No Stupid Questions - 47. Is Laziness Real?

Episode Date: April 11, 2021

Also: why do we dislike being alone in public?

Do you have any mind tricks, please? I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, is laziness a false concept? Sometimes a dog really did eat your homework, okay? Also, why do we feel so uncomfortable spending time alone in public places? Tickets, how many?

Just one, please, sir. Angela, a question from a listener named Susan Kemp. At least that's the name she's using to write to us under. Could be a pseudonym. Might be Angela Duckworth for all we know. Quote, Susan Kemp has this to ask. Do you think laziness is really a thing? She writes, for the last year, I've been debating if laziness is real or just some concept we created in order to, I don't know, Protestant guilt trip ourselves into doing things.

I like Susan already. Say that someone doesn't do their homework. Maybe they have an undiagnosed sleep disorder or are chronically sleep deprived, and that's why they can't focus. Maybe their diet is off, so they're tired. Maybe they're just tired because school starts at 7.30 a.m., and science says that is stupid. Actually, I think science says that early school start is bad for some people, but not others. There are different chronotypes, yes? Well, in general, though, adolescents tend to be later risers, so the science would say that starting school for most high school students at 730 is dumb.

OK, so she's right on that. I'm wrong on that. She continues, maybe they live in a poor socioeconomic situation where there's either a lot of noise at home or not a stable place to work, etc. Maybe their peers don't value education. Even if they opt for video games, isn't that more like dopamines are addictive rather than pure laziness? So I thought I would ask, she writes.

Angela, I find this to be an amazingly interesting question. What's the answer? I love Susan Kemp's question. I think that it depends on what you mean by laziness. If she is asking, do I think laziness is really a thing or a Protestant guilt trip? There's no way you're going to say that laziness isn't real. You're the grit lady. Well, when you call somebody lazy, what do you think we really mean? I think it means that we don't think they're eager to put in the work. What we observe is they're not

working. And we are inferring or assuming that they don't want to put in the work. And then she's listing all these other reasons that could account for the same behavior. Maybe they can't put in the work. Maybe circumstances are conspiring against them. There's a judgment that we're passing on someone when we call them lazy that is about their motivation, about the will to do something. Do you think that that's what we mean when we use the word like you lazy bum or whatever we say derogatorily? My gut response is no. I personally think that laziness is a thing because I'm very familiar with it. What do you mean by that? What does lazy mean to you? What I mean by that is there are things that I feel I should do.

that is there are things that I feel I should do. There are even things I would like to do. But right now, at this moment, it's a little easier and a little more satisfying to sit on the couch and turn on the football game. And that feels lazy. Now, I think she makes many, many, many good points about the reasons why, for instance, a high schooler would not be doing well at school. All of her observations were in that rather narrow or specific situation of, let's say, a teenager who doesn't want to do their homework. So maybe we should consider it a little bit more broadly. Besides the teenager not doing homework and me wanting to watch some football, we can broaden it. We can broaden beyond that. But first, I want to just honor and acknowledge that feeling that you've had, like you feel lazy. And by the way, I didn't

say it wasn't a thing. I just said it depends on what we mean by laziness. Do you want to tell me I'm not lazy? Because I respect you and I'll feel better about myself if you say that's true. Well, I just want to define terms. I know what you mean to feel lazy. I recently felt lazy on a full Saturday. And I know that sounds like, of course, it's Saturday. But usually on a Saturday, I get a workout in. That's the best day to work because people aren't sending you emails. Exactly. No meetings. I'm just cranking. So I, on this particular Saturday, remember lounging around. I picked up the newspaper. Slothful behavior.

