Rambling

Book Thoughts: Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit. The following may have a lot of quotes and random commentary. Commentary is marked in darker blue. I actually got to get on a call with my friend for this email, so I've added notes from our discussion as well.

Original Sent Date: August 9, 2024


I got assigned this book by my therapist, probably because I have endless guilt about my productivity (this is part of what got me diagnosed with a PD, naturally.) Reading this book I started wondering whether most of the people mentioned in this book as vignettes would also qualify as having OCPD. Insert spiel about how PDs are a super flawed category.

Okay also why does this ebook not have a table of contents. I have to flip through the whole thing to write this summary? Man.

Notable things mentioned in this book:

  1. People who look like they're not doing very much are often doing the most they can, just a lot of their energy is allotted to surviving physically or emotionally. When you don't get someone's behavior, it's probably because you're missing their context. One of the examples given was about someone who got high/drunk to prevent themself from suicide. Where it's not a great choice but it makes sense in context.

    Also gives examples of how much you have to deal with when you're homeless, and how much energy it takes to survive and heal from depression because the body is constantly fighting negative thoughts and feelings all day. Procrastinating is about not wanting to fail (and thus trying to delay that feeling) or executive dysfunction. The book argues that people who are just apathetic about certain tasks have also been failed somewhere, because whatever they're being taught or having to do doesn't seem to have relevance to their lives and what they care about, or the overly controlling environment stifles their autonomy. Depression and trauma can also play a role in making people apathetic.

In so many cases, what we call “laziness” is actually a person coping with a ton of challenges and attempting to set priorities based on their needs. When a person is pushed to their limit, supposedly “lazy” feelings and behaviors tend to pop up. Apathy, low motivation, an inability to focus, a desire to “waste time” doing “nothing”—these are all valuable warning signs. They can teach us a great deal about our limits and needs. However, in order to benefit from this highly evolved, dynamic warning system, we have to learn to stop writing it off as inexcusable “laziness.”

Handy list of questions to ask yourself when you find yourself judging someone:


  1. The book is really big on listening to your body's signals and accepting that you need to rest. And accepting that you simply aren't going to get as much done or be as productive. Because when you don't listen to these signals it eventually catches up to you in burnout / physical illness.

    This happened to me too, even though I've never succeeded in properly earning money due to my debilitating social anxiety. I experienced pure pain and nausea in migraines for the first time when I was doing an extremely underpaying job, not necessarily because it was extremely taxing (though it literally set up what was essentially spyware on my computer to track whether my mouse was moving and whatnot) but because I had a ton of anxiety and I was trying to limit my sleep to get all the other things I wanted to get done in a day. Migraines like that plagued me every month and took me out of commission for at least 8 hours at a time. I got specialized medication for it, but since I quit and (currently) gave up on controlling my sleep, I don't experience those types of migraine attacks anymore. Migraines are my body's way of warning me to chill the fuck out, and well, it's working. Honestly the worst pain I've felt in my life so I don't want to go back. The downside is just that I feel like I'm a failure all the time.


  1. But the book also says that you shouldn't compare yourself to other people because those other people are only showing you curated stuff, and also, they're probably working up to their own burnout at any rate. There was a term used here that was specifically like only comparing yourself upwards that people tend to do and this makes them feel inadequate if they don't identify with some aspect of the person they're looking up to (if they do identify, it can be inspirational.)

Update 08/10/25: My friend said that they've noticed that people typically only compare upwards; when they compare downwards, it's usually to put the other person in another class entirely. Such as people looking down on homeless people as a different type of inferior human, to reassure themselves that they could never "fall that low". Meanwhile, when people compare upwards, they see it as something that they should be. I thought that was interesting, because it does track. I don't spending time comparing myself to people who are less "accomplished" than me. I just assume I don't know what's going on in their life and that it isn't fair to them. Meanwhile, though, I do and have always compared upwards. Comparing downwards has never seemed to be worth the time because I don't see how it would encourage me to do anything but to embrace cruel perspectives on other people that they don't deserve. Comparing at all in a way that literally ranks people's worth, though, is a losing game.


  1. This book claims that the average office worker only gets 3 hours of work done a day. I was extremely curious about this statistic so I went and looked at the citations and also did an internet search, but everything links back to this one study, if it can be called that. It's more like a survey? But they didn't release the survey questions and answers, that I can see, anyway, so I'm extremely confused on this methodology. This was apparently enough for the U.K. to pilot a 4-hour workday trial run, though...?

