Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Laziness Does Not Exist with Devon Price

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

We are currently living in an era dominated by overwork. Whether it’s your punch-in, punch-out job, the side hustles and extra gig work you pursue to help make rent, the drive to produce and consume “content” during every waking hour, or the expectation to look a certain way and constantly keep up with whatever trends surround you — it’s relentless. In this Conversation, we speak with Dr. Devon Price, a social psychologist at Loyola University in Chicago, explores these topics in their book, Laziness Does Not Exist, published by Atria Books. How have the concepts of “productivity” and “laziness” been manufactured and deployed by capital to cultivate pliant, profitable workers? How have the ideals of hyper-productivity encouraged not just willing but enthusiastic participation in the hustle-and-grind culture of modern capitalism? And what can we do to escape this prison? These are just some of the questions in this Conversation.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This episode of Upstream was made possible with support by listeners like you. We're currently raising money to support our next season of documentaries and conversations. We have just a few days left to raise $2,000 in order to hit our goal. To chip in and help us raise the money we need to keep this project going, please visit upstreampodcast.org-forwardslashsupport. Thank you. Instead of seeing our bodies and minds as us ourselves that we get to do whatever we want with and get to live however we choose, we see our bodies and our brains as a means to an end that have to justify their own existence and earn their own right to survive under capitalism. And what that does is it imposes all kinds of values and assumptions and standards onto how bodies and minds should be.

And so what I really want to challenge people to do when they read this book is not just take more breaks, take more naps, take Fridays off of work when you can, though all of that is great. But really question what society has taught you about who you should be, how you should live, and what you're supposed to value. You are listening to upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. An interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation we speak with Devon Price, author of Laziness Does Not Exist,

published by Atria Books. How has the concept of laziness been manufactured and deployed by the forces of capital to cultivate ideal, easily shapeable workers? How have the ideals of hyper productivity, the sort of hustle and grind culture that has exploded in the last decade, led to a new neoliberal self self with a tendency to commodify all aspects of life and not just willingly but enthusiastically participate in the rat race of modern capitalism. How does the adherence to this hyper productivity ultimately destroy our bodies, our mental health, and in a larger sense our communities. And most importantly, what can we do about it?

These are just some of the threads we explore in this conversation with Devon. And just a side note, and a bridged version of this interview was originally published as a written Q&A in Protein magazine. magazine. Thanks so much for being on the show Devon. It's great to have you. I'm wondering if you can just start by introducing yourself and maybe talk about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Sure, yeah. So my name is Devon Price. I'm a social psychologist at Loyola University, Chicago, and I'm the author of laziness does not exist, which is both a book and it was originally an essay. And what really got me into writing about this idea that laziness is kind of an artificial kind of damaging, socially constructed fear is looking at how a lot of my students thought about themselves and the way that other educators had treated them or were even

currently still treating them. So I've taught working adults for over a decade now and that is a population of students that is really really busy. There are often people who have struggled with school in the past, and maybe left and then come back. They're often juggling, you know, child care, elder care, maybe undiagnosed ADHD, some kind of issue that, you know, depression, something that kind of made school hard in the past. And it's this group of people that time and time again,

I've seen, is working incredibly hard and not getting the supports that they need and yet are most likely to think of themselves as lazy and not doing it up. So once I kind of became cognizant of that and just how unfair that disjoint is between what's expected of them and how much they're already doing, I just started seeing it basically everywhere in how we treat homeless people and how we talk about addiction Basically any kind of social problem. Yeah, thanks for that and Okay, so you covered this a little bit, but I'm wondering you Start the book talking quite a bit about your own personal experience with sort of overwork and the sort of challenges that you faced in saying no to all of the work that was sort of piling up on your plate, like deciding what to take on and what not to

take on and it ended up having some pretty serious health effects for you. So I'm wondering if you could maybe get into sort of the opening part of the book, laziness, does not exist. And maybe through that what kind of message were you trying to convey through your own personal experience. Yeah, so I think my life story really illustrates that even if you're one of the few people who are fortunate enough to kind of win by playing the rules of the workaholism game, even if you are someone who can be hyperproductive

up to a point. It's not going to bring you health and happiness and it's not really sustainable. And it's still something that you're going to have to pay for in the long run because we're just set up in the society that we're currently in and the job landscape that we're currently in where too much is demanded of people. And it's just not based on the science of how human bodies and brains really work. So I was always an overachiever, quote unquote, I finished college early, went straight into grad school.