I opened it to a random section, not the section I thought was going to be the section I would enjoy. I just like opened it, started reading random articles. And then somehow the day passed and I went to my bed thinking like, what a lazy day. So I want to honor and acknowledge and say that there's a reality to feeling lazy. You felt it. I felt it. Most people have felt lazy. So it has to be real and a thing in that we feel lazy sometimes. It's also possibly true that defined as not really willing to put in the work must be true of people sometimes. If I want to say, hey, this math assignment that my

daughter didn't do, she was too lazy to do, of course it's possible that she wasn't willing to put in the work. It's possible. But just because it's a thing doesn't mean it's always the thing. Exactly. So again, I think Susan raises really good points. It's interesting. Her question reminded me of the controversy over this speech that George W. Bush gave to the NAACP. And he was talking about wanting to increase black students' achievement. The phrase he used that became the source of the controversy was the soft bigotry of low expectations. expectations. And some people pushed back on that, saying it was a racist understanding of Black students. And I think what he was saying was, you set a standard and expect people to get to it. And other people were saying, well, there might be some other factors to consider here. And I think that's what Susan is doing here, is calling attention to a lot of potential confounding factors that we may lump in as, quote, laziness, but often wouldn't be.

Well, yeah. And that speech, which I don't know well, but he didn't talk about laziness in particular, right? No, but I think there were some who thought that the subtext was, hey, come on, if you just try a little bit harder, you'll do better. The soft bigotry of low expectations. That's why it was called bigotry, not the soft uplift of having, you know, high. Right. And whose expectations, by the way? Exactly.

So here's something I have read, and I do know well. There's a research literature on the fundamental attribution error and our tendency to, and I hesitate here only because I don't think we always make this error, but we can sometimes infer that somebody didn't want to do something, didn't want to put in the work, right? You didn't do your homework, didn't care enough to put in the assignment work. But really, there are circumstances that are situational and that are not your own motivated behavior that are at the source. So sometimes a dog really did eat your homework, okay? Not often, we should say. Dogs have so many other things to eat. In my experience as a dog owner, I've tried to feed them many things. We should just put homework in front of

a dog and see if they ever eat it. If you smear the homework in some liver treats, then I find that the homework is much more readily eaten. Can you imagine smearing your homework in liver treats, hoping your dog will eat it, and the dog doesn't eat it? Then you have to bring it in and turn in your liver-smelling homework? Plus, it's probably just not good for the dog to be eating any of this. But we digress. Anyway, my point is that we can sometimes err, or often, maybe.

Did you say err? Err, like E-R-R. Err like the old city in Iraq, Babylonia, or wherever? No, err as in to commit an error. Err. Oh, we can err. To err is human. Did I mispronounce that? It's a South Jersey alternate pronunciation. Okay, to err. Well, if Susan can make Protestant guilt trip into a verb, I can mispronounce err.

But anyway, my point is, we can infer a certain motive for a behavior that we observe and we can be wrong. And then the question would be, what are all the instances in which somebody doesn't put in effort and we may have been wrong? Like circumstances beyond their control. Or there's another thing that's not laziness and that's just not wanting to do it. So I would say of my coffee cup leaving on the counter daughter, like, oh, you're so lazy. And my husband actually, Jason pointed out, she doesn't want to put the coffee cup in the sink. She's not too lazy. She just thinks it's dumb. And I'm guessing he points to other examples in her life where she is not lazy at all. immediately pointed out that my daughter can't be lazy because she works so incredibly hard at things that she does care about, like her academics. She really loves what she's studying in college, and she's the opposite of lazy. So I think that we can be wrong about why people do

what they do. We can underestimate the effect of situational factors that are invisible to us, but real to that person. And sometimes we infer an unwillingness to put in the work when the goal itself has no value for the person. And that's not laziness. It's something, but it's not laziness. Let me ask you this. Are gritty people ever or often lazy? I think gritty people could be called lazy or assumed to be lazy about all of the many, many, many, many, many things that that gritty person doesn't care about. But yeah, in fact, I think that's part of the secret of grit is to actually be really lazy about all the things that you're not doing. But I guess one reason not to be, quote, lazy, and I realize we're going to have issues around

that definition as long as we talk about this topic. But one reason to not be lazy is so that you don't get locked into what could be bad habits. I think of, for instance, you remember the research paper about what happened when there was some kind of partial transit strike, I believe, in the London Tube. There were certain lines that were shut down. And so commuters had to try different ways of getting places. And 5% of commuters, I think, found a more efficient route. Exactly. There was some optimization to be done there that they never would have done had they stayed locked in their habit, had they not been prodded out. So don't you think that you could argue that if you're a little bit less lazy, you could expose yourself to more options, a larger choice set. Everything you read, everything you think about, every person you interact with could make you better off.

