sometimes we don’t want to do things. I mean this in the sense that I don’t think that there are very many people out there, in the entire world, who are just inherently lazy. I think that everyone is lazy, and it just happens that some people are placed into situations in which they aren’t setup to succeed - and as a result, laziness manifests. This doesn’t make laziness an inherent part of that person’s personality - it makes laziness a condition that they experience as a result of their circumstances.

When I was a kid, I was lazy because I didn’t see the point of schooling. I was a generally smart kid, and had always been told that from the beginning. As a result, I developed a bit of a superiority complex, and I became, for lack of a better descriptor, a huge dick about it. I considered myself better than my peers. I didn’t have to try very hard to pass classes, so I didn’t. I didn’t see any value in trying to excel, because I didn’t see what I would get out of it - I mainly cared about video games, and extra time studying was extra time I would miss out on using to play video games. So, my laziness was a result of my ordering my life in order to optimize for more time spent playing video games, which is just what was important for me at the time.

Likewise, when I experience laziness in the present, it usually doesn’t happen just randomly. It still happens all the time - I’m just better at recognizing it, and knowing to analyze it and identify where it comes from.

Very often, there are very obvious, concrete reasons when I stop to think about it. I bought a new video game recently, and I would rather be playing it than working right now. Maybe the work task that I have for the time being, is one that I particularly dislike. Maybe, I simply don’t know what to do next - a common occurrence when your work is not structured to give you the info you need, or when you’re learning a new skill but don’t know what the next step is to drive you further.

In particular, I think back often to the time that I was a teen and trying to find a summer job. I had already found a job (working as a caddy at a local golf course) but that was mostly on the weekends, so I needed something more traditional to do during the week.

But looking for a job was painful. I’ve always been an anxious person, and new people and new places just inherently make me anxious. Going into businesses and asking if they’re hiring was about as bad as it was possible to be for me, and it spiked my anxiety terribly. Sometimes, I would tell my parents I was looking for jobs, but I would just get in the car, drive to a parking lot somewhere, sit around for an hour or two, and then go home and lie and say that I’d looked for jobs.

But at the time, I didn’t even know that I was dealing with anxiety - and so instead, I was unable to call it that. I rationalized it away. I told myself that I was lazy. I felt awful. This only made things worse. Later, I got lucky and finally managed to find a job this way, but it took a lot of trial and error to get there, and a lot of anxiety. My life also got better when internet job posting became more of the norm, and I could simply apply online.

The reason I’m so productive nowadays, isn’t even because I’ve become somehow inherently “more productive” or “less lazy” - it’s just that I enjoy the work that I do. Writing for this blog is genuinely fun, and I enjoy getting better at it and improving my writing over time. The same can be said for the YouTube videos I make, and the fiction writing that I do. All this work is incredibly meaningful to me, and so it’s easy to focus on and often doesn’t feel like work.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that it never feels like work. There are plenty of things about running this business that I don’t like doing, and that I have put off as much as possible. Luckily, I’m also at the point where I can simply hire people to help out - which has made a huge difference, especially when dealing with those tasks that I simply don’t like, and which formerly would have held me back. Relying on others for the stuff that you hate doing, can help quite a bit.

Productivity

The end result is that there are probably some people who are simply “lazy” - but I think a lot more of them simply don’t have work which is:

Comprehensible - You understand every element of what needs to be done, without any confusion
Meaningful - You care about the work at hand, and see the value in completing it. Your goals and incentives are aligned with the completion of this work. You are compensated well for your work.
Well-structured - Your work is structured in such a way that it can be done - you are not waiting on others to complete tasks first, you have all the tools you need, and you have the requisite skills to do so.
Urgent - The work is structured around some kind of time limit (artificial or natural) rather than being completely open-ended.
Stress Free - The work is not accompanied with excessive stressors, which could include anxiety triggers, overbearing bosses, shifting task requirements, asks which go against your moral beliefs, unpredictable customer behavior, etc.

That last one is a huge one - because very often, many jobs are simply not structured in a way that they can be stress free. Often, the problem is not that someone hates work, or is lazy - it is simply that the kinds of jobs and work they can find are structured in a hostile or stressful way.

The first job that I found after that stressful job hunt, was a job working the cash register at a nearby Arby’s. It was easily the most stressful job I’ve ever had. I had a racist boss, a massive number of tasks to complete on each shift, volatile customers who would yell at me if they didn’t think their fries were fresh enough, and the fact that I wasn’t permitted to sit down at any point during my shift. On night shifts, I had to clean out the grease traps before I could leave - a disgusting task which often took much longer because customers would constantly try to drive in and order at the last possible minute before we closed. That was an intensely stressful job - but I managed to stay at it for a few years, because I needed the money, and the prospect of job hunting again, felt even worse.

In many jobs, employees also don’t have much of a reason to overperform. No matter whether you do your job well or poorly, you get paid the same amount. If you somehow bring in more business to the company, you don’t see a penny of the profit. As a result, you don’t have any incentive to improve the business. Your primary incentive is to do whatever bare minimum you can, in order to ensure that you don’t get fired. If you particularly like that job for some reason, that might provide some motivation to go above and beyond, but that’s about it.

I was never a particularly productive person in university. I had a general motivation to succeed at my classes because I had developed a stronger love of learning since high school, and because I had self-selected the courses that I was inherently interested in. But there was only a certain amount of work to do - and when that was done, I just wanted to go back to playing video games and hanging out with my friends, dating, and so on.

I wasn’t a particularly productive person when I started my career. I was a personal trainer, and while I could spend time trying to wander the gym and make sales, this was an anxiety-inducing and generally ineffective way to do it. Instead, most sales came from the initial onboarding sessions the gym offered free to new members, and I simply focused on those.

Likewise, when I had a job as a gym manager, I loved it. I had to show up at certain times, and there was a set list of tasks to do each day, but aside from those, I was basically just required to sit at the desk and be prepared to help with any issues that came up. I spent most of my free time reading books, watching Netflix, or otherwise goofing around. I had no reason to go above and beyond - there wasn’t even anything meaningful that I could really do if I wanted to, that would significantly help that gym to succeed. All I could do was ensure that it ran smoothly.

The huge shift happened when I started my blog - and with it, I had a potentially limitless source of new work that followed all of the above criteria. Each new blog post helped find new clients, and each new client would raise my income. There was minimal stress, and everything was clear cut and easy to follow. In short, it was the ideal kind of work - and that’s when, for the first time in my life, things just clicked. I became a workaholic, because I had the right kind of work available to me. I found myself writing blog posts in my free time at work, at home in front of the TV, and so on.

I’m a terribly busy person today - but most of that busy-ness comes from the fact that I’m pursuing self-directed projects. I know what I need to do, I know how to do it, it’s stress free, an the benefit is clear.

What Is The Source Of Laziness?

At the end of the day, I’m not a neuroscientist, and I’m no expert on human psychology. However, I think that it’s clear that humans are not robots - we don’t always act up to our own expectations, and we often make mistakes.

Laziness, I think, arises from a combination of human fallibility, and a lack of well-constructed work. Sometimes, this is just the nature of the kind of work that we do. Other times, yes, there are probably things that we can do, in order to better order our lives and improve our ability to do further work in the future. But, I think that a lot more of what causes laziness, is situational, or environmental, than we’d like to admit.

Recognizing this fact, we can work around it. We can work to identify the causes of our laziness with respect to a certain task, and use this to make informed decisions. We can work to change our work, so that it’s less likely to be laziness-inducing in the future. I’ll admit also that it helps to work for yourself - because when you do, there’s always more work to do, and it will always feel meaningful and valuable.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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