I got my PhD when I was 25 years old, and then I went straight into a post-doctoral research position. And right then, I was struck with a really bad fever. Every single night I would get a 103 degree fever at like around 7 p.m. Shivering, I had a heart murmur. It lasted for months from February of the year that I graduated all the way through to November

of that year. Shivering in 90 degree weather in the summer is just absolutely out of control. And even while that was happening, I was still trying to cram in working on my postdoc research, teaching, doing all these other things, consulting work, trying to exercise. I was trying to cram in as much as I could into each day knowing I would get really debilitatingly sick by like early evening every day. And that did not work. We're taking care of one's health when one is

already clearly very physically depleted. I had lots of medical tests. We couldn't ever really pin it down on any kind of diagnosable, treatable, chronic health condition. I just had to eventually rest and not work so hard and not try to be perfect in terms of being hyperproductive, exercising every day, being a virtuous little worker bee. And the reason that I open the book with that example is well to explain why it's kind of a personal touchstone for me and also to kind of say that this is not just a conversation that is for people who are debilitated their

whole lives with disability or who really don't fit our educational system and work system because I happen to be one of those rare people who can really hyper focus and work really hard quote unquote by like the standards of the world that we're living in, and it still just ground me down into an absolute pulp. So there really is no winning when we try to ascribe value to our lives based on just constantly churning more productivity out of ourselves. Yeah, I really, really appreciated your opening vignette. And although I would not characterize myself as someone who is a virtuous worker bee in any

sense, I do know a lot of people in my life who struggle in similar ways as you and it really resonated. And yeah, so early in your book, you introduce this concept, which sort of is a thread woven throughout the book, the laziness lie, you call it, which you describe as a sort of a social epidemic, which of course is also tied to very specific economic and political realities within our modern capitalist society. And so I'm wondering if you can unpack this idea of the laziness lie. So you've spoken about the need for productivity and you touched a little bit on this idea of folks thinking that maybe they're lazy if they're not reaching the heights of this hyper productivity expectation in our society, but yeah, so maybe flipping

it around and looking at this idea of the laziness lie. Yeah, so the laziness lie is my little shorthand for a bunch of kind of latent beliefs that are really deeply embedded in our culture and date back centuries that are really infused in how our educational system works, how we approach the workplace, how people think about a lot of social issues such as, you know, unemployment, homelessness, and so on. And it has three main tenets. The first is that your worth is defined by your productivity. The second is that you can't really trust any needs and limitations that you feel in

yourself because those are just really threats to your productivity that you're supposed to ignore and push through. And then the last one is that there is always more that you could be doing. So even if you are someone who is working a 50 hour, 60 hour work week, you could be doing more for your community or your family or you could have a better looking home or just have a better looking like physical appearance. There's just an endless litany of things that we're supposed to do to kind of broadcast that were virtuous and we're kind of conforming to standards and that we're supposed to do to broadcast that were virtuous and we're conforming to

standards and that we're trying hard enough. If you slip on any of those, you can feel a lot of shame. And in the book, I charted it back to early in American history and what the Puritans believed about hard work and how we've used this really misanthropic belief that people are lazy and you have to push them to work. That belief system is how we justify its slavery. It's how we justify kicking people off of disability benefits if they don't seem sick enough. And so many other inequities kind of trace back to these beliefs that we just can't trust

ourselves and that we can't trust other people. That everyone's fundamentally lazy and evil deep down. Even though we really have no evidence to actually believe that. Yeah, I mean, it's a fundamental tenet of our economic system, right? The work is a dis-utility and that workers are striving to do as a little bit as possible while getting as much out of it as possible, which I think is true when it comes to the fact that a lot of us hate our jobs because, you know, wage slavery and that kind of thing, but, you know, there's a big difference between jobs

and work and doing things that are fulfilling and like the definition of work in that it's not necessarily something that is always going to be seen as work in our current system. But we can get a little bit more into that, I think, later down the line. You write that, quote, research shows that when we believe the world is fair and people get what they deserve, we're less likely to support social welfare programs and have less sympathy for poor people and their needs. And I just, one of the real affirmations that came to me while reading your book was how pervasive the myth of meritocracy is in our society that we actually think that success is tied to hard work, an idea that has been foundational to American capitalism since its inception, right?

This idea, this myth of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But really success is only tied to like a very specific kind of hard work, the kind of work that's valued by capitalism. And even then, it's not in any way inevitable that that hard work will lead to financial stability and social status, right? And so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that idea of meritocracy and sort of this myth that pervades our society. Yeah, I mean, you already summed it up pretty perfectly, but we get these really valorized images both through fictional media and through kind of the mythology of your Steve Jobs,

your Elon Musk's, your Dale Carnegie kind of figures. Those figures have been with us since at least industrialization, this particular flavor of the self-made man and the mythology of if you have a dream and a vision and you kind of singularly pursue it and you work really hard, you can not only ascend to the ranks in terms of wealth, but you can actually become someone who really shapes what society is like. It's kind of become literally cosmic now with people like Jeffrey Bezos and Elon Musk, just not even just a crewing wealth, but really trying to dominate the world and space. And it is this incredibly individualistic view of the world that is a very convenient and appealing story, but it just neglects, first of all, most of those figures had some access to generational wealth or some advantages to kind of give them a pretty significant head start.

