Laziness

We’re taking it easy! In episode 103 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a leisurely dive into laziness, discussing everything from couchrotting to the biology of energy conservation. They explore Devon Price’s idea of the ‘laziness lie’ in today’s hyperproductive society and search for alternatives to work through Paul Lefargue’s 19th century campaign for ‘the right to be lazy.’ They also look into the racialization of laziness in Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu’s ideas on the idle tropics, and think through how the Protestant work ethic punishes laziness, even when technology could take care of the work.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

 Works Discussed
Devon Price, Laziness Does Not Exist
Roland Barthes, “Let us dare to be lazy”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Christine Jeske, The Laziness Myth
Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah
Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Modem Futura
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• 30:40 [Ad] Modem Futura
• 31:25 (Cont.) Laziness

Transcript

Ellie: 0:16

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:18

The podcast where two philosophers aim to help you feel better about yourself by pointing out how your personal problems are tied to big ideas and social issues.

Ellie: 0:28

I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:29

And I'm David Peña-Guzman.

Ellie: 0:32

People say increasingly that laziness is not a thing. I feel like at this point in my social circle, the word laziness is just kind of anathema. You can't use it to refer to yourself or to other people. And I think this is part of this new movement that treats laziness as just a misnomer. There's a recent book that came out by the social psychologist Devon Price that I looked at in preparation for this episode called Laziness Does Not Exist. And this was based on a viral essay that they had written arguing precisely this.

David: 1:06

Love a book whose thesis is neatly contained in the title, Laziness Does Not Exist. And you know I love anything that will rationalize my own disinclination to do work.

Ellie: 1:16

Right?

David: 1:17

So I want to read it now, but I also wish I could have recommended it to my younger self. Because I think younger David needed to hear about the inexistence of laziness.

Ellie: 1:28

Oh, I think my pathological self writing 50 things to do over the summer when I was nine years old because I was just overcome with this feeling of not doing enough stuff needed to read this too. And one of the really interesting examples that Price gives in developing their argument is the case of depression. Of course, there are lots of different types of depression, but they're taking a paradigmatic case of major depressive disorder where, somebody has a really hard time getting out of bed in the morning, they're sleeping all day, they're cancelling plans with people or not even making them to begin with, they're missing deadlines at work or not showing up to work. And Price says this looks like laziness. from an outside perspective. But actually, fighting depression is itself a full time job, and that just means that there's no energy left over for doing anything else, in their view. Depressed people sleep a lot, for instance, because their brains get tired from fighting all the negative thoughts and feelings that they're having all day. And also depressed people have documented lower qualities of sleep, so they might not be getting the same amount of rest from eight hours that somebody who's not depressed might be getting. So their argument is that the apparent laziness of depressed people is actually a way of protecting themselves. It's a rational response to the situations in which they find themselves. And it's an attempted way of even recovering from it.

David: 2:56

Yeah. this reminds me of some research in biology that suggests that when an animal is losing their life energy, one of the smartest things to do rather than fight or flight is quote, unquote, to sleep. Play dead, which is just try to minimize energy expenditure, which in itself is a huge expenditure of energy. But let me ask you a question here about this thesis about the inexistence of laziness. Is the author's position that in the case of depression, it looks like laziness, but it's not because there is actually a lot of work, mental energy being spent on survival? Or is it that in all cases? Laziness is a misnomer, not just in the case of depression.

Ellie: 3:41

The latter.

David: 3:42

Okay, so it's that laziness doesn't exist at all.

Ellie: 3:45

That's the title of the book!

David: 3:47

I know, but, so the reason that...

Ellie: 3:49

it's not laziness does not exist for people undergoing major depressive disorder. It's laziness does not exist.

David: 3:56

But it's because in some ways this is a very easy example, I think, to use. Because yes, it is very difficult to battle depression and to live with it. And I think many people would differentiate between the kind of inactivity that you see in somebody who is struggling with depression, and the kind of disinclination to work that we might see in somebody who is not depressed. And so making the argument that depressed people are not lazy does not quite get me far enough in agreeing with the conclusion that laziness as such doesn't exist. So I want to hear a little more about that.

Ellie: 4:30

Just an example I use because I think it's a particularly salient one. You say it's an easy example, but I think it's a good example in the sense that it's a paradigmatic one, right? So that's the sense in which it's easy, and also the sense in which it's effective. Because I think there is a really common idea, Price even cites a major study that was done suggesting that people experiencing depression, according to 30 percent of the population, just have a quote, weak personality. So they're really trying resist that idea. I actually think the thesis could just as validly be there are reasons for laziness, right? Laziness is rational, yeah, and or laziness is not morally reprehensible, rather than laziness does not exist. Because I feel like that it just depends on how we're defining the term laziness, but their claim is that laziness cannot be dissociated from some sort of moral judgment.

David: 5:22

Yeah, and I think in that regard they might be correct because just thinking about this on the spot, I cannot think of a single example where the term lazy is used either positively or even neutrally. I think anytime that we use the adjective to describe another person, there is a pretty heavy moral blaming going on. And so the fact that I cannot think of a single counterexample, and maybe other people can, I don't know, is suggestive in that regard that it cannot be dissociated from cases of moral blame.

