We’ve been talking a lot about how people with disabilities are called lazy for needing accommodations. But what does that even mean? I’d like to talk about it. Disclaimer: I’ve had three cups of coffee today and this post is all over the place.
If I asked you to define laziness right now, off the top of your head, what words would you use? Unproductive or unmotivated? Lacking energy/effort or unwilling to do work? Sluggish, inactive, sloth? Couch potato?
Procrastination is probably one of the first to come to your mind. Because we always attribute being productive to being successful and being unproductive to failing. (Capitalism, am I right?) You are not considered a valuable member of society unless you are giving 110%, 100% of the time. You have to be on all the time. You have to prioritize your job or your schoolwork above everything else in your life, including yourself. And for a lot of us, it is the fear that we could fail that keeps us from being “productive.” Or maybe it’s just that we aren’t putting our energy toward things that society approves of.
I used to want to be on Broadway. I wanted to apply to colleges as a musical theatre major. That’s where my energy was going when I was in high school; I was working on my acting and my voice. I can’t even count how many times I was told to pick something more realistic, more practical, because acting was never going to work out for me. So I said fine, whatever… I didn’t get into my first choice school anyway, so I guess I’ll just give up on theatre. I still wanted to do something I really cared about, though. So I chose GWST and was really excited about it. Again, people questioned me. Oh, that’s… interesting… and what do you want to do with that? What kind of job will that get you? How are you going to find a good job after college? Firstly, it’s none of your business. Secondly, why can’t I just get a degree in something that I enjoy and want to be more educated in? I didn’t even want to go to college in the first place, but everyone got in my head about getting a job when I’m older. Prospective jobs need to see that I payed well over $100,000 on a degree that cost me my mental health, and probably isn’t useful for the position anyway. Society rewards jobs that need a college degree over jobs that don’t, even though the jobs that don’t (food service, grocers, janitors, garbage collectors) are for services that we need and benefit from every day. Yet these same people will get mad that no one wants to make them a Big Mac for $9 an hour.
Where was I? Oh, right: laziness.
Instead of calling ourselves lazy, we should think about why we are using that term. Most of the time it’s because it is the easiest word to describe what we’re feeling and going through. If you are feeling unmotivated and unfocused, if you are fatigued, or if you can’t find pleasure in doing things that you usually love, you might blame it on laziness. Or, if you have a mental illness or other disability, you might think that being lazy is a symptom of that. But here’s the interesting thing: ‘laziness’ is not a psychological term.
No one is going to include “laziness” in the list of symptoms for depression. They might, however, list lack of motivation, lack of concentration, loss of interest, that “empty” mood, pessimism, fatigue, self-doubt, etc. All of these symptoms are things that would make someone procrastinate or seem lazy to an outsider. One blog I found on the myth of laziness says that “even if laziness did exist, it only describes a set of behaviors – the symptoms. It doesn’t describe or explain the cause of so-called laziness.”
So next time, instead of judging someone for being lazy, ask yourself what conditions around them have made them act the way they are. Instead of judging a disabled person for needing an accessible parking space or any other accommodation, ask yourself why society functions in a way that forces people with disabilities to even need accommodations… and then stigmatizes them for asking.
Unruly Bodies 
This post sparked some interesting thoughts for me about how we understand energy, fatigue, laziness, and depression. We’ve spoken a lot in class about the politics of resentment, how we tend to get angry when someone seems lazy or doesn’t work “hard enough” because we all feel exploited and fatigued to some degree. I think your post is a good opportunity to think more about how we define laziness. In my own experience of depression, it definitely makes me “lazy,” but I would argue that lack of motivation, loss of interest, anhedonia, etc. all underlie laziness. Why else would someone act “lazy”? What other feelings would cause “laziness”? Maybe the concept of laziness only exists to try to blame people for their lack of work. This definitely motivated me to think more about how we understand laziness and how we respond to our own + others’ (in)ability to meet capitalist demands.
I feel like being lazy gets a bad rap. My high school teacher (cringe ik) said how people aren’t actually lazy, they either just don’t know how to do something or some other spurious factor is affecting whether or not they are able to do something. This is defiantly a negative connotation associated with laziness ir what is perceived to be lazy. Society expects a lot from the individual weather or not their is a reason of why some one is acting in a “lazy” way
This is such an important idea! I actually had a debate with my roommate whether or not we thought “lazy” is something real (I was adamantly against that). Like you described, it’s yet another way capitalist culture is able to place blame on the individual for not prioritizing their work. There are countless reasons a person might appear to be “lazy,” but we must keep asking ourselves why our first move is always to pathologize the individual.