Not always the case, but usually with those mythic figures. But second of all, just how many social structures make it possible for those who do succeed in society to be able to, whether that's having access to public infrastructure, having cities give them deals so that they can move their warehouses and not have to pay taxes for years. Just basic things like the fact that we're all dependent on society to some extent for roads and water and shelter and education.

It's because we have this view of being self-made and individualism really drilled into us, I think many of us are uncomfortable zooming out and looking at how reliant we are upon other people. And that makes us really undervalue the very social systems and social welfare that makes anybody's well-being even possible in the first place. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of these articles that always pop up. They're sort of like how this 30 year old millennial bought their, like actually bought their home, you know, or like this like 19 year old owns a home.

How did they do it? And it's like always buried like five or six paragraphs and it's like, oh, and, you know, by the way, they got the down payment loan from their parents or something like that where it's like you know we're obsessed with this idea of self-made people but there's no such thing as being self-made and yeah I appreciate you bringing that up. Another thing so you unpack the history of the laziness lie and you've touched on this a little bit in terms of connecting it to early components of the American project. You tied together elements of like Puritan ideology and Christianity.

And I was actually, it's interesting just listening to a podcast recently that was talking about how like abnormal the Puritan ideology was like in Europe at the time and like the reason that they came here was because they were really sort of ostrized, just because people thought that they were so fucking weird. And not to make huge broad sweeps of judgment, but this idea of the Puritan work ethic is pretty bizarre when you think about it. And you also talk about enslaved people and the treatment of indigenous people and white poor laborers and other exploited groups, you kind of tie the laziness lie into all of that. And I'm wondering, maybe if you could unpack a little bit how the control of these groups led to this idea of the laziness lie and sort of this foundational myth that like idle

hands are the devil's playthings? Yeah, so first of all, I'm really glad that you mentioned how kind of artificial and aberrant for its time, Puritan beliefs about human nature really were, because it actually takes so much effort to go against how people's bodies and minds actually work, but it's just so ingrained in our belief system now that we take it for granted. So, one like tidbit of that that I learned recently that I did not know is that Puritans would even try to construct furniture that would kind of basically force babies and toddlers into sitting into a more mature adult looking stance from as early as possible. I knew that they had

views of childhood that we're basically we should treat children as little adults and view any childishness in them as immoral, but the fact that even not being able to hold up your own head because of basic developmental biology was something that they went against and tortured their children over, is just really shows you how distorted their beliefs really were about people. So yeah, they believed that if you had a drive to work really hard, that was a sign that you had already been chosen for heaven, and that if you didn't have a strong drive and motive to work hard, that was a sign you were already basically consigned to hell. And in the colonial United States where you have a lot of enslaved workers, you have

white laborers who were indentured servants, people who are having their labor exploited to varying degrees, an ideology of pushing people past their limits, and really just being downright cruel and dehumanizing and disrespecting people's physical needs, to the people who stand to gain economically from colonization at that point, that was a really handy belief system to have. And it was also a belief system that got other people on board with things like chattel slavery in the U.S. There were already in Europe before that percolating these beliefs that there were different

races of people and certain races were more animal and less moral and had less self-control. And that really only got worse under the American empire and us enslaving people because it was basically promoted to the American public that enslaving black people was how we would save them from their own kind of like base animal instincts. After abolition happened, that narrative shifted a little bit, but basically the same core beliefs were still really

politically useful. So you can see political cartoons from right during the reconstruction period portraying black Americans as looking for a handout and being really greedy and lazy. And this, of course, was propaganda to justify not paying reparations and not making good on the immense harm that we did to black Americans. That was also really useful come around the time of labor strikes and protests for really portraying white laborers and basically any kind of poor laborer as an idle hand that's just going to drink and drug and run riot all over town if you don't work them 16 hours per day. It continues to morph these beliefs, but not that much.

You know, the welfare queen stereotype of the 80s is very similar to the reconstruction era. Stereotype of black Americans is looking for a handout during that period. And unfortunately, because it is so deeply entrenched in the stories that we tell in our political system at this point, so many people passively absorb it and believe it. Even if they wouldn't endorse the most literal race science level of it, they still on some level a lot of people implicitly believe, I can't trust most other people. People who are on government benefits are opportunistic fakers, and I need to police my co-workers too if they seem like they're slacking off. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It's so deeply permeated. And I think one of the things that you bring up that really resonated with me as someone who spends far too much time on social media, particularly like Instagram and stuff, it's, you know, you explore how culture reinforces our ideas of laziness and productivity, writing specifically, you know, you explore how culture reinforces our ideas of alasiness and productivity, writing specifically about, quote, Instagram influencers and popular YouTubers are major

