Laziness Does Not Exist

The psychodynamics of giving up and shedding hope

Once, I tried to rescue a cat who, I was told, had been curled up motionless in a corner on the side of the road for days. The friend who had found the cat thought the poor thing was dead, but after closer inspection, the cat showed weak signs of life. We took the cat to the vet. The vet told us that the cat had probably been hit by a car, and his jaw had cracked, making it impossible for him to eat or drink for about a week. The cat had given up. He knew there was no hope. He just curled up and waited to die as painlessly as possible, without wasting any more effort. In the end, the vet couldn’t save him. I still have a photo of the cat after showing some improvement that proved deceitful. My point here is not to lament over a dead animal. I seek to illustrate the natural psychodynamic of giving up when you have no credible hope of achieving anything.

Much like elderly lions choosing to leave the pride when there’s nothing left for them to accomplish, giving up trying might be the final dignity reserved for us.

This is a follow-up to Hard Work Is Easy When You Have a Why.

Introduction

I know the suggestion that “there are no lazy people” offends those who pride themselves on magically “being more hardworking than others” — an admission of their unearned blessings. Claiming you just happened to be born with an affinity towards hard work or superior decision-making is the greatest argument for fatalistic determinism. So much for free will…

The volume of work you put in, your effort, and your motivation are directly analogous to what you expect to gain from your labour, and how probable you believe it is for you to get it.

A personal story

I have been extremely motivated and determined at times. Extremely. When I was driven, I worked really hard, and it paid off until I had no reason to work hard anymore. That was either because my efforts stopped being rewarded, or when I no longer saw any reward on the horizon. More importantly, I gave up when I stopped valuing the reward, when I realised that the fruits of my labour weren’t actually fulfilling in the end, or they weren’t in line with my true values. It’s easy (and good) to give up and cut your losses when you realise you’ve sold your soul to the devil.

For example, after labouring to achieve a fitness model’s body for cheap validation from cheap, impressionable people, and then realising that the good people weren’t even impressed, I concluded that I was an idiot to have worked so hard for nothing, all at the cost of my health, dignity, and self-esteem. Because starvation and over-training syndrome, just so you can get vascular abs, wasn’t exactly worth it when it only impressed slags, gays, and undignified suckups.

You see, everything that has ever motivated me was the hope for and the expectation of something worthwhile. I worked hard for something better until I realised I wasn’t getting it, or that it wasn’t realistic for me to get it, no matter how hard and how long I kept going.

There were times when I worked out so hard that I managed to attain almost elite-level performance for my weight without ever touching any PEDs. And another time, I achieved a pro-level aesthetic that put to shame most professional fitness models. This is no joke, and I don’t tend to brag, as you can see from my writing (I don’t mind self-parody).

Perhaps the only happiness achievable is the expectation of happiness…

Another time, I nurtured hope of landing a top job at a big bank, and after their rigorous aptitude testing lasting months, I excelled against intense competition (I placed in the top three out of more than 1800 candidates). But nepotism got in the way, and the networked, politically connected suckups stole that position from me. And one of the culprits happens to be in my extended family network — a despicable little manlet who soon after had the gall to ridicule me for “still working in a bar”.

I regretted working hard in those cases. It was a naive waste of energy, pain, and tolerance just to suffer disappointment and indignity. Not only that, but I was tortured by the ‘what-ifs’, wondering what opportunities I had missed from diverting all my focus to futile pursuits.

There is no such thing as “losing nothing for trying”. You always lose something by trying. Always. Opportunity cost is the least of it. There is always a loss of capital in every failed investment. Even if you win, you lost something to get there.

Hard work economics

Working hard — or deferring gratification — is a matter of simple economics: It’s investing in something with either a high probability of return, or a return so grand it justifies the high risk of losing your investment.

Once you work hard, and there is nothing left to work hard for, you simply stop working hard. And once you accumulate enough experiences of wasted labour, it’s easy to become cynical and stop expecting payoffs to your hard work.

You accumulate proof of inadequacy, or rather, proof of lack of blessings and opportunity. You lack the network, the social skills, the opportunity, the talent, the genetics, and the random luck — elements you need on top of your hard work, if your hard work is to be rewarded.