Ellie: 5:56

Today we're talking about laziness.

David: 5:58

Why does being lazy make us feel bad about ourselves?

Ellie: 6:02

Where does our prejudice against the lazy come from?

David: 6:05

And in a world where we often fight for the right to work, should we now begin fighting for the right to laziness?

Ellie: 6:19

David, I want to pick up on the last thing that you just said, which was about how laziness is a charge that always goes along with some sort of judgment. And Price talks about in their book what they call the laziness lie. And the laziness lie has three components. And I think this gets at what you're talking about. One is your worth is your productivity. Second is you can't trust your own feelings and limits, right? if you feel tired, oh just get over it, just grind harder, etc. And the third is there's always more you could be doing. You're enjoying a matcha latte with your friend? you should also be doing that on a power walk. There's always more that you can squeeze out of your time. And one of the things that I found really interesting about this book, because you know that in and of itself, those three tenets of the laziness lie, I think for us, are very old hat, right? these are, things that we're familiar with from critiques of capitalism. But one thing I found very interesting is their claim that once they started talking about the laziness lie, or like they had this viral essay online, people pretty easily, for the most part, came to recognize it and say Oh my God, you're so right. The laziness lie does exist. People aren't lazy, except for me. They said they've had so many conversations where the person can recognize a laziness lie happening on a social level, but they still think that they are personally lazy. So I want to talk about that. what is it about this charge of laziness that sticks to us personally so much? Because I'll be honest, David, I feel this way. Price says that one of the parts of laziness lie is this idea: I must work incredibly hard to overcome my inner laziness. And yeah, that, that spoke to me.

David: 8:14

So I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that people tend to only apply the laziness lie to themselves, that it's somehow more recalcitrant when it's used reflexively, because I remember when I was a teenager, Ellie, my parents did not hesitate to apply that term to me, they were not applying it to themselves. And, I actually think there is something to be said about it. adolescents as a group of individuals who get accused of being lazy by other people, especially their parents, because of that stereotype that teenagers spend most of their day sleeping, not doing any work, refusing to transition into adulthood.

Ellie: 8:53

Cause their bodies literally need more rest.

David: 8:55

I know. And this would be another example, of what appears to be laziness is in fact a bodily response to a certain kind of demand, either from the inner or the outer environment. But be that as it may, I also relate to this notion that I must work hard to overcome my own inner laziness. Although in my case, I don't really feel that I have to work that hard to overcome it. My partner always tells me that he envies how quickly I can switch from entertainment mode to work mode.

Ellie: 9:28

Yeah, you've talked about this.

David: 9:30

from work mode back to non work mode. for example, if we go out and we come back in, I literally open my computer. And if there's already a Word document there of something I was writing, I just pick up where I was within five seconds and get back into it.

Ellie: 9:45

Unhinged Behavior.

David: 9:46

Yeah, it's completely unhinged. I think I experience laziness as morally reprehensible in my case because of how easily I could overcome it. And yet I don't. All that it would take is for me to like literally sit down and begin working. Yeah.

Ellie: 10:02

Yeah, and that's definitely not the case for me. I've had to accept over time that if I go on a trip, for instance, I just got back recently from a one week road trip, and the first few days back into work, I'm going to be much slower. I'm going to feel like I don't have the same kind of thinking capacity as I usually do. I'm not going to have the same sort of like popping off of ideas. And if I'm lucky that passes in a few days, but definitely it takes me a while to transition back in. But I also just want to know, so the critique that Price made, it wasn't that we only apply laziness to ourselves. It's that once people are exposed to the laziness lie, they often recognize the way that our society, including we as individuals, tend to apply it to others. But even when faced with the laziness lie, we don't find it as a good justification of our apparently lazy behavior, right? So it could be like, Oh, I thought that person was lazy, but they're just depressed. But in my case, I'm different. I am innately lazy. There is something wrong with me.

David: 11:01

Yeah. And there seems to be something like an auto flagellation that happens in these cases that allows the self to feel good in a kind of masochistic way about itself and about its own suffering and about its own virtues. So I think there is what we might call a vice signaling that is a form of virtue signaling where we want to believe that even if social conditions explain why other people struggle, it cannot possibly be the reason why I struggle. In my case, I am special and there must be something unique about me that sets me apart from the social world, even if that uniqueness is actually a moral failure. So I think it's narcissistic.

Ellie: 11:47

That's such a good point. I wouldn't say it's narcissistic, but I think you're right about that kind of vice signaling that ends up being quote unquote virtue signaling, but the way that I would put it rather than as narcissism is more that when it comes to ourselves, we can recognize the competing desires, competing psychic forces and so on that lead to our behavior. Whereas we can't do that with other people, right? So I might be lying on my couch, but I feel like I should be writing on my computer. Only I can see that struggle for myself, right? And so there's this way that laziness feels so bad to us because of that inner conflict. And we just don't have access to that in the same way when it comes to others.

David: 12:34

Yeah. And the fact that it's effective, that it's a feeling that we have of tension, of psychic competition between competing desires, and that whenever the desire for rest or for inactivity wins out, we experience that defeat above all else, right? So it's not as if we see two paths opening up before us that are morally equal or at least comparable. It's that we see a higher and a lower, and then we end up falling for the lower. And again, that's where the self flagellation begins because we know in theory we could have chosen the higher pleasures to quote Petrarch, right? But it's almost as if there is a weakness of will that we experience when we quote unquote give into laziness.