peddlers of the laziness lie. You're right. And one person that comes to my mind immediately is this guy Gary V. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's a prominent YouTube mouthpiece for like hustle culture. He popularizes these ideas of sort of rising, grand culture and the guys of self-help. And literally says that if you want to succeed, you should be working 18 to 20 hours a day. And along those lines, your book reminded me a bit of an article I read recently by Rosie Spinks titled, The Age of the Influencer has peaked its time for slacker culture to rise again. So Spinks explores this idea, like the death of the 90s era slacker, think like Ethan Hawking, Reality Bites, or the link later, Classic Slacker, and the birth of this sort of hustle and

grind culture, the age of the influencer and embodiment of sort of the modern neoliberalism that's characterized by hyper productivity and side hustles and the monetization of hobbies and that kind of thing. So it's sort of what Spinks calls the neoliberal self. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this in your opinion, what happened to that sort of cool slacker and what shifted culturally.

Yeah, so I'm still kind of pondering this and I don't know how many historical examples there are beyond a couple of salient periods, but it seems to me not coincidental that the times when a slacker type is kind of accepted or seen as cool culturally are usually times of relative economic prosperity at least for some people. So, you know, the 90s, there was this on Wii. It's funny looking back on movies like Fight Club, where someone who has a job that allows them to have a really nice condo and like really nice furniture. Their biggest problem is just on we about that and how superficial life is. Even though it does speak to how even when you succeed and you're relatively comfortable under neoliberal capitalism, it still is an alienated, lonely, empty existence. I think right now we are seeing a resurgence of that

to a certain extent and economic forces are temporarily at least tipping a little bit more in the workers' favor than they have been for decades now. So I think it's not coincidental that after a year where people were able to be on unemployment that actually they could be self-sustaining on and they could actually live comfortably, relatively speaking, off of unemployment, and during a period where a lot of people are having mass walkouts at work, it seems to me not coincidental that we would be suddenly having a social media moment in kind of a pop culture moment where slacking, taking it easy, scamming, and things like

that are getting a little bit more acceptable. Even while we still have those rise and grind hustle culture figures being immensely popular, and they will still have those rise and grind hustle culture figures being immensely popular, and they will always have a robust YouTube and LinkedIn presence, I think, because there's just too much money to be made off of that belief system for it to not be. And it does also make me think about during the period that we were talking about before, during the period of enslavement, the idea of a wealthy aristocrat who did not work very hard, but like a mark of their culturedness being how they spent their leisure time and being well-read and artistic. That's also something that's been with us for a long time, I think, rest and pleasure

and enjoyment being a thing only for those with the economic means, too, is a kind of recurring cultural meme as well. It's just that it's still usually baked into the same cultural fabric of exploiting workers and having a really alienating economic system. So I think there is some through line there, though. We are also right now in a moment where there is a little bit more, hopefully revolutionary kind of potential in some of the ways that it's manifesting at least.

Yeah, yeah, hopefully. It does seem like it is sort of pendulum swung so far to one side in the last 20, 30 years that it's sort of starting to make its way back in a way. It's hard to say, you know, how far the swing will go, especially when we have so much permeation of this laziness lie and the succession with hyper productivity that coming at us from all angles, parents, managers, TV shows, and yeah, like this cultural social transmission of an illness almost. And you talk about like this sort of junk values of productivity and how they're instilled very early on and use this really apt example that stuck with

me where adults often ask children what they want to grow up to do in the sense of a job and much more rarely do we ask children sort of like what they're passionate about. So yeah I'm wondering sort of like what they're passionate about. So yeah, I'm wondering sort of like in our education system too, like can you talk a little bit about how the laziness lies perpetuated in terms of our education, both formal and informal, and also in terms of who it really privileges and who it discards?

Yeah, so the factory model of education is a little bit of an oversimplification, but it is more or less accurate that the structure of the school day was modeled on the idea of being an industrial warehouse worker during the late 1800s, early 1900s. And we didn't really teach children, if we take kind of a long view across culture and time, we didn't really teach children that they needed to kind of sit in place and kind of churn out, you know, times tables for hours at a day and be very docile and well behaved, as consistently, though obviously there were people like the Puritans who did have that very rigid view of childhood.