And that alone would be a reason to prod yourself out of laziness. To get the energy of activation up enough to try something new, learn something. Yeah. Yeah, but let me make the counter argument. something. Yeah, but let me make the counter argument. I have supervised many students, and I have been the student who was so eager beaver, so industrious, that in fact, I fell into inefficient habits. And I have had students who don't mind putting in the extra six hours of work to transcribe the notes from one document into another document by hand. And that can be a route to total inefficiency also. So sometimes laziness can save you from that because it's

the lazy student who says there's got to be a faster way. Oh, right. Copy paste. And so maybe there is no rule about when laziness is good or bad. but I do think that introspecting about why it is that you don't want to do something on a Saturday or why somebody else doesn't want to move the coffee cup four feet to the sink is always useful. When I thought about that Saturday and I said to my husband, oh my God, I haven't had a lazy bout that lasted a full 12 hours. In memory, what is going on? He said, I think you're exhausted and pointed out to me that I hadn't been sleeping well. So that's actually useful. I think the Protestant guilt trip thing is interesting because I think it is better to understand why you don't want to do something than to immediately just feel guilty about it.

So that all makes sense. And I think there's a lot of argument or a lot of ammunition even to Susan's challenging of the people that we tend to call lazy, especially when they're people who are not in our circle, who are not in our generation or not in our cohort in some way. I understand that it can be too broad a complaint. That said, if I happen to feel on a given day what I would call lazy, like there are things again that I need to do, I want to do, I want to do something for someone else that would mean a lot to them, but I can't really motivate myself to do it. Do you have any mind tricks, please? I think that in the circumstances when you think everyone will be better off if you do the thing

that you don't really feel like doing, the way to get this to work is not to use ought and should, work is not to use ought and should. It's actually to turn it into a want. If you can make it somehow enjoyable, say, for example, you don't really want to write thank you notes, but you feel like you ought to. Doubling the ought isn't as good as just making it somehow more pleasurable. And how do you do that? Well, you could play music. You could make somebody in your family do them with you. You could add secret codes that are vulgar. Backhanded compliments. There are all kinds of things you could do to make your thank you note. But actually, my own daughters, who I always tried to get them to write thank you notes, and I used a lot of ought and should.

It was actually not that that made them get down to it. They actually find it more fun to what I find incredibly inefficient, but hand make the thank you notes. Oh, that's nice. Takes four times as long, but actually it makes it more into a want because that's enjoyable to them. That's awesome. Our solution to that was to allow thank you emails.

I think that's legit. I think even a thank you text. Well, that's the most you're ever going to get from anyone in my family. I'm just saying. I will take it with great appreciation because something beats nothing by an infinite amount. Something beats nothing by an infinite amount. Did you make that up? Yeah. Do you like it? That's a great quote.

I hope I'm not plagiarizing it off to someone, but I think I made it up. It's really wonderful. I want one more quote from you today. Okay. To end this episode about laziness. Okay. So here's a couple of quotes about laziness that I thought you might enjoy. Kobe Bryant apparently once said, one never really knows if anybody has ever said anything because quotes are so amorphous and ephemeral, but Kobe Bryant apparently once said, I can't relate to lazy people. We don't speak the same language. I don't understand you. I don't want to understand you. Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics entrepreneur, reportedly once said, there are no ugly women, only lazy ones. I don't think she'd say that today. So what will Angela Duckworth's most enduring quote about laziness be?

Oh, my gosh. I'm not going to do it for you, Stephen. You know why? You're too lazy to make up a quote about laziness. You know, it's much easier to have like a pithy little quote. That's kind of non-introspective. You know, Ben Franklin, laziness makes every work difficult. Okay, great.

But I am asking people, when you feel lazy, ask why. But that's not a pithy quote. It's like a fortune cookie. I think that's pretty pithy. It's also a question. I found the best quotes are questions. When you feel lazy. Wait, what was it again? See, it's not that pithy. When you feel lazy, ask why. Oh, it wasn't a question either. Maybe if I can figure out a word that starts with L, like when you feel lazy, ask why. Oh, it wasn't a question either. Maybe if I can figure out a word that starts with L, like when you feel lazy, ask, and then if it started with an L. Ask not what your lazy can do for you.