Ellie: 13:19

So I think then the question becomes, is what we're talking about, and to put it very simply, is the bad feeling that comes along with lazy behavior a bad feeling because laziness is bad? Or just because society has conditioned us to feel that it is.

David: 13:38

Yeah, I don't know. I wish I could give you a clear answer to that. I probably lean towards the social interpretation, but maybe here a little bit of etymology will help us, think through this.

Ellie: 13:49

You're, the etymology guy today. I'm usually the etymology guy.

David: 13:53

So the word lazy appears in English around 1540. And it means someone who is averse to labor, to action, or effort. And I want to add that originally it was spelled laysy, laysy, which I think is really iconic because it just gets at the essence of laziness. I'm just going to be like laysy here down on my sofa.

Ellie: 14:22

Oh, I love it. It's, onomatopoetic. it's literally pronounced probably the same way, but just so maybe onomatopoeia is not the right category, but it, looks the way that it feels even more, just, laying

David: 14:35

Lazy, yes. Even now, etymologists are not completely sure where the word came from. It seems like it either came from the Low German term, Leisch, meaning weak, feeble, or tired. But then there's also this chance that it came from the Old English word, Lessu, which means false or evil. And I think you really see there in that second definition more so than in the first one, although potentially also in the first one, the connection between laziness and moral weakness and a failure in moral judgment, because it suggests that the person who is lazy is literally false in the sense that they are turning away from truth, but also that they are evil in the sense that they are turning away from the good or from the divine.

Ellie: 15:23

Ugh, I feel this all too much myself. I've struggled a lot with perceived laziness, though I'm in a quite good place with it in my life right now. But I feel like the moral judgment is the worst part of laziness. And you mentioned that it's often adolescents who are perceived to be lazy. For me, my period of struggling with, laziness was really late teens. And then in my 20s, throughout my 20s, I would really say, who knows? Maybe it'll return. Maybe I'm just in a brief respite moment. But I think that part, that moral judgment part, is really the part that Price wants to reject in their book because they argue that humans are just doing their best and the world is not set up for us to work this much. I think there's been a big shift in recent years toward recognizing this, as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, to the point that we're now in a phase of really affirming laziness with, things like bedrotting, couchrotting, doing nothing.

David: 16:18

I think I have not overcome my bedrotting couch-potatoing face of adolescence. I think I'm in an, what is the term, delayed adolescence or, protracted adolescence when it comes to laziness. I've been in it for years.

Ellie: 16:33

I think that's just the human condition in America these days for many of us, when, we have the leisure time, right? I think that obviously bears mentioning, but yeah, I moved from being a bedrotter to being a couchrotter because as professors and before that, and as grad students, we've always had a good amount of time that's work-from-home time, and so I pretty much wrote my entire dissertation from bed.

David: 16:57

Really?

Ellie: 16:58

Yeah, but I would say that I was like Marcel Proust, who famously wrote in bed. You can actually see his bed at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. I've moved to becoming a couch rotter though. And I think that's actually because I started living alone. And so the couch then was just my personal space. It wasn't like a space I had to share with a roommate. And during quarantine, I invested in a really nice couch. So it's basically bedrotting because my couch is so cozy. You've slept on my couch,

David: 17:26

Rotted on that couch. A very productive kind of rotting. Yeah, but

Ellie: 17:32

That night we came home from the club and watched beef until 2 a. m. Last time you visited,

David: 17:40

I know, and I'm coming to visit soon, so I'm looking forward to more bed rotting and couch rotting stories together, Ellie. So one thing to say about laziness, and we've been talking about the etymology a little bit, but there's also a point to be made here based on the Latin versus the Greek roots for the concept of being lazy. And I'm getting this from an interview that the French philosopher Roland Barthes did in 1979 with the magazine Le Monde, a very famous journal in France. And the title of the interview is Osons etre paresseux, let's dare to be lazy. And in this interview, Barthes talks about how the Greek and the Latin roots for the concept of laziness are very different, and they point to two different conceptions of laziness. So in Latin, there is a term piger, that's the root for the French term for laziness, which is paresse. And in French, that means slow response. So it is a kind of response that does produce a result, but it drags on in bringing that result about. So laziness is fundamentally about temporality. And Barthes says that's very different than the Greek understanding of laziness, because the Greek word for laziness is argos, which is a contraction of a and then ergos, which translates into he who does not perform work. In Greek, it really is a refusal to perform effortful activity, much more so than in the Latin slash French derivation, where it's about doing work, but on a slower timescale. And I think that's a really helpful way for conceptualizing two different ways of relating to laziness. One is where you're still doing work, just on your own time scale. And another one that is a much more active refusal to perform what is expected of you by others and by society at large.