But we've been stuck with that kind of factory model of education pretty much ever since, because it was pretty easy once more workers kind of went into an office setting to kind of adapt it and just still benefit from the fact that we were really drilling into people. You sit still, you do what you're told, you show your work in a particular prescribed way, and you kind of conform to behavioral standards. And I think it's self-evident almost for anybody who's been through that kind of system, or at least anybody who's been burned by it even a little bit, how much it's not complimentary

to our humanity. A lot has been said about how it kind of creates the problem of ADHD, not to say that ADHD isn't real, but the idea that certain neurotypes are stigmatized and seen as fundamentally broken because you need to walk around a little bit and get some energy out or you're just not built to sit in a fluorescently lit room staring at a chalkboard for hours per day. It's really kind of created the condition under which a lot of people are stigmatized as ill and defective

when if we had just more diversity of ways of living that were acceptable and ways of learning that were acceptable, we wouldn't be doing that to people as severely at least. So, that's a big factor. I think probably listeners are very aware for the most part of how much our testing system is rooted in things like white supremacy and early beliefs about race science. Standardized tests are still based basically on IQ tests developed in the like white supremacy and early beliefs about race science. Standardized tests are still based basically on IQ tests developed in the late 1800s, early

1900s, that were really eugenicist in their origin and in the ideology that really drove them. This idea that brains were something you could easily quantify and that certain groups had more aptitude than others. That's still really with us, even if we try to kind of noodle around with the metrics a little bit and diversify our samples a little bit. We're still in a very top-down fashion imposing one

particular mode of learning and being onto people. And if you deviate in any way or your cultural background is at all different, you end up slipping through the cracks. You are listening to an upstream conversation with Devon Price. We'll be right back. Come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, We can't I hate to be scared They were made for the work and the stair We could do that for a minute They're loose like a blinded man's arm And I know At the end of every week

You're screaming in our streets What heart-like heart will stand for me For 100 hearts is still free I ain't the weekend I ain't the weekend I ain't the weekend I ain't the weekend Hey there, Rainbow Shenzu, they stepped out everything we made Cause they were made for the work instead With the two of them for me That was like a lot of fans on it I hate the weekend

I hate the weekend I hate the weekend I hate the weekend I hate the weekend, I hate the weekend. That was I Hate the Weekend by Taco Cat. Now back to our interview with Devon Price, author of Lazyness does not exist. I want to bring another quote and from the book, you write, if every person who's ever been jailed for drug possession was simply to quote lazy to get a real job,

I don't have to worry about drug policy or form. And if every student who gets bad grades in my classes is simply to lazy to study, then I never have to change my teaching methods to offer any extensions on late assignments. And yeah, so I love how you bring back the lens and challenge us to think about things, not so much from just an individualized vantage point,

but more so through systems. And it's really interesting, your book is like a self-help book and a systemic critique sort of at the same time. And I love that because far too often, these self-help books are way too blind to the systems and structures that are imposed upon us that lead to a lot of the things that we need to help ourselves with. And it sort of reminds me a bit too of that Simpsons meme of principal Skinner where he's like, am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong. And it's sort of like, people are trained to think like,

is our system fucked up? No, it's the people who are wrong. And you write about decades of exposure to this laziness lie and it's had a massive effect on our public consciousness. And I'm wondering, can you just sort of talk a little bit about that tension between systems and the individual and the importance of thinking in systems versus the more neoliberal individual judgments of character? Yeah, it's kind of staggering to me just because I'm someone who is so obsessed with this

stuff. How much we really don't train people to think about systems and to kind of just immediately explain a problem in terms of individual bad actors. So one of the most timely examples here in the US is COVID and the way people talked about COVID numbers and it being just a product of individual's behaving badly. So I live in Chicago and are very quickly became notorious for opening up restaurants, kind of opening up businesses, whenever the numbers took even a slight dip COVID-wise.

And then immediately once numbers started climbing back up, logically as kind of a systemic result of that, she would be on the news talking about how young kids from the south side, a majority black area of Chicago, were partying and behaving irresponsibly and not wearing their masks and that's why the numbers were up. That's such a clear cut example of someone who surely she must know that when she opened up schools and when she opened up bars that she was creating the system that would cause

COVID to proliferate but it's so much easier to just say individuals are behaving badly as a way to allow herself to keep serving business interests while putting everybody's life on the line. Unfortunately, a lot of people really bought into that and certainly Chicago isn't the only city where that happened and just even anecdotally so many of my friends and people who I know share a lot of the same values as me were still feeling really negative on humanity and really

thinking that COVID numbers being so bad in the US were a result of people not caring about others and being selfish and stupid and all of these individual failings rather than us just not having the systems in place to make it possible for a lot of people to stay home and make the quote unquote right decision. It's really permeated everything. It's in how we talk about medicine. We just failed to study how something like anesthesia works on fat bodies, for example.

And then doctors turn around and blame fat patients for not having as positive of health outcomes as thin patients when they've never designed systems or even equipment for fat bodies. It's pretty much in any social problem that you look at. In social psychology, we often call it the fundamental attribution error, this idea that we attribute a person's actions to who they

are as a person rather than the situation around them that incentivizes or forces certain behaviors. But we know it's not actually fundamental. We've called it that because we saw it mostly in America and Western Europe, but in other countries and cultures, it doesn't happen as much as a knee jerk attitude. People can learn to think in terms of systems.