Hard work alone is never enough — go break stones alone in a desert, and let’s see if what you achieve is worth the hassle.

Before you commit to working hard, you need to know that you stand a good chance that your labour will bear fruit. Otherwise, you’d be a fool for trying, like gambling when you know the house always wins, yet you foolishly still play. All gambling is illogical.

There is absolutely no labourious task that you have ever performed without reasonably expecting to be rewarded.

Let me put it differently.

If you’re swimming upstream, without any realistic way of ever reaching your destination, you’ll stop trying, as you should. You’re not lazy; you’re just grounded in reality and efficient with your energy. Risk aversion is good when the risk is high.

It’s not clever to take high risks for low rewards with low probability, even if you end up miraculously winning.

If there is no why, then there is no how, nor a what.

Hard work is easy when you anticipate, expect, believe, or know that your efforts will be proportionally rewarded. For this to be the case, you must have some blessing — a talent, or first-access, insider knowledge, or someone to help you put those efforts to good use. Also, it means you’ve had enough support, encouragement, or a series of small wins that build a sense of confidence in your efficacy, whether realistic or deluded.

It doesn’t matter whether your work will actually be rewarded or not, because for that to happen, random external factors beyond your control have to align with your efforts. What matters is that, at the time of labour, you assess that your labour is likely to produce results.

Belief and future expectations

Here I’m only analysing what makes people work hard towards a specific goal, not whether their foresight is accurate. Whether your assessment of reality is wrong and your positive predictions prove false is irrelevant. What is relevant here is examining what drives your hard work, determination, and self-discipline: It’s always a belief that your efforts will yield results. Whether this belief is the result of accurate situational awareness or totally deluded psychopathy, it doesn’t matter.

Everyone gives up someday, even if they have succeeded. That day is the day they realise there is no more juice left to squeeze, and if there is, well, it’s not worth the squeeze.

I remember at university wondering why certain students had chosen career paths that — in my eyes at the time — led nowhere, not to mention they sounded retarded, and oddly specific. They were in areas that seemed to have no market demand. It turned out, however, that every single time, they had already had an insider who helped them start a lucrative career path. Joke’s on me.

I see people investing money and time, taking huge risks, and then their business becomes a huge success. Then I find out they had an insider in some government or municipality that granted them first-access information, or an exclusive license/permit at the expense of their competitors. And so the business (and their efforts) would be a guaranteed success given unfair advantages over competitors. Such is the inevitable corruption of centralised government.

No one is denying people’s hard work, despite having an unfair advantage. But again, hard work is easy when you know you have an advantage, and when you labour hard, you’re comforted knowing that your efforts are likely to be rewarded.

And then you see people working hard, investing time and money, only to fail and be disappointed. But it is still the same dynamic since their efforts were driven by an unrealistic analysis of their investment in labour, not to mention hope — their delusions of future success.

Why did they have hope? Who knows. Perhaps they were encouraged as children, or they had a desperate need to prove something, or they were born naïve enough to believe that “hard work always pays”. It doesn’t. Actually, hard work alone never pays — it only pays the bills at best.

For hard work to pay, you first need external opportunity. Otherwise, masochism and breaking rocks alone in a desert would make you rich.

The love of the process

You keep hearing that you have to love the process, without expecting results. Yes, but that’s what defines a hobby, not a serious pursuit that requires your fullest. I have plenty of hobbies, in that I conduct them casually as an amateur, without expectations or delusions that I’ll ever make it as a professional. I’m not even interested in pursuing it professionally. I work hard to the point where loving the process begins to fade. That’s the difference between an amateur and a pro: the pro works so hard he hates the process, but keeps at it regardless, because he’s expecting a benefit in return; a benefit enough to outweigh the pain. An amateur has no motivation to work as hard as the pro because the former does not expect any benefit other than the love of the casual process.

So, “loving the process or the journey” is the only reward you need; the journey is the destination in itself, as long as that’s all you’re expecting. You are already rewarded daily by doing the work that gratifies you to the point that it keeps gratifying you. And if it gratifies you, then it’s not hard. If you’re loving the work, it isn’t hard work. Hard work is something different.