Ellie: 19:43

I feel like there is potential benefits to each to move away from the moral judgment piece and to be like, what is useful? Not even what is useful. That still sounds, Oh my gosh, I'm still drinking the productivity Kool Aid, but what is valuable about this experience? I know we're going to talk a little bit more about that later. I think you have some more to say about what Barthes's view is on this. But certainly when we're thinking about what might be valuable about"lazy" behavior, it matters whether we think about laziness as doing things slowly or as doing nothing at all. There can be value to both. sometimes I'm doing things slowly. Slowly, like reading a text to philosophy. Sometimes I'm whipping through it and then the next morning I'll wake up, got a bad night's sleep, and oh my God, it's five pages in an hour and it's not even Hegel that I'm reading.

David: 20:29

And I think sometimes it's also very difficult to know which kind of laziness you are performing, right? Because any refusal to do work is always by definition also a deferral. It's a temporal putting off of things. So you never just refuse to do something forever into the indefinite future. And so I want to believe that I am a slow performer, but I think sometimes we perform that slowness by doing micro refusals and vice versa. Sometimes you end up performing a long term refusal just by constantly deferring a task onto the future. And so that there is an ambiguity that I think might more comprehensively define the lazy experience.

Ellie: 21:11

I think that's a great way of putting it. And when we're talking about these features of laziness, I think the. enemy of laziness in the background here, which we haven't named as such, is not only capitalism, but specifically the Protestant work ethic, this amalgam of Christian ethics and capitalist values. Because you mentioned that the word lazy comes into English around 1540, and one thing that I read in some of my research is how the charge of laziness really went along with the rise of capitalism, of course, the Protestant work ethic, but then also the transatlantic slave trade. And I think we'll come back to the racial connotations of laziness later in the episode. That's something we're going to discuss quite a bit, but I just want to say for now that the Protestant work ethic was a useful way of trying to convince people that you had converted to Christianity. I'm thinking about slaveholders converting enslaved people to Christianity by saying hard work is good in and of itself. Because an enslaved person doesn't have any intrinsic motivation for doing work for a slaveholder, right? It's not giving them any direct benefit. And so the idea here and Price talks about this in their book as well, is that slaveholders had to have some other motivation for enslaved people to work, and that then became this Protestant work ethic that has a really strong tradition in the US, especially, thanks to Puritans, even though the Puritans are, they started off more in the Northeast, and then the slaveholders are mostly in the South, although certainly not all, but that then became a kind of justification.

David: 22:55

And that's really dark because not only does it justify people committing themselves to a life of endless struggle and toil under, down the road, a capitalist system, but also it gives a moral mission and a moral face to the institution of slavery. Because at that point, you're not only just making other people do forced labor for you, in order to enrich you. You're somehow becoming the steward or the shepherd of their souls and the protector of their passage into heaven. And so it's extremely dark because it moralizes some of the most amoral institutions that we know.

Ellie: 23:34

And it condemns both of those aspects of laziness that you talked about, namely the idea of doing things slowly and the idea of doing nothing at all, right? The Protestant work ethic is a harder, better, faster, stronger mentality. And so for that, you have to work quickly and you have to always be doing something. Enjoying Overthink? Please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self supporting show. As a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to extended episodes and other bonus content, as well as joining our community of listeners on Discord. For more, check out Overthink on Patreon. com. You've heard of Karl Marx, but you may not have heard of Karl Marx's son in law, Paul Lafargue. So listeners, Paul Lafargue wrote in the 1880s, this essay or tract called The Right to be Lazy. In French it's le droit à la paresse. This was a refutation of this big movement in France at the time which was the right to work movement. Paul Lafargue, just a couple little fascinating tidbits before we get into it. He was born in Cuba of mixed heritage and then moved to France with his family and got married in 1868 to Laura Marx, Marx's second daughter. He and Laura worked for decades together on their political organizing, and he was one of the founders of the Marxist wing of the French Workers Party. He and Laura were also, as they were, doing all this political work, financially supported by Engels.

David: 25:18

Oh yeah, he was rich.

Ellie: 25:20

Yeah, Engels was like this super rich, yeah, like son of a very wealthy capitalist. And so Engels was like, Hey, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and support financially the Lafargue's for decades. Paul Lafargue was in prison for his political work as well. So he actually wrote the preface to the right to be lazy from prison.

David: 25:42

Oh, interesting.

Ellie: 25:44

He was in prison for about a year.

David: 25:46

I wonder how much of this was ultimately influenced by the father in law, by Marx, and also by Engels, who in this case would be the, sugar father in law, or the Lefargues, because there is a very famous line in the Communist Manifesto about laziness, where Marx and Engels are talking about... one of the things that they do really well in this text is they address critiques. So they'll often say the capitalist might say this, but here are our five responses. And one of those moments hinges on the claim that, look, somebody could say that a communist society would disintegrate because people would suddenly become lazy. They would just refuse to work and they would not want to contribute to the flourishing of society. And Marx and Engels in their, they're really funny sometimes with their little like quips against these capitalist arguments. And they say, if that were true, that communism makes people lazy, then the capitalist society, especially the bourgeoisie should have already gone to the dogs. Bourgeois society should have already gone to the dogs, because if anything, they are the ones that embody laziness in the status quo, because they don't work.

Ellie: 27:08

Definitely. And I love that part of the Communist Manifesto. Just like any critique that you would have of communism, they anticipate. And it's interesting reading it today, well over a hundred years later, and those critiques still hit. But David, not you, just attributing the ideas of a mixed race Cuban to his white father in law, Marx, and, Engels his sugar daddy,

David: 27:34

Sugar daddy law. Yeah.