It's just our religious system, our economic system, our economic system, our culture is completely anithetical to thinking about. Oh, what are the external factors that might make this choice make sense for someone? Or might put them in a situation where they have no other choice. And I think it's really threatening, particularly in the US and individualistic cultures to think about that stuff,

because it goes against our belief in free will and individual morality, basically. Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, let's sort of shift now to the later half of your book where you sort of move into looking at ways of overcoming the laziness lie and really talking about the importance of like just stillness and space and life and that kind of thing and you write quote wasting time is a human basic need and that quitting things, cutting corners and all other actions we typically write off as laziness can actually help us heal and grow. Or in other words, help us to escape the negative impacts of the productivity present.

Can you talk about this? Maybe expand on it. Also, maybe talk about one of my favorite parts of the book, Julie's Tattoo. Oh yeah, yeah. So to kind of take a step back and kind of set the stage for this topic, industrial organizational psychologists have kind of tried to solve the problem of time theft at work for decades at this point. Whether you're looking at people in a manufacturing plant or office workers or retail workers, people don't work constantly for the full 8, 9, 10 hours that they're on the clock. And we found that really consistently for decades.

And yet for some reason, that's always framed in the research literature as a problem. And a lot of interventions are looked at to figure out how to stop distracting workers and get them to actually work during their entire work day. And what I really argue in the book is, if we were repeatedly found across time and a bunch of different settings, that the average person can only really focus on work tasks for three or four hours per day,

why can't we just accept that as data and description of what people are capable of and what's good for them, rather than a problem to be cured? Because clearly it is not changing. No matter how much we try to make, the workplace are really punishing environment where you have to fake being productive that whole time.

Because that's what people end up doing. They end up sitting at their computer, trying to look like they're being a virtuous hard worker, quote unquote, virtuous, when they are not focusing, they're not getting anything done, and they're just miserable. So yeah, we really do know that humans aren't built to focus and churn productivity out. People need to daydream.

We know that's really essential for processing information and creativity. People need time to process experiences that have happened to them. We certainly know that from the trauma literature and just memory research. Just if you want information to be stored into long-term memory, you have to give your brain time to plug it into the places where it needs to be

and to kind of make meaning out of what you've learned. And yet, we're all trying to live in a way that's completely incompatible with that need. So one person that I spoke to in the book, Julie, she worked for a nonprofit here in Chicago that was doing, I think, the flaws with nonprofits aside, doing really meaningful work,

offering creative writing to Chicago Public Schools students. She was managing a huge team, dealing with the constant fires that you have to put out when you deal with a school system like Chicago Public Schools that's just constantly having budget cuts and issues like that, and just huge school-depriprison pipeline issues, just incredibly stressful environment to work in. And at the same time, her husband, who was an EMT, and had really, really severe trauma coming from his work as an EMT, was having a really profound psychotic mental health break.

So she's trying to juggle these things. They have a young kid that they're raising who's like she's like three years old at the time working you know 70 hours per week. Husband is like truly like not okay not even safe alone really. And she eventually realized she had to just walk away from the life she was trying to lead. And so she and her husband and their daughter moved to kind of a small suburb in kind of like a smaller and more rural kind of midwestern area. They opened up kind of a small business and just because their cost of living was so much

lower, they could both kind of really dramatically slow down and focus on getting her husband's mental health back up to stuff. Her just kind of focusing on like managing the family and their health rather than working a full-time job. And she got this tattoo that says surrender on it to really reflect that she is just giving herself over to having limitations and reality being what it is and not striving to be the success and the kind of quote-unquote woman who has it all and is doing it all, that she really for years thought that she was supposed to be. And I think it's really telling, I quote her in the book where her mother, who was kind of a feminist from a different era, really hated that she got this tattoo that says surrender, because she really, I guess believes in the kind of girl boss kind of idea of you need to overcome

unfairness and inequity by working really, really hard. And in Julie's case, she was someone who had the insight and also admittedly the privilege to say, I can't do this anymore. I'm going to focus on what actually matters to me. And that is going to come with sacrifices and losses. Yeah. No, it was very inspiring. And so, and for your own personal journey,

