Unlike a doctor or builder, an assistant deputy financial controller in a large multinational corporation cannot be at all certain of the effect or end-product of his or her labour – so why bother? To make matters worse, the job that pays their bills and fills their best hours might have become so abstract and specialised that they can no longer fully grasp its purpose or product, and, by extension, their part in improving other peoples’ lives. Many so-called ‘lazy’ people haven’t yet found what they want to do, or, for one reason or another, are not able to do it. Yet our instinct remains to conserve energy, making us averse to abstract projects with distant and uncertain payoffs.Įven so, few people would choose to be lazy. Today, mere survival has fallen off the agenda, and it is long-term vision and commitment that lead to the best outcomes. In any case, in the absence of conveniences such as antibiotics, banks, roads or refrigeration, it made little sense to think long-term. Expending effort on anything other than short-term advantage could jeopardise their very survival. Our nomadic ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources, flee predators and fight enemies. Today, laziness is so closely connected with poverty and failure that a poor person is often presumed lazy, no matter how hard he or she actually works.īut it could be that laziness is written into our genes. A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things. The Bible inveighs against slothfulness, for example, in Ecclesiastes: By much slothfulness the building decayeth and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through. In the Christian tradition, laziness, or sloth, is one of the seven deadly sins because it undermines society and God’s plan, and invites the other sins. In other words, we are being lazy if our motivation to spare ourselves effort trumps our motivation to do the right or best or expected thing – assuming, of course, we know what that is. We do it badly, or do something less strenuous or less boring, or just remain idle.
We are being lazy if there’s something that we ought to do but are reluctant to do because of the effort involved.
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