You should never feel bad for laziness. In fact the notion of laziness or sloth is a device by industrial authorities to press more work out of an already beleaguered labor force.¹
We’ve seen how it goes during the 2020 epidemic lockdown and furlough: most people couldn’t couch potato for a week and turned to hobbies, enough of which were monetizable enough to cause the great resignation and give us a moment of elevated ground-floor wages. The rest of us suffer from avolition, a symptom of major depression (or a number of other potential diagnoses).
Industrialists (and churches and civil officials) fail to recognize that the drive for profit to upper management and shareholders has made a lot of work environments toxic. Most of us who work are overworked, underpaid, and poorly treated by management, if not also dealing with bully coworkers, pollution from industry without adequate PPE, safety hazards and oppressive work conditions. Our capitalist masters could treat workers well, and even would see a productivity surge worth the additional cost, and yet they still crunch in the video game industry, and overtask rather than running a high-morale clerical pool with slight redundancy (where the task list is always short).
I was lazy enough in my career as a victim of major depression to sleep for about nine months (getting up only to eat or excrete), I am a pro at couch potatoing. Granted, it’s not good for me to go without some contact outside, but I’ll happily do it. In the meantime, when I was forced to work in late 1980s clerical pool conditions, it drove me to suicide, and typical conditions are even worse today.
Laziness is a product of slave drivers or mental health disorders. If you’re feeling too tired to get work done, it means it’s time to take a break. Don’t worry, if you’re mentally fit, you’ll be on task again.
¹ Though my sin nun explained the cardinal sin of Sloth as avolition specifically to engage in the work your faith calls for (e.g. feeding the poor, housing the stranger and the transient, healing the sick, etc.) If you have energy to engage in costly signalling and praying loudly in public, but don’t mind the unfortunate, then you’re engaging in the cardinal sin – according to a cloistered nun I called for tech support.
You should never feel bad for laziness. In fact the notion of laziness or sloth is a device by industrial authorities to press more work out of an already beleaguered labor force.¹
We’ve seen how it goes during the 2020 epidemic lockdown and furlough: most people couldn’t couch potato for a week and turned to hobbies, enough of which were monetizable enough to cause the great resignation and give us a moment of elevated ground-floor wages. The rest of us suffer from avolition, a symptom of major depression (or a number of other potential diagnoses).
Industrialists (and churches and civil officials) fail to recognize that the drive for profit to upper management and shareholders has made a lot of work environments toxic. Most of us who work are overworked, underpaid, and poorly treated by management, if not also dealing with bully coworkers, pollution from industry without adequate PPE, safety hazards and oppressive work conditions. Our capitalist masters could treat workers well, and even would see a productivity surge worth the additional cost, and yet they still crunch in the video game industry, and overtask rather than running a high-morale clerical pool with slight redundancy (where the task list is always short).
I was lazy enough in my career as a victim of major depression to sleep for about nine months (getting up only to eat or excrete), I am a pro at couch potatoing. Granted, it’s not good for me to go without some contact outside, but I’ll happily do it. In the meantime, when I was forced to work in late 1980s clerical pool conditions, it drove me to suicide, and typical conditions are even worse today.
Laziness is a product of slave drivers or mental health disorders. If you’re feeling too tired to get work done, it means it’s time to take a break. Don’t worry, if you’re mentally fit, you’ll be on task again.
¹ Though my sin nun explained the cardinal sin of Sloth as avolition specifically to engage in the work your faith calls for (e.g. feeding the poor, housing the stranger and the transient, healing the sick, etc.) If you have energy to engage in costly signalling and praying loudly in public, but don’t mind the unfortunate, then you’re engaging in the cardinal sin – according to a cloistered nun I called for tech support.
I was too tired to write this, which immediately jumped to my mind o’ reading the post. Thanks, stranger. Basically : what that person said.