False credit

My point here is not to discredit hard work, but to discredit those who attribute their success to hard work alone; such is the narcissism of “free will”.

Assuming they did put some hard work into it (hard work is rarely a prerequisite to success), then still, that hard work wasn’t admirable. Why? Because it’s easy to have the drive to work hard when you know or believe in something: having an opportunity that others don’t, the foreknowledge, or the circumstantial position to know that your efforts are more likely to bring proportionate results.

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Oh? You still believe that hard work is a prerequisite to success? Just look around you. The hardest jobs around us seem to be rewarded the least — the people who work the hardest live paycheck to paycheck. The filthy-rich, without a care in the world, seem to “succeed” effortlessly.

Now, you could commit a motte-and-baily fallacy and appeal to the top-performers’ “superior intellect”, but this proves my point: talent and superior intellect are unearned blessings, which no one works hard to acquire in the first place.

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It’s not so much about discrediting others for their successes than about giving yourself some credit for your failures. There was a reason you failed. There was a reason you stopped working hard. This is not an excuse; it is a deserved explanation, and some earned credit for the uneven playing field you were thrown in and was belittled for not winning. There is no such thing as “owning your fate”; fate owns you.

The ‘lazy’ smear

Now look at those who don’t act, who don’t take risks, who don’t “work hard”, as we’re told. We call them “lazy” so we can gloat in schadenfreude, to pat ourselves on the back for being so much “better than them” by comparison. We love to kick people when they’re down so that we can gratify our vanity, to insinuate that we are so much more resilient and hardworking than they are. Easy pickings.

Are they lazy, though? Are we better, though, if our “superiority” wasn’t earned, and was in fact the consequence of fortunate randomness?

How do you know how hard they’ve actually worked in their lives? How do you know how much effort they put into it, and still lost? Are you so sure you worked harder? Judging by results alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

How do you know they wouldn’t work harder if they had a sure-think insight (deluded or not) that their efforts would yield rewards?

Those whom we call “lazy” are in fact people who don’t believe their efforts will bear any fruit. That’s it. Nothing more. Whether they are realistic in their assessment is irrelevant. Maybe they’ve come to recognise patterns in their lives — patterns of wasted work without results. Or maybe they possess accurate situation awareness, understanding that their efforts won’t yield results. Or maybe they’ve realised that rewards are usually reserved for the blessed, the ass-kissers, the corrupt, the schemers, the soul-sellers. This is a logical conclusion from just looking at the world and noticing who gets the most money, the most popularity, the most love, the most confidence, the most peace of mind. It’s the worst of people with mountains of skeletons in their closets.

Those we call “lazy”… maybe they did work hard — harder than you’ve ever worked. And despite their efforts, they failed numerous times, because let’s face it: success is more about opportunity than effort or merit. If you doubt this, I invite you to look at the geographical areas where all the “successful” people seem to reside. This proves the need for external factors. You can be the smartest hard worker in history, but if I throw you on Mars in a spacesuit surrounded by no one, you won’t accomplish shit.

You see, it’s easy to condescendingly tell people to “not be lazy”, patronising them from your high horse of imagined excellence. It’s even easier to assume that what you think you’ve accomplished in life was the result solely of your alleged “hard work”. But it isn’t, not even close, because you don’t know what people have been through only to fail.

If you succeeded, then that doesn’t necessarily mean the work you put into it was hard; it just happened to pay off due to circumstances beyond your control, and required none of your contribution. It’s easy to tell people to “work harder” without knowing how hard they have already worked and seen no results. After having recognised this pattern of useless labour, they now make the sensible choice of retreating to inaction. You’d do the same.

Oh? Did I just hear the motte-and-bailey fallacy of “work smarter, not harder”? Exactly. If anything, it’s the concept of “smart work” that proves my point. It’s not hard work that pays off: it’s work that exploits external circumstances. You have to be in a position to have those circumstances, to be born with the genetics or nurturing developmental years that grant you the IQ necessary to recognise favourable circumstances and thrive. Again, these are beyond your control or contribution.