No, that won't work. Ask not what your country can do for you, but why you're still on the couch. Ask not what your couch can do for you. All right, we'll work on it. I mean, you know, unless we're too lazy. Still to come on No Stupid Questions,

Stephen and Angela contrast the feeling of being lonely with the experience of being alone. Maybe we need, like, a hat that says I'm alone,

but not lonely. Angela, a lot of people are uncomfortable being alone in public. They feel the world is looking at them and kind of judging them to be a loser for being alone. And this seems especially prominent among adolescents, although not just them. So I, as someone who really enjoys being alone and thinks it can be really good for you, in moderation at least, I'm curious, do you have

any advice for people to feel better about being alone in public? So you mean like at a restaurant, for example, right? Restaurant, museum, movie, pre-pandemic. Movie in a weird way is sort of easier because you're sitting in the dark most of the time. Yeah. While you're there, but maybe just that moment when they're like tickets, how many? And you say one. Just one, please, sir. But maybe restaurant is the most prominent example. I think restaurant is the canonical, you know, like table for one, please. Isn't there some Saturday Night Live sketch where they noisily take away the other setting and there's this spotlight on you? I mean, I think that the reason why the restaurant scene where you're eating by yourself and you feel like everybody's looking at you is so emotional to think about is that people in a restaurant are with their friends or their family. And the

implication would be that you don't have friends or people who care about you. I think that's the trigger that it's really hitting. Do you agree with that? I think that's exactly right. And I think that there's two layers of this. Loneliness is one of the most negative emotions. And for me personally, I think of all of the negative emotions you could feel, like terror, I think loneliness is the worst for me. So I can certainly appreciate why people wouldn't want to experience loneliness and they don't want to be perceived as being alone. You don't want to be judged as somebody who doesn't have connections to other people, but you also don't experience it.

So it's a double whammy of badness. I'm curious for you why loneliness is the worst emotion. Was it driven by experiences of it? I mean, nobody likes being lonely, but why do I really, really, really want to avoid it? You know, I'm not sure. I do remember the discovery of it, though. So my husband, Jason, was in the habit of going to see his best friend who lives in Toronto, and he would go every Thanksgiving pretty much right after dinner was cleared. And he would spend the next two or three days of this long weekend with his friend in Canada. And I guess partly it's because I don't know if they celebrate Thanksgiving there. Maybe they don't. It just seemed like a particularly clever time to go.

But in retrospect, of course, it was the worst time to go. And there was this one Thanksgiving where our kids were young, but like old enough to really look forward to playing with their cousins. And so I was on a train platform. I had just dropped them off at their grandmother's house with the cousins that they were looking forward to seeing being there. You were going to a casino or something? Where are you going? cousins that they were looking forward to seeing being there. You were going to a casino or something? Where are you going? Well, no, here's the thing. I didn't have any order. I went home. It was cold. It was dark. And the train was late. And then the train finally came. It turns out I was on the opposite side of the platform. So I had to like cross over and wait again. And I was really, really feeling

sorry for myself. And I think it was that night that I discovered that like, wow, I really hate being lonely. We can all think of plenty of times where we don't want to be with other people, but Thanksgiving or even traveling to a place of great beauty, there's something really, really sad about not being able to share. Do you feel the same way that there's nothing worse than feeling lonely? I guess I mostly do. I do think that loneliness is a little bit misunderstood generally. We've talked about it on Freakonomics Radio a bit, and I think that it's become a bigger blanket than maybe it should be.

You mean people are using the term lonely when they mean something else? Well, I think there's a bit of a confusion between preferences and emotions. And a lot of people who are alone are not lonely, and a lot of people who are with other people can still be lonely. For instance, a lot more people live alone now than they used to, including young people. And in fact, people who live alone tend to participate a lot with people outside their home and doing things in a way that people who maybe live with other people don't do. going on with the choice to spend time alone. I spend almost all of my days pretty close to alone working, and I love it. But then I love, love, love getting home to my family. All of one or the other would not work for me. So I see what you're saying. I do feel that loneliness is an almost crippling emotion when you have it. It really feels like you are alone in the world. You just need to be acknowledged. That is a terrible feeling.

