Comment by xeromal
3 months ago
It's easy to confuse laziness for frustration though. I think a key requirement in your comment is that you're grounded emotionally and know what you're feeling when you do. I know too many people that give up at the first indication of resistance but I'm fairly confident its their laziness.
The difference is whether it's a goal that is important to you.
If you encounter an obstacle and just stop without feeling frustrated, then you just didn't care much in the first place. That's fine. It's not laziness, it's just not valuing that particular outcome much.
Frustration is generally a very easy emotion to identify because you tense up, get irritated, have a feeling of wanting to shout or swear, growl, etc. Even if you're in a professional environment where you can't do those things, you feel the impulse to. There's no confusing that feeling with laziness.
"Laziness" is generally a value judgment imposed by a third party, that you're not doing the thing they value as important. An employer might think an employee is "lazy", when the employee thinks they're underpaid and chooses not to do anything above the bare minimum.
I feel that's overly easy to label someone else as lazy. Some people might be of course, but we dont have insight into their inner selves. And so we dont know ehat burdens they are carrying and grappling with currently.
What looks like laziness might actually be very prudent resource conservation if you know the whole story.
It's so difficult to explain this to people who have never been burnt out. It adds to the frustration and depression when people see you that way and don't recognize how much you've been grinding in your day job while working on something else or other. It's deeply demoralizing.
And when one gets bunt out on some basic social interaction.... You're completely screwed.
I think labelling behaviour 'lazy' is a very lazy thing to do. I think only a very narrow class of behaviours is genuinely lazy. Generally there are good reasons why someone may not be applying themselves sufficiently.
It's very reasonable to take a step back and reassess at the first indication of unexpected resistance. When you decide to do something, you're making that decision based on how you expect things to go; if they aren't going that way then the assumptions underpinning your decision to go down this path no longer hold. If you wouldn't have started had you'd known there would be even slight inconvenience, it means you don't value the output enough to justify that slight inconvenience, and you should not keep going just because of sunk cost.
Being lazy, ie being particularly unwilling to put in much effort for a reward, is quite orthogonal to how long you keep pursuing a particular approach to achieve a reward.
Frustration is an emotional response that can lead to many things, including inaction. Laziness is a moral perspective on inaction. Was Bartleby the Scrivener lazy?