    Meanwhile, other sources say their own variations, 3.5, 4, 4.5, etc. And all of the sources of these are just a single survey conducted by some random company that is also trying to sell you stuff on their website. I don't know what to make of this. This is all self-report, and I'm wondering if people are accurate in this or if they're under-reporting. Are they counting meetings, for instance? What counts as "work"?

    Regardless, the 3 hour figure does track most with my own measurements of my own productivity. After 3 hours of using my brain I'm about cooked for the day. At my worst undiagnosed/untreated OCPD years (2017-2019, I think), my time logs from when I tried to log literally everything I was doing that I thought somewhat important (but minus stuff like chores, eating) and trying to plan every single minute of my day seem to indicate that my average was about 32 hours over 7 days. That comes out to about 4.5 hours every single day, but this was also the equivalent of me running on max cylinders and burning myself out.

    I'm timing myself again lately, but this time it's more observational. I want to see what feels the best and what my natural limits are. The first week I did try to get myself to study for 4 hours a day and hit my 33 hours total (including 2 volunteering things, trying to draw, trying to translate), but I could already feel myself burning out again. The last week I sort of gave up instead and my total time was 22 hours. Across 7 days, that is almost a perfect 3 hours a day. I'm guessing this week will be similar.

    Quality of work also drops the longer people try to do a task, so the book suggests focusing on quality rather than hours spent at work. The book then provides some questions to ask yourself that take a longer look at things (months, years rather than days). But I don't work at a traditional workplace so it's not all applicable to me. And my primary concerns are getting myself to a place where I can earn money that isn't pocket change from exploitation.

Update 08/10/25: My friend said that they've similarly only seen that one study/survey quoted for the 3 hour figure, but it is likely true that people who aren't working themselves to burnout likely only average somewhere between 2-4 hours a day. The number probably differs depending on the kind of work, how much intensive physical or mental power it requires, and on the individual person. Regardless, though, the 8 hour day is exploitative.

I guess after I confirm that my own average is something like 3 (and not like 2.5?), I'll just continue with what I was doing naturally. For as long as I have the luck to be able to to do so without having to worry about my livelihood.


  1. So if people (who are not on track to burning themselves out) only do shit for about 3 hours a day, where does all the other time go? Apparently it goes to stuff like "cyberloafing", which is what they call scrolling around on your phone between tasks and whatnot. This is a natural rest period, actually, and if there's no access to physical devices people do other things instead, such as talk to other people, make food and drinks, stare into space. This is actually time we can't really reclaim because our brains need it to recalibrate. I'm guessing this is what stuff like the pomodoro method and whatnot are trying to naturally accommodate. The 8-hour workday is really inhumane. Rather, our productivity (measured by amount of money we generate in companies lol) keeps getting better by the year, but so does the amount of time we work. Our wages are going down. The average work week for Americans right now is actually 47 hours, which is up from the 40 we were supposed to do. And benefits for jobs like having sick leave are also just going way down.

Update 08/10/25: My friend said that this makes a lot of sense and people need natural attention breaks even for entertainment. People will do something else during anime opening songs, put down books for a while after a chapter, pause a movie and come back to it, etc. I never really thought about this before, but it's true. Even when we're enjoying the thing we still need breaks. Breaks are a part of how humans just function, period.


  1. The Master's Degree is also the equivalent of the Bachelor's Degree nowadays. Master's Degree programs are also making people pay more because they're the primary money makers for universities. Sigh. And here I really thought a Bachelor's was good enough.


  1. We should all recognize our limits and stop feeling personally responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world. Apparently, taking in more news is actually correlated with worse well-being and makes people feel more endangered regardless of how un/safe their surroundings actually are. People should pick a single cause they feel connected to and try to work on it locally. It's best to focus on what you can control. Internet activism only goes so far and is hard to measure in terms of impact. Also suggests to avoid internet comments since most people admit to commenting foremost to express how they're feeling and not to learn from other people or be persuaded. Interestingly, people who discourse more online also are less inclined to discourse in person.
    Rather, we should choose our goals based on compassion and not guilt or fear. And we should actually take time to grieve what we can't change.

One of the mental-health professionals I interviewed about this was Xochitl Sandoval, a counselor who works with the Chicago-based therapy group Practical Audacity. A queer, transgender Indigenous person, Xochitl knows very deeply what it’s like to be impacted by injustice on a day-to-day basis. One way that ze deals with it is by giving lots of space for mourning and grief. “I think we don’t know how to grieve as a society,” ze says. “I think a lot of the conversation about activist burnout is actually about grieving, about being really able and willing to just sit in this space of This is fucking awful And there might not be anything I can do to solve this.”

