Your fear of being perceived as lazy is ruining your life.

How many times have you caught yourself telling someone, a friend of family member, how busy you are (or have been) and feeling a sense of pride. We, as a society, have learnt to associate business and overworking with success. I remember a long period years ago where I had only 1 or 2 days off due to overtime at work and relishing in telling people this. Like I was winning at life by proving how much my work needed me. The reality is that the business would not have fallen apart if I had taken more days off; but I nearly fell apart from not doing so.

I could not pin point the moment in my life where my fear of being perceived as lazy came from. At school I was an over achiever, I didn’t necessarily work harder than anyone else I was just lucky that academia came easier to me than others. Almost immediately on from leaving school I began working a full time job and this became the norm for me as I went into further education and beyond. At college, I would attend my lessons and then head into my evening shift at a well known (sadly no longer there) toy shop. At weekends I would work my weekend job - quite often starting not getting a day away from some kind of work for weeks on end. On reflection this was somewhat masochistic and it is no surprise that this was short lived.

Capitalist society functions because it is ingrained in us that working hard is the route to happiness. Working hard earns you money > money buys you things > things make you happy. A möbius strip of consumerism and the only people benefitting from it truly are sitting on super-yachts, ironically probably not doing very much. The popular saying ‘money can't buy happiness’ feels like fairytale nonsense to most of us, struggling from pay-check to pay-check trying to make ends meet and achieve true contentment; for the many money does actually buy happiness because it buys us our time back.

I wonder how many people fantasise about being able to spend time doing nothing and not feel guilty? I would imagine that it is a lot of us. By nothing I mean truly nothing. Scrolling on instagram strikes me as an activity many of us use to rid ourselves of the ‘doing nothing’guilt - mindlessly absorbing information can feel productive. How often do you manage to do nothing? How often do you actually get to spend time doing something just for the enjoyment of doing it? For those people (I am including myself in this category) who truly don’tenjoy doing nothing but relax through mindless activity - when was the last time you partook in something that didn’t have a certain level of productivity?

The pressure we place upon ourselves to be constantly productive can be debilitating, manifesting as anxiety or depression or a whole plethora of mental health disorders. It is no surprise that as the grasp of capitalism has tightened that mental ill-health in the population has dramatically increased. Popular media and certain figure head politicians would want us to believe that everyone is making it up, or at the very least exaggerating it for their own gain. But truly I think that is because they are scared we are going to realise how sick working this hard is actually making us, and it is entirely their fault. Of course the powers that be want you to believe that anxiety and depression are over diagnosed and unworthy of real treatment and recovery, society would come to a standstill if we were all to truly make ourselves well. Capitalism stops working if we are all happy, if we all realise that we don’t need to buy into the next new product to make us better. Entire industries would collapse if we realised the real cure was stillness and rest.

But what does happen if we stop? What happens if we all stopped working so hard, refusing to give so much of our precious time away for the benefit of the super wealthy? It is almost hedonistic to imagine a world where this comes to fruition. Instead we begrudge those who are seemingly doing nothing, lazily categorising huge swathes of people as ‘benefit scroungers’ because we so fear that they are taking something away from us. I have often heard people indignantly announcing ‘I work hard and pay my tax just for these people to sit around doing nothing’. ‘These people’ seemingly being a concept rather than a tangible person they know personally. What boggles me is that often these people work in positions that are lining the pockets of the super wealthy; the hard work that they are doing more often than not benefits someone else, someone higher up the chain of command. The people at the top are often not just money rich, they are time rich. They are stealing your time away from you. These are the people you should be angry about.

I am not naive. I am not suggesting that we all give up our jobs in some mass walk out. I understand a society that functions differently from the way it does now is too complex and scary to even imagine. With the current cost of living crisis many of us are just trying to survive, the opportunity to thrive feels far out of reach. But I would encourage people just to reflect on who is to blame. It feels like us normal folk have been thrown in to a coliseum pit of hardship, fighting amongst ourselves while the wealthiest in society watch from above scoffing. When we bore from fighting each other and begin to look out to the crowd they will throw in a weaker opponent for us tear into, redirecting the rage. We’ve seen this happen most recently with the trans community and asylum seekers - the real culprits are hiding behind these minority groups hoping we won’t realise who is truly making our lives miserable.

Resistance or revolution feels distant and violent. But, in a world that relies on your hard work, thrives on your fear of being perceived as lazy, the most radical thing you can do is nothing. Or at least start with less. Stop working yourself sick for people who couldn’t care less about you. Start taking a shit at work just to make sure you get paid for it. Take more breaks. Phone in sick when you actually need to and stop begrudging when a colleague does the same. Remove the fear of being perceived as lazy and place value in your ability to indulge in doing nothing. There are very few things in this world that are concrete but one is that death will come for us all. I imagine in my last moments and I will think very little of the time that I spent working hard and will think back to those moments enjoyed being lazy with those people that I love.