I really needed to read this

[cosmolinguist]

...maybe you'd benefit from it or be interested in it, too.

I berate myself a lot for being lazy. My depression always tells me it doesn't really exist and I'm just lazy. I compare myself to ideals of productivity and efficiency and am more vicious to myself when I inevitably fall short than I'd accept from anyone else towards me

I've read something about laziness being an ableist concept, but this blog post develops and articulates the powerful thesis behind that.

When I don’t use the word “lazy,” I am more likely to notice the actual causes of someone avoiding responsibilities, and I am less likely to spend lots of emotional energy seething about how they or I are/am a bad horrible person who deserves to be hated forever.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

That is really useful. Thank you.

Causality and specificity FTW.

[moem]

Meh. Lazy is a fine word. It should just not be applied where it's not appliccable. Doesn't that go for all words?

Depression is not laziness. They're very different things.

And the person who 'literally just did not see [the dirt] unless it was explicitly pointed out to him'... did he have a visual disability of some kind? Was there a reason why he could not see it? Not looking doesn't count. And looking is a thing that can be learned. For some reason, the people who need dirt pointed out to them are almost always socialised as men. Funny how that works.

I guess the post simply doesn't resonate with me. Maybe because I define laziness as "a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever" and then stop? I'm not thinking about how horrible they are or how they should suffer or be resented. I might at most think about how I should not depend on them to take responsibility, or how it might catch up with them eventually and they might get into trouble.
In any case, depression and sleep deprivation and other things like that clearly fall under 'anything whatsoever'.

[finding_helena]

Yeah, I think this post maybe has a point in some aspects, but I also question the people who don't clean despite being told to by family members. In the case of the teen with the auditory processing disorder (not deafness?) surely they understood the parents were trying to communicate *something* and maybe got the vague general gist, so any extent to which they knew that their parents wanted them to do *something* they weren't doing and they didn't try too hard to figure out what is on them. And the same with the adult man who didn't clean... like, you know your partner wants you to clean *something*, it's on you to try to figure out what if you don't understand rather than just throwing up your hands and being like "Well, I have no clue what she's talking about, so never mind".

[moem]

Thinking further, and re-reading:
"Second, even if it wouldn’t work that well if everyone adopted it, if I personally adopt it, then I am less likely to be chronically sleep deprived for several weeks because I think taking a nap would be Extremely Lazy and that if I am going to be lazy I should at least have the grace to be conscious so I can hate myself about it. This is a win."
Okay, I'm with you (= the writer) so far. If your life improves by not using the word 'lazy', then that is great and I approve.

"Since I am not a Kantian, I do not have to go “hmm, well, this works for me, but if I check it against the categorical imperative it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, guess I’m going to have to be sleep-deprived until I have a failure of willpower and take a nap anyway.”
And now you've lost me. If it works for you, surely that's enough? Just because it doesn't work for everyone, does that mean you can't or shouldn't do it either? I've not read any Kant but I doubt that's what he said.
If I had written that sentence, it would go “hmm, well, this works for me, but if I check it against the categorical imperative it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, guess I'll keep doing it anyway, because it works for me".

I'll freely admit that I'm a bit of a lazy thinker...

Hello

[(Anonymous)]

Yes I hate depression and some days are worse than others. Sometimes it just surfaces out of the blue, I will be happy one minute and then really sad. I had a really bad bout about a month ago.