That said, I think that because we know that's a terrible feeling, we're maybe quick to ascribe it to others when they're not feeling that. Like if you see someone dining solo in a restaurant, you might think like, oh, they're so lonely. How horrible. And they might not feel any of those things. Exactly. But because it's such a common response, I think it makes people unwilling to be alone. And I would say, as with anything in life, when there are costs, there can be benefits, too. So, you know, I don't choose to travel alone. I don't think I've ever really just gotten on a plane or a train by myself to just go somewhere.

But I've done a ton of traveling by myself because of work. And I don't necessarily look forward to it. But I will say this. Over the years, I've had a lot of experiences and conversations I never would have had, whether it's just eating alone in a restaurant in some foreign city or just going exploring. So there is that upside. I do know that there's research showing that striking up a conversation with a stranger, people mispredict how enjoyable that will be. The research suggests that when you do that, you're really happy actually on average

or you're glad you did it. But when you ask people hypothetically, do they think they're gonna be better off at the end of an airplane ride if they've talked to the person? People don't think that. They mispredict. Right. There are benefits to thinking on your own, to exploring the world alone, to putting yourself in situations that you wouldn't if you're with your prefabricated conversation partners. And so I think that there's a real underappreciation of navigating the world alone sometimes. But I feel what presses against that is this perception that if we see someone who is alone, we make them feel bad about it. So maybe there's, you know, a mechanism. Maybe we need like a hat that says I'm alone, but not lonely.

So when we are out in public and we are fine, one of the great general truths about how we're perceived by others is that we tend to overestimate how much anybody really cares at all anyway. This is the spotlight effect? The spotlight effect, exactly. We assume everybody's looking at us, but no, they're looking at something which is more interesting to them, which is themselves. And they're worrying about how other people are perceiving them. I think that is a general truth about social cognition. When I first read about the spotlight effect years ago, I thought, oh, that is such a great thing to think about when I'm alone, because you think people are paying attention to me. The fact is that nobody gives a crap about you. So yeah, that helped me. But I also just wonder if there are coping mechanisms, like should people who are eating alone in a restaurant and want to signal to the world that they are happy, should they fake laugh uproariously every few minutes to just show

what a great time they're having? Should they slap their knee? Well, the most obvious advice to give, given the spotlight effect, is just to not worry about it at all, right? Just do whatever you want to do because nobody cares. But I'll tell you one thing not to do, which is don't talk on your cell phone when other people are around and you are not with anyone else physically. Why not? And this insight goes back more than a decade to a study that was so clever. There are people who are either listening to a stage conversation on a mobile phone and you can only hear the half. And you can't hear what the other person is saying or the full conversation. And the question is, which is more annoying? You could argue, not knowing how the data come out, that hearing the full conversation is twice as annoying because you have two things that you are being distracted by. But it's the other way around, right? It is. And better scientists than me, certainly on this topic, like Dan Gilbert, have speculated that the reason why half a conversation is twice as bad or any way worse than the full conversation

is that we are constantly trying to figure out what was the other half. You can't just habituate to it. And it doesn't become white noise the way if you're sitting in a coffee shop and kind of tune out everything. It's more distracting because you're having to fill in the other side. And you never quite know what's going to happen. You thought the conversation was going one way, but it's going another. So you can never really habituate to it. So you're saying that if you're sitting alone, occupying yourself by talking on the phone, people are going to judge them even more harshly? Well, don't you feel bad? Like, have you ever been scolded for being on a cell phone?

I get very easily annoyed by other people's cell phone conversations for exactly the reason that you just discussed, which is that your brain can't help but try to fill in. In fact, I used to do – well, I shouldn't say what I used to do. You should absolutely say what you used to do. Look, it's very immature, silly. Somebody else did this later professionally and made videos of it that were very funny, and I'm sure can still be found, which is you sit next to them with your phone and you pretend that you're on the other side of their conversation. So there's a stranger that said, well, did you remember to defrost the meat? And I would say like, well, I took the meat out like half an hour ago, but it's still a little bit hard.