I remember when I first emailed you, I think a couple months ago, and asked if you'd be interested in coming on the show, you said like, yeah, but like, give me a couple months, I'm taking some time off. Why don't you like read the book and come up with some questions or whatever and we'll get to it later in the summer. And I like that because so often we see people not drawing, and I don't know if this was your case in terms of

what was going on for you, but not drawing boundaries in terms of their time. And I saw a tweet recently where someone's like, I really hate it when I send an email out and someone responds right away because I just crossed that off my list and now it's right back on my list. And I'm just wondering like personally for you, so going from that version of you which was just grinding yourself into dust

by working so hard, where are you now? What steps did you take to get to where you are now? Do you see yourself as in a place that you're happy with in terms of your relationship to productivity and work? Yeah, just curious where you're at. What your growth journey is like? Oh, yeah. It's absolutely not linear. And I think I will always be someone who, by temperament, is pretty bad at this stuff. I've learned the hard way and now I have kind of very publicly established for myself what my beliefs are, which makes it a little bit easier for me to live up to them. But I am always relearning this lesson and finding new rules that I've

imposed on myself about how much I'm supposed to get done or what I'm supposed to do that I have to realize that they're there that I kind of put these like lasers in front of me that I'm trying to like crawl between of you know I need to write this much per week I need to do this much to like promote workshops that I'm doing like all of these silly things I need to work out this many times per week and I have to like take a step back all the time and say, is this a law? What's going to happen if I don't do this? Do I actually want to do this? Can I actually just be comfortable not doing anything for a minute? And often the answer is no, right? I do like having like a lot to do in stimulation. But I have learned that there

are ways to be someone who operates that way without having that urge in me exploited all the time. I can put my energy towards doing things that are fun and creative projects and frivolous things that I will never put online and will never impress anyone that I'm doing just because it's like a fun challenge, which can be, you know, an art form of a video game, whatever it is. So the tension is always there for me. It was definitely a very cognitively dissonant thing to have this book come out and suddenly have all these media invitations, which on one hand, I'm really thankful to get them and I want to do them, but it's also so counter to the message of the book for me to be constantly exhausted and constantly producing content for people about my book, about how people are overworked.

So it's something I'm always kind of smoothing out. I definitely could feel that burnout was coming around when the book came out if I didn't really watch myself. And I had to really kind of like explode a few things in my life, a few like side hustles and like part-time teaching appointments that I had where I had to just like look at my life and say, like, what are you doing? Why are you still trying to do all these things? Why can't you just like ease into the fact that you're one of the few people in this world who's like incredibly blessed too. Have something you're working on that you do really believe in and like doing.

Just enjoy that part and then screw off the rest of the day. If you have the ability to do that, why not do that? So that's where I am. It's hard. I don't think anybody just unlearns this stuff permanently in the blink of an eye at all. Well, first of all, I want to thank you for coming on the show and taking the time to do that.

I'm reminded of something a few years ago, a fairly prominent co-founding editor of a fairly prominent new economics magazine in the UK who I've been in touch with, writing a couple of pieces for the magazine. They write on stuff like shortening the workday and just, yeah, alternative economics kind of stuff. And as his email signature one day, I noticed he changed it to, you know,

in line with our values in this like new economics world, I am working a four-day work week. So I'm sorry if you email me on a Friday, I won't be able to get this back to you on Monday. And then I just remember a ton of people within that community giving him shit about it. Like they're joking around, but they're like, oh yeah dude, I emailed you on Friday and I got this message. They're just giving him shit about it. And I think he changed it. And it was just really sad and funny at the same time, but it was mostly just like you're

saying, even people who are immersed in this stuff theoretically and even practically in many ways, like it's just so hard to actually adapt and change to the new way of being in terms of, you know, better health and mental health and physical health and all that kind of stuff. When you're up against the system that sort of has these very specific requirements. And you're very aware of the idea of purlage throughout the whole book, and you've brought it up throughout this interview as well. But I did want to just, you know, I want to say like one thing that struck me while reading

the book was like this idea of extricating oneself from the rat race of late capitalist hyper productivity requires a certain level of purlage. And I just want to name this because I know that there are people out there who, like, if they don't continue to work themselves to the bone, like, they could potentially lose everything, right? And I think it's definitely important for those of us who can focus on how to embrace rest and relaxation for us to do that as much as possible. But like I was saying, like like there's this entire system in place

forcing many to sort of stay on this running wheel. And like, I don't know, I'm just thinking like a single mother who has to work two or three jobs and then has to come home and cook dinner and take care of the kids or, you know, some version of that. So I'm wondering, what do you say to that person? And I don't know how much of a question I have, it's just as much as like wanting to bring this up and see if you had any thoughts around it. Yeah, so my thoughts on this are really evolving kind of in real time lately.

I thought it was really important in the book that I didn't want to be one of those self-help writers who gives this really banal advice that it's only gonna really make a difference in your life if you have the money to kind of very, and the comfort to really easily follow it. That's what a lot of self-help books are like and a lot of books about. Workaholism or being just a people pleaser, all these kind of compulsive things. It's so often talked about as just this individual neurosis that someone has to just overcome

and get like more confident and more selfish and assertive and then everything will be fine. And that's just not the reality because the origins of these problems are so much bigger than an individual. It's a systemic problem. It's not an individual problem. And it is easier to be assertive and exert your power if you have it. That said, I have really been challenged lately by Trisha Hershey.