Ellie: 27:35

No, but I, actually think it is like jokes aside, it's totally fair to say that Lafargue was inspired by Marx. He literally moved to France, became a Marxist.

David: 27:45

Married into the family.

Ellie: 27:46

Yeah, but actually, aside from marrying into the family, he really adopted core Marxist ideas. That was his intellectual identity, so I don't think he would have a problem with that. But I think, this text, I really want to talk about because it's, for one, just as sassy and juicy as the communist manifesto has so many great lines. It's really fun to read, but it's also a pretty robust refutation of the right to work movement in France at the time, in part for the same reasons that you're talking about. So his claim is like, why is the proletariat obsessed with working when their capitalist overlords are just chilling out drinking tea and fancy wine, watching whatever like sports match they want to see at the time or going on a random hunt. And so he suggests that laziness is a natural instinct among humans. So, weirdly agrees with the laziness lie in the sense that one of the aspects of laziness lie is this idea that I'm innately lazy and I need to constantly work to overcome that. He agrees with the core part of that, which is that we are innately lazy.

David: 28:57

I'm innately lazy

Ellie: 28:58

Yeah, no, that's what humans are. And he says, Jesus preached idleness. Jesus said, the lilies of the field don't do any work. why don't we be more like that?

David: 29:09

he didn't make wine out of water for no reason in order to send me to work.

Ellie: 29:15

Right? And that was at a wedding. Actually, David, that's a great segway, because one thing that I was hoping I would have a chance to mention, and I was just like, I don't know how I'm really going to bring this in, which is that Lafargue rejects something that happened in post revolutionary France, which was the drastic reduction of holidays. So as you, having spent a lot of time in France, I'm sure also know one of the key tenets of the French Revolution was a move away from having a state that was organized around Catholicism and a move toward a state that was organized around laïcité or secularism. That's a really fundamental feature of French politics. And Lafargue is look, there was a really bad side effect of this, which is that people went from having, I'm quoting him, 90 rest days, 52 Sundays, and 38 holidays, during which they were strictly forbidden to work. And instead, having, now I'm not quoting, now I'm just skimming and reading, the new post revolutionary government abolished these Catholic holidays and replaced the seven day work week with a ten day work week, giving people just one day of rest out of ten. And obviously, now French people have way more holidays than Americans do, but he was seeing French culture at the time and being like, we are working way too much, and actually the Americans have it better than us because they have started using all of these machines to do the work for them.

David: 31:17

Yeah. So the machines will be an important theme because a lot of contemporary communist Marxists and even anarchists will point out that now we have the machine power to really liberate people from having to work, period. We have the capacity to produce and satisfy our fundamental and even some of our artificial needs without anybody having to work maybe more than a day or two per week. And so our ongoing commitment. To work is just an expression of this Protestant work ethic that tells us that in some way we are working on our soul or on our spirit and making ourselves better people through unnecessary expenditure of effort.

Ellie: 32:03

David. I feel like there's so much discourse today, and there should be, about how weird it is that as we've developed all of this technology to liberate us from work, our actual, our amount of working hours have not gone down. And Lafargue addresses this explicitly in his text. He says, for instance, a woman whose job is knitting can only knit five meshes a minute, but new circular knitting machines make 30, 000 in the same time. And that means that this woman should be able to just get her work done much more quickly and then have a lot more time for her fun, lazy pursuits. But here's a quote from him. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work, or in this case, woman's work, with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardor as if he wished to rival the machine. The idea is that, instead of, say, needing one scarf for your lifetime, suddenly we need one scarf every six months because we develop our interest in consumption in proportion to the rise of technology. That's, obviously not a point from the quote that I just read, but that's what he goes on to argue. So there's this weird way that not only do we keep working as much as we were before, even though we shouldn't be working so many hours, the demand for more and more consumer goods rises to justify that kind of work. So it's the worst of both worlds. We're working more than ever, but then we're also consuming more than we could ever need. And I think, this is written in the 1880s, still very much the same case, and to much, much worse degree, almost 150 years later.

David: 33:45

Yeah, and just the futility of competing against machines in the performing of machine-like labor, right? We will never be as good as an inanimate machine. And I love that they use the example of knitting because in that same interview that I mentioned from 1979, Roland Barthes uses knitting actually as an example of the highest expression of leisurely, lazy, Ooh! enjoyable time. And this just makes me think about how one in the same activity, in this case, knitting can take very different meanings for the subject that performs them, depending on the kind of external compulsion or absence thereof that applies to that activity. So the woman who has to knit in order to compete with whatever the machine is that knits versus the woman, or in this case, actually, the gender dynamics you are getting. really funny because Barthes talks about seeing a man knitting in the metro in Paris and how everybody was shocked, not just because he was a man, but because it's the most useless kind of activity. And so it also suggests that under communism, it's not that people would become lazy, it's that people would. potentially continue to perform some of the same activities that they performed before, but for other reasons and for other motivations, other than just productivity.

