Review: Laziness Does Not Exist, by Devon Price

[Russ Allbery]

Laziness Does Not Exist
by Devon Price

Publisher: Atria Books
Copyright: January 2021
ISBN:      1-9821-4013-5
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     216

The premise of Laziness Does Not Exist is in the title: Laziness as a
moral failing does not exist. It is a misunderstanding of other
problems with physical or psychological causes, a belief system that is
used to extract unsustainable amounts of labor, an excuse to withdraw
our empathy, and a justification for not solving social problems. Price
refers to this as the Laziness Lie, which they define with three main
tenets:

 1. Your worth is your productivity.
 2. You cannot trust your own feelings and limits.
 3. There is always more you could be doing.

This book (an expansion of a Medium article) makes the case against all
three tenets using the author's own burnout-caused health problems as
the starting argument. They then apply that analysis to work,
achievements, information overload, relationships, and social pressure.
In each case, Price's argument is to prioritize comfort and relaxation,
listen to your body and your limits, and learn who you are rather than
who the Laziness Lie is trying to push you to be.

The reader reaction to a book like this will depend on where the reader
is in thinking about the problem. That makes reviewing a challenge,
since it's hard to simulate a reader with a different perspective. For
myself, I found the content unobjectionable, but largely repetitive of
other things I've read. The section on relationships in particular will
be very familiar to Captain Awkward readers, just not as pointed.
Similarly, the chapter on information overload is ground already
covered by Digital Minimalism, among other books. That doesn't make
this a bad book, but it's more of a survey, so if you're already
well-read on this topic you may not get much out of it.

The core assertion is aggressive in part to get the reader to argue
with it and thus pay attention, but I still came away convinced that
laziness is not a useful word. The symptoms that cause us to call
ourselves lazy — procrastination, burnout, depression, or executive
function problems, for example — are better understood without the
weight of moral reproach that laziness carries. I do think there is
another meaning of laziness that Price doesn't cover, since they are
aiming this book exclusively at people who are feeling guilty about
possibly being lazy, and we need some term for people who use their
social power to get other people to do all their work for them. But
given how much the concept of laziness is used to attack and belittle
the hard-working or exhausted, I'm happy to replace "laziness" with
"exploitation" when talking about that behavior.

This is a profoundly kind and gentle book. Price's goal is to help
people be less hard on themselves and to take opportunities to relax
without guilt. But that also means that it stays in the frame of
psychological analysis and self-help, and only rarely strays into
political or economic commentary. That means it's more useful for
taking apart internalized social programming, but less useful for
thinking about the broader political motives of those who try to
convince us to working endlessly and treat all problems as personal
responsibilities rather than political failures. For that, I think Anne
Helen Peterson's Can't Even is the more effective book. Price also
doesn't delve much into history, and I now want to read a book on the
origin of a work ethic as a defining moral trait.

One truly lovely thing about this book is that it's quietly comfortable
with human variety of gender and sexuality in a way that's never
belabored but that's obvious from the examples that Price uses.
Laziness Does Not Exist felt more inclusive in that way, and to some
extent on economic class, than Can't Even.

I was in the mood for a book that takes apart the political, social,
and economic motivations behind convincing people that they have to
constantly strive to not be lazy, so the survey nature of this book and
its focus on self-help made it not the book for me. It also felt a bit
repetitive despite its slim length, and the chapter structure didn't
click for me. But it's not a bad book, and I suspect it will be the
book that someone else needs to read.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-01-24

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-9821-4013-5.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>