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Today, laziness is so closely connected to poverty and failure that a poor person is often presumed lazy, no matter how hard he or she actually works. But it could be that laziness is written into our genes.
Our nomadic forebears had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources, flee predators, and fight enemies. Expending effort on anything other than short-term advantage could jeopardize their very survival. In any case, in the absence of conveniences such as banks, insurance, roads, refrigeration, and antibiotics, it made little sense to plan for the future.
Today, mere survival has fallen off the agenda, and it is long-term vision and commitment that lead to the best outcomes. Yet our instinct remains to conserve energy, making us averse to abstract projects with distant and doubtful payoffs.
Even so, few people would choose all the time to be lazy. Many so-called ‘lazy’ people haven’t yet found what they want to do, or, for some reason, are unable to do it.
To make matters worse, the job that pays their bills and fills their best hours might have become so abstract and specialized that they can no longer grasp its purpose or product, and, by extension, their part in improving other peoples’ lives. 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?
Other psychological factors that can lead to ‘laziness’ are fear and hopelessness. Some people fear success, or don’t have the self-esteem to feel comfortable with success, and laziness is their way of sabotaging themself. Shakespeare conveyed this idea much more eloquently and succinctly in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows.’ When Destiny knocks at the door, as it does in the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, many people run upstairs to hide.
Other people fear, not success, but failure, and laziness is preferable to failure because at one remove. “It’s not that I failed” they can tell themselves, “but that I never tried.”
Yet other people are ‘lazy’ because their situation is so hopeless that they cannot even begin to think it through, let alone do something about it. As these people are unable to address their circumstances, it could be argued that they are not truly lazy—which could be said, more or less, of all ‘lazy’ people.
The very concept of laziness presupposes the ability to choose not to be lazy, that is, presupposes the existence of free will.
Read more in Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
