Down with Laziness

It is not uncommon in my counseling sessions for people to blame themselves or others for being "lazy." I have a major problem with that, because frankly, I don't know what it means. Nothing in my years of training or continuing education has ever prepared me to understand laziness. I understand something about depression, which can rob people of their motivation. I understand something about ADD, which can make people tend to wander around in life or in their everyday activities. I understand something about frontal lobe brain damage, which can rob people of motivation. I also have some general understanding of passive aggressive behavior, which in my experience is usually a reaction to punitive parenting in childhood. But I'm just not sure what laziness it.

I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. But it's one of those words and concepts that is really good for beating ourselves up without having a clear meaning. That makes it rather dangerous. We can call ourselves lazy and feel inadequate and depressed. We can call others lazy and feel angry at them. So we had better know what we mean by it. It's a powerful word.

"Lazy" is a moral judgement. We apparently are saying something more than "I feel unmotivated," or "he is relatively unmotivated."

There's another problem with the word. Lack of motivation is a relative thing. Even persons that we might be tempted to think of as lazy are often in fact motivated to do some things, maybe even things we ourselves wouldn't do.

In almost every situation that I encounter where a patient calls themselves lazy, they are in fact, either depressed, ADD, or experiencing a psychological reaction against a very dominant person (parent or spouse). The word lazy obscures rather than clarifies, creates obstacles rather than solutions. We have to know what the real problem is before we can fix it. So whenever one of my clients uses that word, you can be sure I point it out to them.

Usually, the client is depressed, and calling themselves lazy only compounds their depression. It is not usually accurate for a client to call themselves lazy because that (if it exists) is a character issue, a lifelong quality rather than being part of a temporary episode of depression.

It may be possible that people are born with a lethargic temperament for some reason, and may naturally not be very motivated. If so, that would not be a moral issue; it would be a psychological or biological issue.

So down with the word "lazy." When we encounter problems with lack of motivation, we need to figure out what is really going on and address the real issue.