Ellie: 35:05

If the title of the interview is dare to be lazy, it seems like he's also offering a kind of defense of laziness. And one thing that I find, not super satisfying about the Lafargue is that he doesn't actually give a lot of content about what it would look like to live in this lazy society. That's fine. That's not his aim, but I was left feeling like I wanted a little bit more of that. And so tell us what Barthes's view on the pleasures or values of laziness are.

David: 35:34

Yeah. And so I think it is fair to describe Barthes in this piece as the 20th century Lafargue, because he is doing something very similar to what Lafargue did in the 19th century, except in his own unique postmodern poststructuralist way.

Ellie: 35:50

Without the political implications for good or for ill. Barthes's I'm just gonna tell you why I think we should be lazy. Lafargue's like, we need to fight for the right to be lazy.

David: 36:00

That's right. And the whole thing unfolds, the interview unfolds as a kind of lamentation on the part of Barthes that he has been unable to welcome laziness into his life in the way in which he believes that he should. He also performs that self flagellation, except that it's not about, I'm too lazy. It's the other way. It's, I'm not lazy enough. yeah, very much so. And you constantly feel this frustrated desire that he's trying to express in regards to this. But anyways, the central argument that he makes in this interview is that we need to make time for laziness in our lives, because if we don't make time for laziness, laziness will literally force itself upon us against our will in a negative form.

Ellie: 36:45

Ooh.

David: 36:48

He almost personifies laziness as this untamable force of human life that either you welcome with open arms or you are crushed by it when you least expect it. And he says, look, when you try to work Consistently without breaks, eventually you become extremely irritable to the point that any small diversion or distraction you experience as an oppression or as an attack on your mode of life. So he gives the example of trying to write, because he's, an author and trying to write so much that it got to the point where if somebody even offered him, to stop to eat or to drink a glass of water, he would get pissed, and he would lash out against those that interrupted his work. And he also talks about working himself to the bones to the point where he would just fall onto the couch and bedrot.

Ellie: 37:47

Couch rot.

David: 37:48

Yeah, couch rot, he would just stew, so he would couch stew, he would just fester at his inability to continue working. And so he regrets not welcoming laziness into his life. And then he does talk about some more concrete ways to carve out a space for being lazy in our schedule. And the things that he mentions as examples are, for instance, the knitting, because it's for pleasure and it's something that should not have a direct social utility for others or even for ourselves. And in his own case, he talks about painting. He describes going to the French countryside during the summers, especially when he's not teaching. And giving himself over to the activity of painting. And what is so valuable about painting for him, he says, is that I am not good at it. And so it's an activity that takes up my time, but that does not feed my narcissism. Because it's now something that I am devoting time, I am investing time in, even though I will never get success or recognition out of it. Whereas if I try to be lazy, he says, by writing another article or writing another book, my sense of ego is too caught up in that. And so it's not true laziness. So true laziness is something that de centers the self and silences the ego.

Ellie: 39:11

I as you know all too well, pretty much never work after 5 p. m. or on the weekends. And, I've started in the past couple of years tracking my time really carefully, which has been an amazing exercise for me, in part because it's encouraged me to work when I'm working and not work when I'm not working, if that makes sense. It's oh, so I have this morning of writing. I'm not gonna then scroll my phone. But hey, what I do after my workday is over is completely mine to decide. And it turns out that I work about 30 to 35 hours a week. And I really don't work more than that in a given week. But those 30 to 35 hours are devoted hours, to my work, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, and this is very edifying work, the kind of work that we do. But the reason I mention that here is because I've learned from this to just really lean in to those times where you're not trying to get anywhere with what you're doing. But I also want to mention that's actually made my leisure time more enjoyable because the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who's the guy who popularized the term flow, talks in his work on this topic about how it's actually really hard to enjoy time when you're not working or not efforting at all because there aren't intrinsic goals set up for you that you can feel the satisfaction of achieving. So he actually recommends rather than being productive versus doing nothing, finding leisure activities that have built in goals to them, but ones that are, maybe easy to achieve, ones for which there are really low stakes, etc. And I feel like that's really helpful for me to think about because the fact is, before I started tracking my time, I would feel anxious about not doing work and then doing work, etc, And a lot of times when I was not working, I was just like, "vegging out" on the couch, and that was actually not that pleasurable. And I think this is the case for a lot of people. a lot of people, when we think about bedrotting and couchrotting, there's not just a moral judgment due to society, there also is a feeling of I actually don't know if I want to be doing, yeah, this.

David: 41:41

Yeah, no, because it doesn't feel good.

Ellie: 41:43

I really might want to be doing something different.

David: 41:45

Like sometimes when you just spend hours and hours watching TV, it's not oh, society constructs this as a negative experience. No, it's a shitty experience,

Ellie: 41:54

you're just consuming, which is something we talked about in other episodes too, like in our productivity episode.