You did not. I did. Yeah. Really? That is bold. You know, I got this from my mom. When she saw people doing things that she thought were, you know. You take it upon yourself to police them. Listen, the vast majority of the time, their first response is obviously, who's this jerk? And their second response is, oh, yeah, no wonder. I'm sitting here yelling into a public place.

So what about you? Are you uncomfortable eating? Let's say it's on campus. You know, you're a big shot. You are a professor. People know who you are. But on this day, for some reason, you find yourself needing to eat in a public place alone. How do you feel about it and what do you do about it? Oh, gosh, it has literally never happened to me. It's interesting how well you do at avoiding it, though. If I were eating alone, I mean, it does happen to me not on campus because I would just go pick something up and go back to my desk. But if I were seen eating alone, would it make me feel bad without kind of an alibi, as it were? Like, if you're traveling, you're like, well, of course I'm alone. If I had a full meal in a restaurant that people recognized who I was, I probably would feel like people would be wondering, like, why is she eating alone? And then that would make me feel a little bit uncomfortable. Yeah. And now that you've put yourself in that position of thinking, what would you do to feel less bad that they are thinking that about you? Would you make a phone

call against your earlier advice? No, I would not. I wouldn't make a phone call. What would I do? I think you would never go to a restaurant alone ever is what you would do. You would never put yourself in this position. I think that's why I'm so at a loss. I think the spotlight of attention that we think is on us, beyond just like realizing it's not, I would try to put the spotlight of my attention on something else. Oh, you'd look at all the other people eating alone and say, what a bunch of losers they are. Yes. You know, beyond that one thing I said, which is like, get over it, right? Like, nobody cares. I mean, I think that is my best advice. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and Sadeer Breaks

the Internet. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and now here's a fact check of today's conversations. Angela thinks she came up with the quote, something beats nothing by an infinite amount, but she wasn't entirely sure. She does get credit for that specific wording, but she may have been subconsciously influenced by Little Richard's 1967 song, A Little Bit of Something, parentheses, Beats a Whole Lot of Nothing. Or perhaps she heard Jean Knight's song, A Little Bit of Something, parentheses, Is Better than a whole lot of nothing that came out on her 1971 album, Mr. Big Stuff. Later, Angela references a Saturday Night Live sketch where a lone diner sits pathetically while a waiter removes the other setting. There's no such scene that I could locate.

There are, however, many other famous sketches about dining alone. Mitchell and Webb have a video where David Mitchell desperately tries to convince the other people in the restaurant that he does, in fact, have friends. There's also the Food Dudes commercial parody from season 45 of Saturday Night Live, which advertises three mannequins, or food dudes, to create the illusion that you're eating with other people. And then there's the famous pizza order sketch from Key and Peele, where one man ordering several pizzas gets into trouble when he pretends he's sharing the large order with an entire party. Angela also wonders if Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving. They do, but Canadian Thanksgiving falls on the second Monday of October,

while Americans celebrate a month and a half later, on the fourth Thursday of November. Actually, Canadian Thanksgiving became a national affair in 1859, four years earlier than American Thanksgiving, which became a holiday when Abraham Lincoln set the president for celebration after the Battle of Gettysburg. Finally, Stephen says that a comedian shared his particular affinity for filling in loud strangers' cell phone conversations. That comic is Gregory Benson. He shares his videos on YouTube under the handle of his production company, Mediocre Films. Benson refers to this particular

prank as cell phone crashing. His videos have millions of views and include cell phone crashing in the airport, on the beach, at Disneyland, and many additional locations. We'll link to a couple of our favorites in the show notes. That's it for the Fact Check. No Stupid Questions is produced by Freakonomics Radio and Stitcher. Our staff includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Mark McCluskey, James Foster, and Emma Terrell. Our theme song is And She Was by Talking Heads. Special thanks to David Byrne and Warner Chapel Music.

If you'd like to listen to the show ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium. If you'd like to learn more about, you can check out Freakonomics.com slash NSQ, where we link to all of the major references that you heard about here today. Thanks for listening. The advice from that research would be strike up a conversation. You know, I read that study and I was like, I still don't want to be talked to. I was like, I still don't want to be talked to. I was not convinced.