Deprogram yourself

Part 1: The Laziness Lie

I often say my best productivity hack was going to therapy. I started because I’d reached a point where work should have been going more and more smoothly—I’d built up a store of experience and contacts, I’d had some success with the promise of more to come—but instead it was getting harder and harder. I felt like every story I did was a chance not to learn something new or enjoy a new challenge but to lose everything I had so arduously gained. I alternated between a state of terrified paralysis and unpleasant sprints of work sparked only when a deadline got too close to ignore. When I got to the therapist’s office, however, we barely talked about work at all. As it will surprise no one to learn, my problems with perfectionism and anxiety had almost nothing to do with my job. They were much more deeply rooted than that. Untangling those roots was painful, difficult, and took several years of weekly appointments. Once I did (that is, for now; I expect to go back as needed forever), it was like shaking off quicksand I didn’t even know I was stuck in. Being able to walk forward at all felt like I was strapped to a rocket.

This is why I’ve chafed against the new-ish discourse that situates burnout, a mental health problem, as a structural issue that can be solved only by a full societal overhaul. Does burnout fall harder on those who are more marginalized, who are also given less space to recognize and recover from it? Yes. Has technology enabled already toxic workplaces to become even more toxic, and also all but inescapable? Definitely. Do we need a full societal overhaul? Absolutely. (I’m even writing a book about it!) Will the revolution cure your burnout? I’m not so sure. It (and the baby steps between now and then, like joining a union) could and should allow you the stability, time, and money you need to address your burnout, which is a vital first step and the bare minimum of what everyone deserves. But it won’t save you from the hard and often ugly work that only you can do, the work of finding and untangling your destructive patterns at their roots. The work of really, truly taking care of yourself.

The burnout-is-structural discourse is (slowly) replacing something even more toxic: the tyranny of positive thinking. The idea that everything that needs changing in your life is within your power to change, if you just work hard enough and keep a smile on your face the whole time. The idea that living up to impossible standards with deficient resources is not only easy, but required. The idea that it’s a personal failing if you can’t. I’m not arguing for a return to that way of thinking about self-improvement. Recognizing how inequality leads to trauma and suffering is crucial, and inequality is a structural problem that demands structural solutions. I just don’t want to leave out the mental health piece, which at its core is irreducibly personal, while we’re fixing the rest.

So in all the reading about productivity, creativity, and burnout I’ve done in the past year—and I’ll read anything about these topics; please send me links—I’ve felt like there’s been a hole in its center. Cal Newport? Too focused on the individual and success within capitalism. (His new book gets a tiny bit closer to the structural! Keep going, Cal!) Anne Helen Petersen? Too structural, to the point of being weirdly disempowering. (I mean, feeling professionally compelled to tweet while still in a towel after a shower, even while knowing your bosses don’t care, is the very definition of something therapy can help you with.) All in all, I’m on Petersen’s side, by a lot. It just eats at me that mental health care—the thing that most helped me, and has helped so many people I know—is hardly ever mentioned, as if it’s bullshit self-care that means nothing inside the poisonous system, instead of radical, and radically difficult, self-care that’s a necessary part of tearing down that system.

But then, this month, something amazing happened. I read the book I’ve been waiting for, the book that perfectly balances these two perspectives. The book that never denies the obstacles you’re up against but also never lets you off the hook for the ones you’re creating for yourself. It’s called Laziness Does Not Exist by Dr. Devon Price, who’s a research psychologist. They posit that contemporary Western society (at least) is governed by an unspoken set of rules they call the Laziness Lie. At the heart of the Laziness Lie is the belief held by each of us that, deep down, that we’re irredeemably lazy and therefore worthless, and the only way to prove that we’re not is by working all the time, or at least feeling guilty when we’re not. The Laziness Lie also infects how we see other people, causing us to judge those who are struggling to meet society’s unreasonable expectations as lazy, instead of being able to see that they are actually worn out, oppressed, and traumatized. Price locates the roots of the Laziness Lie in American slavery, among other historic injustices, and examines how it manifests in the lives of an impressively diverse range of people, as well as how some of them are managing to fight back. It’s not just about being a workaholic or a perfectionist, though that’s where I related most. It’s about toxic relationships, activism fatigue, information overload, and basically everything that has ever bothered a person who’s awake in the 21st century.

Like therapy, Laziness Does Not Exist was often painful to read. I quickly learned I couldn’t read it before bed; it was too upsetting to see some of the worst parts of myself dissected so astutely, and too electrifying to have a new framework within which to understand them. Literally on page 1: “I was forever spreading myself too thin, dragging myself from obligation to obligation, thinking my lack of energy made me unforgivably ‘lazy.’” Welcome to the psychodrama that plays out in my head every day between 3-6 pm, when I think maybe I wouldn’t be so tired if I could just find the right activity to throw myself at, instead of—after eight years of freelancing mostly on my own schedule!—accepting that I need a real break. “For years, I would berate myself for running out of steam. Whenever I didn’t push myself to the limit, I felt shame about being stagnant.” Welcome to the impossible standards of activity and energy that have haunted me since high school (which, I think to my credit, was the last time I regularly worked myself to burnout and thought it was fine). “Research on productivity, burnout, and mental health all suggest that the average workday is far too long, and that other commitments that we often think of as normal, such as a full course load at college or a commitment to weekly activism, are not sustainable for most people.” Welcome to my pandemic, which forced me to slow down and showed me how much all that running around was keeping me from getting where I actually wanted to go.

Because that’s the thing: If you don’t know how to listen to your rhythms and respect your limits, you’ll always be playing catch up in a fundamental way. Not to swing too far back to the Cal Newport side of things, but the Laziness Lie doesn’t just keep you miserable and perpetuate all kinds of oppressions. It keeps you—very ironically, I know—from doing your best work. From having the energy and confidence to take chances, think big thoughts, keep going after mistakes, and, as Price says, “connect with the goals that truly light a fire inside us.” If you’re too tired, too hard on yourself, too convinced you’ll never do enough because your vision of enough is physically impossible, you won’t be able to see the spark.

Programming note: Next week, another book for the deprogramming journey: Wintering by Katherine May. I read it during a newsletter break, and it felt like too much write about when I got back. I’m ready now.