David: 41:58

Yeah. And okay. So I'm also going to raise another issue, Ellie, here, because your example of cutting out work time from leisure time and ending at 5 pm. bears directly upon it. And sadly, I'm unhappy to report Barthes would not be super thrilled about that approach, Ellie, toward laziness because he calls that a kind of ritualized laziness. So he says when we cut time and specifically devoted to laziness, that's also not true laziness because all we're doing is severing time and splicing it in order to diversify what we do, we're trying to fill every cranny of time. It's just that some time gets set aside for leisurely activity, whereas true laziness should be the dispossession of the subject and the dissolution of time to some degree in and of itself where you just go with the flow to take that term, but without it having a clear end time, which in our case would be the next morning at 8am, right? Like at that point, laziness needs to end. And in connection to the Lafargue and to the discussion of holidays, Barthes says the very concept of the holiday is the highest expression of ritualized laziness or idleness, as well as the weekend. And what you see there is that we often experience holidays and weekends and vacations as a kind of oppressive boredom because it comes from without and not really from within. It's not spontaneous. It's not organic. It's something that we have to do at a designated time for a predetermined reason. And so the kind of ambivalence, he says, that is part of true laziness, is lost.

Ellie: 43:49

Oh God, don't tell me I need to my relationship to laziness when I finally feel like I'm in a good place it. Yes.

David: 43:57

On the positive end of things, I think knitting is a good solution. And Barnes points out that at the end of his life, Rousseau took up knitting as a way of dying happily. Ellie, it is time for us to talk about the connection between laziness and racism. Because one of the things that we know from the history of laziness is that, if anything, it is often used to produce a social other. I'm here thinking about the way in which, for instance, in patriarchy, women's labor in the domestic sphere is devalued and women are, assumed to be lazy at home all day, not contributing to either the family or to society more generally. Also thinking about the way in which racial minorities are thought to be naturally or innately lazy. And one expression of this kind of weaponization of laziness is the idea that certain people, especially people living in tropical and coastal regions, are constitutionally lazy, maybe not because of their biology, but because of their environmental conditions of life.

Ellie: 45:29

And this is the OG version of the racism that we see nowadays that connects Black Americans with laziness. I mentioned enslavement earlier and the way that enslaved people were often considered lazy and needing to overcome their laziness through hard work. You also very much saw this with colonization of the Americas in the vilification of indigenous people, as being disinclined to work. Really, this goes back to what's known as climate determinism, and climate determinism is this idea that climate can determine your personality, which is, basically what you just mentioned, and it's related to environmental determinism. It refers to the idea that different climates lead to different levels of human intelligence and to different social formations. And it's usually really bound up with this idea that there are some societies that have progressed further than others, and with the idea that different races are superior to others, rather than just saying Humans are different. Cultures are different, saying some cultures are better than others and the other cultures are just behind the better ones. They need to catch up. And this goes back in some ways to the ancient world. You can see, for instance, in the Greeks, a belief that their own temperate climate was perfectly suited to democracy and philosophy. but then there's also a modern version that can be found in the work of Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yeah, because he tries to take any racial essentialism out of this view. He's not oh, it's not as though Europeans are inherently superior to Africans, but he uses climate determinism to explain why Europeans have had such cultural dominance in recent centuries. And for that, he's been the object of some critique.

David: 47:24

Yeah, I know it reminds me of just his claim, for instance, that the reason Europeans have become so much more dominant is not because of anything in their biology or their DNA, but because they just happen to land in the right environment with the right kind of beasts, like cows and horses that are tameable, whereas like Africans, you can't really tame a zebra. And so it's the environment that explains then social and industrial development. But this idea from Jared Diamond does have a very long history. And one philosopher in particular who was a proponent of this kind of environmental determinism and whom we haven't talked about on Overthink, I don't believe yet, is Montesquieu, who was an 18th century political philosopher. He was also a judge and a jurist who wrote extensively about politics, about the nature of government, about democracy. But I here have in mind a book that he wrote in 1748. eight called The Spirit of the Laws, in which he reflects upon the nature and purpose of our legal system. And the reason that he's relevant in this discussion about climate determinism is because climate figures really centrally in Montesquieu's theory of law. According to him, one of the most alarming threats to legal order in any society, whether it's European, whether it's in the Americas, in Africa or in Asia, is laziness. And laziness is, above all else, for him, a byproduct of climatic conditions. Hot and tropical weather, he says, It enervates and moves the body, meaning that it fatigues the body. It constantly makes our tissues and our cells do work that they otherwise wouldn't have to do just to be able to cope with the temperature and humidity. And that constant toiling and striving of the body at a physiological level makes people who are native to hot and tropical areas constitutionally lazy. And the problem with laziness is that lazy people don't contribute to the advancement of society. And what's more, they represent a principle of political degeneration. They cause their society to break down.

Ellie: 49:52

And I read actually, this idea associated with Montesquieu might actually have originated even further back than him. I think he's really the one that we associate it with in contemporary philosophy and history of thought. But, yeah. It might have been the case that Montesquieu was actually getting some of these ideas from travel narratives around his time, which in turn might have been influenced by the 14th century North African philosopher, Ibn Khaldun, who was another proponent of climate determinism. just wanted to mention that. That hasn't been fully substantiated, but the argument has been made that some of Montesquieu's ideas may go back to Ibn Khaldun's ideas. And even if there's not a direct lineage, of course, like there is still a sort of similarity here. Can you say a little bit more about how Montesquieu views the relationship between climate and politics, right? You're talking about the sort of bodily effects that a tropical climate might have on a person and how that leads to political degeneration, but I'm curious to hear more of the details on that.