Xochitl shares with me that ze often mourns the harm that has already been done to the planet due to industrialization and climate change. Though society can take steps to reduce carbon emissions and slow the damage that’s occurring, there’s some harm that can never be undone.

(...)

It may sound very demotivating to sit and mourn loss like this, but feelings of grief can’t just be brushed away. When we treat social problems as emergencies that we must fix, we delude ourselves into thinking that we can control them, if we only work hard enough. Realistically, though, that just isn’t the case. I can fight and fight to make the world more just, but if my goal is “fixing” a decades-old problem or making it go away, I’m destined to fail and burn out. Sometimes, the best way to deal with those feelings of panic and guilt is to really let them wash over us for a moment, and really accept that we’re not fully in control—or fully responsible for it. This can be an immensely sad experience, but it can also be liberating. When we mourn the losses that cannot ever be brought back, we come to accept the reality we’re living in. This allows us to address problems realistically and sustainably.

Something that you've mentioned before is that it's true that we could always be doing more in any given situation. I think we've talked about this a bit where you don't intend to imply that we're necessarily obligated to do more but just that it's a fact. Always doing more is not sustainable, at any rate, and this book literally has a section titled "There is Always More You Could Be Doing" as part of the Laziness Lie. From what I recall from our conversations, you were just saying a basic fact, that it is possible that we could be doing more. My new question, though, is, "More at the expense of what?" I've been looking at things in singular dimensions, where it's like I spent X hours on activity X and Y hours on activity Y so my progress right now in X and Y are that respectively, but I forget that I have to add them together and realize that doing more on X necessarily means doing less on Y unless I want to borrow energy from the future, in which case I will have a day in which I do very little of X or Y and feel bad about myself.

Something about me hates working with limits because it's like the opposite of inspiring and also takes away the feeling of control. Stories and the like would have you believe that you can do anything you put your mind to, etc.

Update 08/10/25: My friend again clarified that they meant that "there is always something more that could be done" was merely meant as an objective fact and not meant to be separated from their followup, which is essentially that even if you could theoretically be doing more (such as dropping everything you're currently working on, quit your job, etc. to go work on a specific issue), doing so doesn't necessarily make sense and is ultimately not sustainable. There's the difference between "surmountable" and "sustainable"; you can work yourself to utter exhaustion every now and then, but if you continue doing so you will burn yourself out. They mentioned that they know some people that were really active in activism in college who gave it all up and no longer engage, even if they feel guilty about it. That's what happens when you don't pace yourself, and it's necessary to have a life outside of activism if you want to be in action for the future.

I mentioned that this all made sense, as it did the first (two? three?) times they told me this, but some part of me couldn't recognize it because it felt like it was only "not sustainable" because I had failed to optimize my life correctly. Theoretically, if I could fix my sleep, for instance, I could get so much more done, and that would be sustainable. Coupled with the fact that I was only ever looking at each activity in isolation, rather than thinking about the fact that working on one would necessarily take from another, and I couldn't just "do more overall" as long as I "cared enough" (aka used anxiety to push myself), it's no wonder that I'm having issues. Something I've talked about with my therapist as a result of this book is that I have issues conceptualizing "my best" to not require that I feel exhausted. Effort to me is directly tied to the idea of exhaustion, and so ideas of my limits and what "sustainable" could possibly mean in relation to me were elusive. I still don't have an answer to how to unlearn the "my best = exhaustion", but I guess I'm aware of this now.

I don't know if "I have my body to thank for this insight" is exactly the correct wording for this notion, as I am not grateful at all to have experienced any suffering, but it is ultimately the fact that I experienced my body shutting down on me with migraines that I've begun to grapple with pacing myself more (though the realizations have been slow). It is because I've decided that I possibly hate migraines more than anything else that I've not only managed to create an "inner critic" after the concept feeling silly and eluding me for years, I've also been able to carve my way out of the inherent losing game of extreme time optimization. It's true that I'm still spending something like 2-4 hours in bed every night not sleeping and losing my morning hours entirely to not being able to wake up, and it's true that if I could control my sleep, I would be able to get at least one more thing done that I cared about in a day. However, the cost of failure for trying to optimize is too high. It costs me less to not optimize than it does to actively try and fail to optimize, especially when optimization runs on anxiety and/or excited energy that defeats the ability to sleep at all. As The Sleep Book would put it. (Though I still cannot follow their steps either, because if I purposefully sleep deprive myself I actively put myself at risk for migraines, and I just don't want to fuck with that anymore.) But if not for my body failing me in this way, I would probably force myself to do more until it failed in another, potentially worse way.

