There Is No Such Thing as Lazy — Only Human
“Laziness is a judgment … a reaction to someone daring not to be productive in a moment when ideology demands it.” —Desiree B. Stephens
That ideology—under capitalism—says we owe the system our labor, our creativity, our time. And it says that our worth is proven through output, hustle, and the absence of “excuses.”
“Excuses” are unacceptable attempts to explain why we couldn’t follow instructions or live up to expectations, this time. We felt it would be harmful. We believed something else would be better. We forgot. We were tired. We needed rest, water, or food.
We are taught from childhood to work against ourselves—against our bodies, our inner truth, and our real needs. The accusation of lazy Isn’t really about our actions. It’s about the discomfort one person feels (often a person in authority) when they see someone else breaking the unspoken rules of an ideology that demands constant productivity.
The “Laziness Lie”
In Laziness Does Not Exist, Devon Price calls this belief the Laziness Lie—a cultural inheritance from Puritan morality, slavery, and the industrial age.
The lie rests on three ideas:
Your worth is your productivity.
You cannot trust your own limits.
There is always more you could be doing.
When we rest, we are not failing. We are responding—physically, emotionally, spiritually—to unmet needs, exhaustion, or trauma. As Price writes, “Our bodies and minds are screaming for some peace and quiet.”
Capitalism’s Demand for Endless Labor
Karl Marx’s analysis still rings true: capitalism funnels the value of our labor up a pyramid. At the bottom, the majority work 40, 60, even 80 hours a week just to survive. At the top, a few collect vast wealth—value skimmed from the labor of others—and distribute rewards to their closest lieutenants. The lieutenants then channel rewards to their lieutenants. This chain of favor, loyalty, and rewards keeps those at the top in power.
The ideology then weaves us a fiction. It tells us we’re not serving the wealthy; we’re “providing for our families,” “building success,” or “demonstrating personal discipline.” But this is a smokescreen. The real purpose is extraction from us to them.
How Division Protects the System
The greatest threat to this pyramid is solidarity—when the bottom 80% of people recognize their shared exploitation and act together.
To prevent that, systems of power keep us divided:
Racism, as Malcolm X observed, teaches white workers to identify with the wealthy rather than with their fellow laborers of color. Small privileges and feelings of superiority keep them invested in the system. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned, racism and economic injustice are intertwined, sustained by laws and ideologies that serve the wealthy and powerful.
Sexism divides households, giving men privileges that tie them to patriarchal power instead of to the struggles of women in their own homes, families, and communities.
Religious dogma can suppress sexuality, personal truth, and freedom of choice—keeping people obedient and distracted from the real sources of their hardship. And let’s not forget that organized religion is also an economically exploitive pyramid, teaching a dogma that followers need to participate, give time, labor, and money. This allows religious organizations to accumulate enormous wealth and outsized political power.
Why Pleasure, Rest, and Autonomy Are Threatening to Power
Have you ever noticed that conservative religious beliefs don’t just condemn gay sex, but most forms of sex? In the Southern Baptist tradition in which I was raised, sex was only sanctioned by the church if it was heterosexual, between two people who were married, done in the missionary position, and to make children. Heterosexual married people were not even allowed to have sex for enjoyment, experiment with positions, have oral sex, or have sex when pregnancy was unlikely to result.
There’s a reason oppressive systems fear joy. Great sex, and deep love bond people more to each other than to the system and the authorities teaching the ideologies of oppression. Recreational rest and spiritual freedom give people the energy and clarity to ask: Why am I working so hard? Who really benefits? What do I really want?
If people start to question, they might stop feeding the machine.
Work Isn’t the Enemy—Exploitation Is
I’m not against labor. I’m against labor that depletes us in order to feed a system that takes more than it gives back.
Labor that feeds us, builds our homes, creates beauty, and benefits all members of our communities, without skimming some of that value to feed a machine—a machine that creates the hierarchy and systems of oppression that harm the vast majority of us—that labor is sacred.
Work should serve us—ourselves, our families, our communities. Religion should teach and strive to create love, connection, and unity—not division. Ideologies should guide us toward justice, not obedience.
Rest as Liberation
Rest is not selfish. Rest is reclamation. It’s a refusal to be ground down by a system that sees you as a resource to be used up.
When we rest without shame, trust our inner truth, and build solidarity across all the divisions meant to keep us apart—we step into our power.
And that is what the system fears most.
What if we measured worth not by productivity, but by humanity?
What if we built a society where labor, love, and rest were all in service to people—not profits?
It begins by recognizing how we participate in ideologies of oppression with our attitudes, judgments, and the language we use toward ourselves and others.
Then, drop the judgments. Drop the shame. Express compassion to ourselves and others that much of the effort and “value” we create gets taken from us to feed the system. And, it’s exhausting.
Then ask, “Have I allowed myself and my loved ones to rest and rejuvenate? When we work, how can we channel our efforts more in a way that cares for us, ourselves, our loved ones, and our community? What efforts and time spent bring joy, laughter, and build relational bonds in our communities?”
Let’s build a culture that values our humanity, the humanity of others, and brings us together. And let’s detach from the ideology, the values, and the machine that keeps each of us isolated and struggling just to survive.