She runs the NAP ministry, which is kind of a public, like, activism and kind of public art installment that's all about black rest as resistance. And one thing that she really butts up against is when people tell her that this is only a thing that people who are rich enough to rest can do. And she really says, like, when I started out doing this work, I was making under the poverty line. I could have had my fear of scarcity be used against me and let that be another reason that I was exploited, but I just refused. I was still taking naps when I was making like poverty wages. And we all need to stop with this now.

And that was really useful for me to read. At first, I bristle that. I was like, no way. But then I really thought about it. And I think one, it is absolutely true that it's easier to break out of this system if you are a Jewel Julie, someone who was able to sell their house in Chicago for a decent amount of money, move to the country, work part

time, and you still have enough money to get by. Undeniable that you are, it's way easier to assert your values and take care of yourself when you have that economic and racial privilege. But I think it also is the case that sometimes when we acknowledge those things, it has the unintended effect of saying, oh, this isn't for you. You can't put the brakes on. You can't stop because you're in such a dire precarious spot. And so I think we do need a structural systemic solution to this problem. We need universal health care, universal basic income.

We need to really reevaluate disability benefits, all of these things. And I think also part of that comes from individuals collectively realizing we have the power to refuse and to stop. So that's how I'm kind of reconciling those tensions right now in my mind, but it's kind of, it's ever evolving because it is so tricky.

Absolutely. It is super tricky. And I'm glad that you brought up Universal Basic Income. We did a whole two-part series on it, part of our documentary series. And I think it's become a little bit more mainstream. And I think the folks that listen to the podcast and probably for yourself as well, like it's kind of old news that giving people unconditional cash isn't going to make them sort of like just hang out on the couch all day watching Netflix and smoking weed. Like people want to do shit with their lives. And I think yeah, universal basic income is such a great experiment

in so many different ways in terms of showing like what it is actually like to be a human in our relationship to doing stuff and work and that kind of thing. It busts so many myths of capitalist productivity. But that's a different conversation, I guess. So to close out, you write that, quote, the compulsion toward overwork is a key component of the laziness lie and resisting it is important, but we have to go much further than that. I'm wondering if you can talk about what you mean by that and also particularly how compassion,

as you say, can kill the laziness lie. The laziness lie and all of these problems that I'm talking about are so much deeper than just people are workaholics. They're addicted to work and they need to get over that kind of compulsion. For all the reasons that we already talked about, it comes down basically to really objectifying human bodies and human minds and instead of seeing our bodies and minds as us ourselves that we get to do whatever we want with and get to live however we choose, we see our bodies and our brains as a means to an end

that have to justify their own existence and earn their own right to survive under capitalism. And what that does is it imposes all kinds of values and assumptions and standards onto how bodies and minds should be. So some of these are things we already touched on. If the way that you pay attention is different from what the educational system considers the norm, you're defective and you need to be fixed and you need to feel shame about that.

If your body doesn't kind of conform to the standards laid out for it, it's not being a good, diligent object. And so it needs to be fixed or shrunk or destroyed, basically. Even things like deviating from professional norms by having natural textured hair that isn't kind of Eurocentric hair or wearing clothing that is gender nonconforming, anything that could be kind of a distraction from tidy kind of conforming inoffensive productivity can be seen as a threat. And so what I really want to challenge people to do when they read this book is not just take more breaks, take more naps, take Fridays off of work when you can,

though all of that is great. But really question what society has taught you about who you should be, how you should live, and what you're supposed to value. Because if we start from a base assumption that all life has value, that all humans, no matter what they do or don't do, deserve dignity and a reasonable degree of comfort. That kind of necessarily forces us to really think about, do I actually have to have a body

that looks this way? Do I actually need to present in this way? Do I need to actually construct my life around these norms or can I completely throw that all out the window and really focus on what really matters to me and what I really value. So when I say that compassion kills the laziness lie, I'm really saying we can't just say I'm going to work less, we need to say work is irrelevant to human dignity and human's rights to exist. And we need to take care of everyone no matter how they live. And that also means that I'm free, if I believe that, and I really kind of fight for a world where we all believe that, that means I'm actually free to live how I really want to live and be the person that I really want to be, and extend that compassion to other people. So that's very big and lofty, but on a practical level it just comes down to trust other people

to make their own decisions about what they want their lives to look like. And to the extent you can help us kind of all push for a world where everybody's okay even if they can't conform to those really rigid, productive standards. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Devin Price, author of Laziness Does Not Exist, published by Atria Books. Upstream Thee Music was composed by Robert. Thank you to Taco Cat for the intermission music. And thank you so much to everyone who has chipped

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