So, anyway, things failing can teach you something, I guess. To chill out and perhaps more. This book actually cited The Queer Art of Failure for this idea, which may or may not be interesting to read. It is true, though, that failing expectations make you adapt and consider whether the rules of the game are necessary.


  1. The Laziness Lie in the United States, according to this book, has a lot to do with Puritans (they did indeed cite Weber's Protestant Ethic) and things they came up with to keep enslaved people in line. See "runaway slave disorder." This seems pretty believable as many of the injustices that affect literally everyone in this country basically stem from antiblackness and anti-Indigenous oppression.


  1. Book also argues that laziness helps us problem solve, be creative, and remind us of what matters, since it signals what type of goals you actually want or that actually make you happy. The book also suggests "expressive writing" which is that thing where you write out all your feelings regularly, or meditation, since it's pretty well-supported to improve health over time.

    I know this and yet I still feel like I don't want to do these things because it takes up time that I already feel is limited (lol).


  1. Dr. Fred Bryant, a researcher in positive psychology, says that finding joy and meaning all comes down to "savoring", which occurs at 3 time points:

Research by Fred and his colleagues has shown that savoring has many benefits. When a person engages in savoring, time seems to slow down; the details of the moment become lush and vivid. Happy moments feel happier when they’re savored, and that happiness lasts longer after the experience is over. Savorers also know how to look back on positive experiences and live them over again, which allows them to boost their happiness even when life isn’t going so well. Perhaps as a result, frequent savorers often have much higher levels of life satisfaction and more positive moods compared to people who don’t savor very much.


The opposite of savoring is "dampening". Four traits of this are:


Savoring behaviors (mirror image of dampening):

The whole "savoring" thing is really interesting because it reminds me of our conversations about nostalgia. The third part of the savoring, the positive time travel, is basically nostalgia. Yet it's somehow actively good for a lot of people to do this. Reading this list, I was just thinking about how you probably can't access the last part of savoring even though you appear to me to have the first two parts down pretty good. Though idk, maybe your zipped impression of having had a good time is enough to orient you positively in your future imaginings of doing something similar, and that's enough to give the same effect?

The other thing you probably can't access is the "capitalizing" thing, since you've expressed that you don't understand why other people need to share emotions and they want other people to experience the same emotions they are.

Also, the fact that finding fault with something is seen as actively detracting from enjoyment of life is really funny considering how your brain works with holding both positive and negative at the same time. You bring a compartmentalizing ability to the conversation that others don't like.

In terms of myself, I feel like the "savoring" behaviors are pretty embarrassing. I feel like they're not really something that I should be displaying to other people unless I've already determined that they actually want to hear it and that they will feel similarly so that I'm not burdening them with my emotions. So I do a lot of the suppressing thing. Though I'd also argue that I'm not that great at it, either, considering the fact that I text wall people because I think it's interesting information and they're probably looking at it like "God, STFU". At this point, I just tell people to ignore me if they want to. I can't pretend that it doesn't suck when people don't engage, but also the amount of suck is much less than if they do engage but then resent the hell out of me for it. I'm winning by choosing the lesser rejection in the inevitable rejection of most people. Or losing less. Or something.

At this point I'm kind of convinced that it's impossible to find people who are interested in the same things I am with the same critical eye. Probably I'll point out something that they don't want to hear about their favorite media and they'll be upset, or they'll secretly judge me for liking something even when I say that I'm aware of the problems XYZ it has. I think my boundaries and interests are so niche that it's just a losing combination for anyone else out there. Even with my current friends it's not like everything I'm thinking would be accepted by them. And I'm already out here text walling when they could probably do without that lol.

Update 08/10/25: We discussed the concept of nostalgia and came to the conclusion that it is different, even though they used the words "time traveling". My friend, for instance, does not experience nostalgia and is unable to recreate most emotions even though they retain basic information about events that have occurred. So they cannot access the feeling that people use to describe nostalgia, such as "It was like I was 10 again."

In their words: "For example, I actively enjoy planning activities or trips, but not in an anticipatory sense. If the activity does not occur, I do not feel any disappointment, because I enjoyed the planning as a separate activity. Likewise, I can look back on events with sincere reverence and gratitude without a need for nostalgia. I brought up an extreme example of a moment in which I decided not to harm myself. I certainly would not want to be transported to a time of possible self harm and feel no nostalgia for the moment, but I do feel sincere gratitude for that moment occurring as it contributed to the person I am today (not from suffering, but from choosing not to suffer). Similarly, I have no fondness or nostalgia for prior media obsessions, yet I feel profound gratitude for those eras due to the media literacy skills I learned and continue to use to this day."