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Let’s face it: favourable circumstances often mean unfavourable to others, because this is a world of scarcity and aggression. If everyone had exactly the same to go with towards “success”, then everyone would be successful, which means no one would be successful. So bear in mind that your favourable circumstances rely heavily on the unfavourable circumstances of others: where you have insider market knowledge and nepotism to boost your business ahead of competitors, your competitors don’t. Note, this is not a socialist argument of the zero-sum argument. If you’re born smarter, stronger, taller, prettier, and with better parents, then someone who was not as blessed, while deserving our compassion, does not deserve to hate us for our luck. Nature is indifferent, uncaring, and unfair. Instead of making envy and self-righteous indignation into virtues, as all socialists do, try to accept that it is what it is, and life inherently has no meaning, let alone fairness.

You work as hard as it’s required to align results with your expectations, assuming you believe there is a positive correlation between your hard work and the results. If you discover that in fact there isn’t a correlation, or that the results aren’t as great as you initially calculated, then you’d be a fool to keep working hard. This doesn’t make you lazy; it makes you efficient.

The mechanics of hard work

People talk a lot about “deferred gratification”, a term they picked up on a podcast, and use it to brag about their self-advertised “discipline”. Deferred gratification is a fancy way of saying ‘investment’. Investing means diverting time, money, and energy from the now into the future, risking them in the process; but the payoff is their probable magnification. Deferred gratification is synonymous with investment.

You can delay your gratification as long as you know gratification is coming, or you speculate it’s got a good chance of coming, at least. If you don’t expect the delay to bring any gratification, you will not defer gratification, no matter how “disciplined” you think you are. Self-discipline is the direct consequence of expectations of payoff. Otherwise, it’s not discipline; it’s masochism.

Discipline and hard work are the direct consequence of one of these elements:

1. Random blessing that grants you an opportunity too good to waste. If you got something rare, then of course you’ll feel inclined to make the most of it, or at least to make yourself feel worthy of it.

2. Delusion — The naivete to hold false hope, to foolishly believe you’ll succeed when you have absolutely nothing backing your belief other than wishful thinking. Yes, there’s the off-chance your deluded belief might in fact act as a ‘fake-it-’till-you-make-it’ self-fulfilling prophecy; but it’s much more probable that you won’t make it, and venturing under deluded expectations will in fact bring you more grief than had you never tried. The earth is full of disillusioned people who once held an audacious, unfounded belief in themselves, only to face reality with a hard slap in the face from which they never recovered. The mindset of “build it, and they will come” is the exact kind of deluded blind faith that sometimes bears fruit, but mostly doesn’t. Exactly like roulette, just because you will win sometimes doesn’t mean you should play, because it is a mathematical certainty that you will lose more times than you will win. And each loss has a cost greater than the regret of not trying.

“Laziness”, or more accurately, risk aversion, is the consequence of these:

1. Learned helplessness. You recognise patterns of fruitless hard work and conclude that you either lack the intelligence to put that work to good use or the opportunity. In either case, there are random blessings of the external environment over which you have zero control. It is realistic to quit trying, and foolish to keep doing the same thing, expecting different results.

2. Cynicism — This consequence of constant disappointment, discouragement, and failure, enough to condition you into risk aversion. People say you lose nothing by trying, or that you fail whether you try or not, but this is not the case at all. Swinging recklessly exposes you — trying anything has its costs. So, if you don’t expect a high probability of succeeding, you’d be a fool to try; trying and failing is more costly than not trying at all. This is an emotional response to constant disappointment, which might lead to missing actual opportunities.

3. Misfortune — lack of opportunity, bad genetics, bad environment, missed developmental window and wasted youth. Once you are experienced enough to make realistic assessments of your potential, you can confidently conclude that there is no point fighting against the storm. You just curl up and try to absorb as little punishment as possible. Isn’t this what we all do when we surrender to the despot of centralised government — give up and surrender? Some of us even learn to love our oppressors.

Nobody works for free.

Nobody commits to a job unless the remuneration is clearly outlined.

Nobody starts a business or a self-employment plan unless they’ve done their market research or already possess a monetisable network, and thus speculate that their marketing strategy will be a fruitful one.

Whether their expectations prove wrong in the future is irrelevant — we decide to work hard and defer gratification only when we reasonably expect a payoff. If our expectations prove unrealistic in the future, we give up, or more accurately, we cut our losses.