David: 50:58

Yeah. I think there are two connections to be made. One is literally that it makes people fatigued and lazy. But another one is that he thinks the climate determines people's belief systems. For instance, he gives the example of the inhabitants of Siam, which is modern day Thailand. He says that people in Siam, because they live in a hot, tropical climate, they develop a metaphysics, so their entire metaphysics, their philosophical system, is a reflection of their environmental conditions of life. And because their bodies are enervated by the weather, they come to value inaction. So think about it. If you live in an environment where your body is constantly having to do effort just to survive, You will come to see inaction as the highest form of human privilege that somebody can perform. So the highest activity is actually inactivity. And that means that in the belief system of the people of Siam, the highest being is not as in the case of the Greeks, the mover, the unmoved mover, but it's actually just the unmoved entity. So the divine is that which is not moved because movement is a kind of suffering.

Ellie: 52:18

Is he talking about Buddhism here?

David: 52:20

I don't know exactly what the reference is.

Ellie: 52:21

Yeah, I have questions about Montesquieu's understanding of "Siamese metaphysics."

David: 52:27

And so he says that they just value inaction because rest is "delicious." And so there's, there are questions here about the kind of Oriental perspective that he's bringing to the table, but he also uses this framework for thinking about Europeans, especially in terms of the distinction between Northern and Southern Europeans. He says in the North of Europe, because the weather is cold, people have to heat up their bodies and they do that by being industrious. And so there is a principle of social advancement that is built into the weather. In the South, however, because their bodies are already heated up they are disincentivized from working. And ultimately, the problem is that this, again, determines people's political values and political beliefs. And so he says, the people of Northern Europe, because of the cold weather, they ultimately value freedom above all else, especially the freedom to work. Whereas Southern European people don't value freedom. The thing that they value the most is, the people of Siam, passivity. And he says, that's why they are more likely to become slaves.

Ellie: 53:43

Oh my gosh. not that an anecdotal argument against this is a particularly good one, but speaking for myself, when I'm really cold, I want to do nothing. I just want to curl up in bed and warm, warming my feet and hands becomes my number one priority. And so the idea that like, A Southern European would be less likely to work because they're already comfortable, but the Northern European wants to go out and work because they're freaking miserably cold is just so odd to me.

David: 54:16

I know it almost seems as if Montesquieu is working with the most stereotyped images of being cold as like rubbing your hands to warm them up. That's industriousness. And then when you're at the beach or just like laying down sweating, that's inactivity. That's laziness and a principle of political degeneration. But I think here, we also have to keep in mind that, Montesquieu is most often remembered as a reformer of slavery. But the real takeaway of the spirit of the laws is ultimately his defense of slavery. Because as an Enlightenment thinker, he does say that slavery is against nature, because all humans are equal, right? Like he's checking his Enlightenment box by affirming equality. Yet, he says, in countries with hot climates, and this is a direct quote from the text "slavery is there more reconcilable to reason." so even though slavery is unnatural, you can justify it for people who are lazy in these hot tropical environments. And that means that according to Montesquieu, the function of the law is to counteract the effects of climate and make people do work for the social body. So people in positions of power should do anything that is possible to break people out of their tropical laziness. And he says, we need to give people land, private property, so they have an incentive to work at. You have to mandate, public service like they do in China, he says. The government should even organize competitions annually where we give prizes and honors to like the farmer who had the best harvest for the season because that's also a huge motivator. And when all of this fails, that's when slavery enters the picture as reconcilable to reason.

Ellie: 56:19

And this book being published in the middle of the 18th century is, of course, happening as France is participating in the transatlantic slave trade. So that's context worth considering. And I feel like this reminds me of the persistence of the idea that Black people, even after crossing the Atlantic as, enslaved folks, would remain lazy. That's one of the most pernicious stereotypes that we have in the US when it comes to race. And I definitely think it's the most pernicious stereotype about laziness. It's something that you've seen politicians even in recent decades articulate. And, we have still in some quarters and in some sort of collective unconscious, the persistence of myths like the welfare queen, or the poor black person who is benefiting from the state unjustifiably. I even found some work by the anthropologist Christine Jeska, who states, she has this book called The Laziness Myth that's about South Africa, and she states that the Zulu people, in South Africa. So this is a people that have been oppressed racially, but that weren't part of the transatlantic slave trade and had a movement of climate, but that Zulu people often refer to themselves as lazy, even in present day South Africa. And we'll often say this is an unfortunate trait of our people, but it's a trait there. So there's a sense in which this has really become internalized, not only for people who are descendants of enslaved Africans, but also for people across the globe.

David: 57:48

Yeah. And it's not just the laziness that is internalized by people who are members of dominated groups, but also the opposite that is internalized by people who are members of privileged groups, because there is a really funny passage in Montesquieu's book where he says he's differentiating between the Spanish and the French, of whom he is a member. And he's look, the Spanish, they're just prideful people in their laziness. And that's what moves them, if anything, is their pride. But the essence of the French, he says, is that we are fundamentally vain. And because we are vain, that motivates us to always work to prove that we are better than everyone else.

Ellie: 58:30

The The origin of your claim that people are vice signaling and when they're saying, Oh, I'm this way, even though in this case it's the opposite. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live Q& As, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast. com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.