My friend also does not experience the need to "capitalize"; whether or not someone feels the same way they do isn't a big issue for them. Also, while "savoring" says finding flaws in things is detrimental to the experience, finding flaws is actually part of the enjoyment for my friend. Knowing the good and the bad of something increases their appreciation and enjoyment. Naturally, I don't relate, and most of the people I talk to don't either. Regardless, it is another possible way of being that probably reaches a similar result that "savoring" is describing, whether or not the methods match 1:1.

Me, on the other hand, well. I am Dampener in Chief or else I probably wouldn't have "the disorder". My friend mentioned that all my examples about how I find the behaviors listed under savoring feeling embarrassing are about other people reacting to me. So I had to explain again that I feel like I am always being watched, even if I'm alone. It's a hard feeling to explain, especially as someone who doesn't actually believe in ghosts nor that I am actually being spied on with technology or whatever. But it's a feeling that has never left me from when I was a child. No matter what I do, there's the feeling that someone could be watching and judging me, even though it's basically my own mental panopticon projection of other people that aren't even with me. I've never really felt truly alone, even when I've been abandoned emotionally. The possibility of other people's judging gaze is just a constant in my life. Probably this is a function of my inner critic, but it's also hard to link all of that behavior to the smoky dog that haunts my mind. Because it's not the dog that's watching me. I actually imagine real people and their reactions. Even if the people are completely random strangers. The dog's reaction is then to attack the rest of my brain processes, but the dog itself is not the imagined observer. I don't know what to make of that, or really what to do. Maybe therapy will have an answer for me someday.


  1. Price also suggests that we should set limits with exhausting friends and gives a whole story about how they were spending hours helping a friend by letting them vent to them whenever for hours on end, and they were compiling resources on therapists and jobs for them etc. But it turns out this friend never bothered to look at any of that because they just assumed they could keep coming to Price. So eventually Price had to just tell them they couldn't do this anymore, and some time after that the person actually bothered to get a therapist and improve. The book puts it as that Price had accidentally trained this friend to rely on them and telling them what to do basically was taking away their agency. The friend had to do it on their own timeline and not with an infinite source of someone to throw their feelings at.

    I've been thinking about this because it makes me feel two ways. Since this friend was threatening suicide and all. One, is, it is true that you do inadvertently enable someone's behavior if you're always at their beck and call. The second, though, is: What if they really had killed themself? I think the fact that people may actually make good on their threats is something that we have to come to terms with, too, and accept that if they die it's a long string of failures that isn't only on us. And there may be cases where we really could have been the one thing that successfully stopped them from killing themselves. But maybe we really couldn't give them what they needed without sacrificing ourselves, so we choose ourselves instead. Which is not something you have to be guilty about. But easier said than done.


There's a nice list Price includes here about things to ask yourself before trying to "save" a friend:


And things to do instead of trying to solve things for people:

I need to practice asking other people what they plan to do instead of just telling them what I think they can do all the time. The problem I think is that I secretly hope to be saved when I express my issues and I think other people feel similarly. But maybe, even if they do feel similarly, I'm training them to be more dependent. That line is so hard to tell. Like, what if I'm too dependent also because I expect other people to help me with my problems? I don't know about this one. My therapist says that I'm counter-dependent so maybe it's not true in my case, I just feel pathetic whenever I hit my limit and go venting to someone.


  1. There's a section about accepting your body as the way it is and goes into the stats I already know about in how dieting is a lie and most people rebound because it's fundamentally not how our bodies are supposed to work, etc. But then they talk about influencers and how much effort it takes to actually get photos that make them look good and thin.

    Being curious, because I don't follow people for this type of thing, I looked up some of the before/after pictures mentioned and I was honestly really surprised. In the same way that I hadn't realized that abs don't normally show all the time on people who aren't severely dehydrated, despite what all popular media prefers to depict, I hadn't realized that thin people actually have a lot of tummy in a lot of cases and are purposefully posing in certain ways and sucking in their stomach/flexing certain muscles to get that utterly flat look. Rather, a lot of positioning of arms and stuff plays into this hugely, as does "shapewear", or high-waisted things that go above the navel and therefore alter the body line to make it look much more flat. The difference is honestly shocking to me and makes me realize that my own stomach is extremely common. Not that I was ever going to diet or change this stuff anyway, but I just am surprised to find that flat tummies are basically a lie all-around.

#books #nonfiction