Breaking rocks all day is hard, but it offers value to no one, and your efforts will not be rewarded unless it’s part of your fitness regime, and all you expect from it is only fitness. This is why I keep saying that fitness is the easiest thing to do, since the effort-to-payoff association is the most independent, predictable, and guaranteed: the more the work, the more the reward (as long as you don’t overtrain or use PEDs). And of course, unless your expectations don’t include becoming a fitness model or a ‘fitfluencer’, since these require a completely different skillset, together with an exogenous opportunity.

To sum up

There can be no Trojan War without a Helen whose mythical beauty makes her worth the struggle. There can be no Argonautica without a golden fleece. There are no Herculean Labours without the expectation of atonement.

You cannot be a Sisyphus toiling without purpose, nor a Prometheus suffering without meaning.

There is no strife without a realistically attainable goal. You’ll never work hard if you don’t have the blessings that conveniently compel you to labour to become worthy of them. Another way of looking at it, you work hard to avoid the torment of impostor syndrome — feeling like a fraud for being blessed without having earned it.

Conversely, you won’t work to seek rewards if you don’t see yourself equipped enough to realise those rewards.

You’re not lazy or weak. You just have nothing worth fighting for.

We work hard only when we expect our efforts to be rewarded, when we believe we stand a chance to win.

To put it in financial terms, demotivation is feeling bearish when you hold a long position.

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You work hard, you’re self-disciplined, you defer gratification, and your tolerance to pain automatically increases only when:

1. You’re already blessed with something, or someone, or a rare opportunity, and you want to fight to keep it, to feel worthy of (thus avoiding impostor syndrome).

2. You have a reasonable or deluded expectation, or just blind faith, that your efforts will bear fruit, because nobody works like Sisyphus, endlessly toiling, knowing there will never be any result. In your understanding, there needs to be a high probability of payoff, or an extremely high payoff when the possibility of payoff is low. This last point explains gambling and philosophy: the excruciating search for meaning (highly unlikely but perhaps the highest payoff possible). Philosophy is a gambit.

Why?

When you are given nothing worth fighting for, you don’t feel like you owe anything to yourself or to this reality to strive.

You need to say this to yourself so that you don’t feel guilty and ashamed, endlessly replaying in your head the voices of the infinitely cruel who wish to one-up you as their cheap substitute for self-respect. You need to give credit to yourself for the bad hand you were dealt to silence the permanently displeased parents, the eternally condemning gods.

You need to recognise your misfortune to make the toxic motivators shut the fuck up, those who wish you drown you with their faux, pretentious positivity, who manipulate you with their supposedly “encouraging” expectations of you, when in fact they’re egging you on towards where they want you to venture, where you fail and where they get to exploit you — you naive useful idiot.

Permitting yourself not to feel obliged to perform hard work is not a coping mechanism; it’s a liberating realisation. Freeing yourself from the desperate need to appease the toxic motivators around you — those who deliberately discourage you with a veneer of toxic positivity — is actually empowering.

It is a strength to free yourself from false hopes and expectations.

You free yourself from the shaming from those too cowardly and dishonest to admit their blessings, their obvious opportunities that fuelled their hard work. You’re free from those who have the audacity to berate you for not “working as hard as they did”, supposedly.

They kick down the downtrodden so they can cover their impostor syndrome, their denied feeling of being frauds, of not having earned their random blessings. By telling themselves “you were just lazy”, they pat themselves on the back with masturbatory self-aggrandising, denying the simple fact that there is no hard work without first the opportunity and credible hope.

It is important to free yourself from the accusations of people who need to disrespect you as their only avenue to respecting themselves.

Knowing you’re not lazy, but instead only bereft of opportunity, is liberating. It doesn’t make you lazy, because again, you wouldn’t be lazy if you had opportunity and credible hope.

Because fighting against the wind only hardens the inevitable, and there is no greater torment than strife without purpose and meaning. This is why we seek meaning for our torment as the only way of resolving it.

There are no lazy people. There is only a lack of light on the horizon.

Give yourself some credit for your failures and for your learned risk aversion.

There’s peace in giving up Sisyphean tasks.

There’s stillness in giving up false hope.