We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Laziness Does Not Exist with Devon Price

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

303. Laziness Does Not Exist with Devon Price  Why are we so scared of laziness? How have we been convinced to tie our worthiness to busy-ness and how do we STOP and create lives we are excited to live? Social psychologist and author, Devon Price, teaches us how we got bamboozled and sets us free from the Laziness Lie. Discover: -How to rest, reorient priorities, and say “No” to reclaim our time and energy and avoid burnout. -Glennon asks Devin her favorite question: “What the hell is gender?” -The importance of listening to dread and recognizing when something doesn’t feel right. -Why resenting others for not doing enough often indicates that you're doing too much.  Plus, Devon shares an exercise for reflecting on the moments when you felt most yourself and aligned with your values – in order to create more meaningful life experiences. About Devon: Devon Price, PhD, is a social psychologist, professor, author, and proud Autistic person. His books include Unmasking Autism and Laziness Does Not Exist. His forthcoming book, Unlearning Shame, will be released in February 2024. Devon’s research has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the Journal of Positive Psychology. Devon’s writing has appeared in the Financial Times, HuffPost, The Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, and on PBS, NPR, MSNBC, and the BBC. He lives in Chicago, where he serves as an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. TW: @drdevonprice IG: @drdevonprice To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And to be loved we need to be known What the fuck sister? You wrote a book. I mean this interview is a book. You wrote a book. Let her be herself. I mean, god. I can only do what I can only do. This is what I do. This interview is longer than the person's book who we are interviewing. That's not true. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Today's a special episode with a special person. Sister take the wheel. Sister take the wheel. That's like that old Jesus take the wheel. But it's not. Jesus, it's Amanda. Hark, we bring tidings of great joy for all of the people today. And that is telling you that laziness does not exist.

I knew it. This is a wild and liberatory truth, which is very exciting, but it is also maddening because it's one of these prime examples of the absolute horseshit that we have completely internalized so much and incessantly shamed ourselves for only to find out that it isn't even a thing. And so we are here today with Dr. Devon Price, and he is going to share his research on the laziness lie, which consists of these three tenants.

And I'm asking if these happen to be etched in your heart as ridiculously as they are etched in mine. Number one, your worth is your productivity. Two, you cannot trust your own feelings or limits. Three, there's always more that you could be doing. So if these voices are screaming these things as loud at you as they are at me, please join us for this time together because it turns out lies,

lies, lies, laziness sits on a throne of lies. And it affects every part of our life. So, Devon Price, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Devon Price, PhD is a social psychologist, professor, author, and proud autistic person. His books include Unmasking Autism and Laziness Does Not Exist and his newest book, which we had the pleasure of reading early and is exceptional, Unlearning Shame. He lives in Chicago where he serves as an assistant professor at Loyola University, Chicago School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Yes. Thank you for having me. That's a great introduction. Every now and then people are skeptical of the idea of laziness not existing.

So it's always nice to be in friendly waters for that concept. I have lived in accordance with the laziness lie my whole existence. So your book is really revolutionary to me and understanding and kind of like putting pieces together that were sort of moving in that direction. And so I'm thankful to you. I was hoping we'd start with a little bit about your personal story because your first tenant of the laziness Lie is that your worth is your productivity. And I feel like your early part of your life, like so many of us, started as a very strong subscriber to The Laziness Lie.

So can you tell us a little bit about even your family of origin and your whole kind of track before you came right up against the truth of it that kind of your rock bottom that brought us all here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think for all of us who believe in this stuff, there's just layers of like generational trauma baggage that we've internalized about ourselves. So many forces that kind of compound that teach us to feel insecure about our right to exist just all the time. So my dad was from Appalachia in this really remote area called the Cumberland Gap area.

Coal mining was basically your only means of subsistence, and that was obviously really shaky and unsustainable anyway, too. And he had a hidden disability. He had a couple of hidden disabilities actually. He had cerebral palsy, which his mom told him to just not let anyone ever discover that he had because it was considered so shameful. Yeah, he had seizures starting at the age of five. And his family at that point in time, in that place in the world, your ability to live was based on your ability to do really backbreaking work. And so you couldn't let it show. You'd be a failure as a person, you'd be a failure as a man to have these disabilities. So he had that shame really bundled up and just the real anxiety of the economic precarity of

living in that region, incredibly poor. And so then he and my grandmother and grandfather, they moved up to Ohio. That anxiety was really deeply embedded in how I was raised, just being really terrified about not having enough money. My mom also had disabilities. She has a rod in her spine, just really bad back pain. She couldn't work full-time either. So both of my parents had this deep anxiety all of the time

about not being sure if they were going to be able to continue to keep working, if they would be able to make enough money to keep me and my sister okay, and they really drilled into our heads the same thing that's drilled into a lot of millennials' heads at that time. You've got to go to college, you've got to get a good career, you've got to make this work. It comes from a very loving place when you get those messages.

But it takes a toll, it's a lot of pressure. And I didn't know I was autistic at the time. As a kid, I just was a weird kid. I was in special ed gym, so I had some motor disabilities of my own, like my dad, but I didn't know what was going on. I just knew that I said things that were weird, that made kids kind of pull away from me. It was easier to relate to adults. It's very bookish,

you know, all that kind of stuff. And that was another layer that made me obsessed with productivity because that was the one thing I was good at was school. I could write, I could give speeches, I could, you know, definitely fake my way through a lot of assignments. And so that was my identity for a long time. Everything was pushing me towards, you're going to be an academic, you're going to do well in school, and then you'll be okay. Then you'll be able to afford to be yourself

because you'll have that stability. And so the long story short is that I finished college early in three years, I went straight to grad school, I got my PhD at 25, and then I was struck with this really terrible fever that lasted nine months. Sorry, I think there's a helicopter that might be on the mic. They don't want us talking about these things, Devon. They're coming. Right. Yes. Yes, they're coming to collect me. So my body completely broke down after just striving to be high achieving all the time for the first 25 years of my life.

I had a 103 degree fever every single day. Every night it would hit me at about 6 PM. It was very bizarre. I was still trying to work. I was working on a postdoc research position. I would work every day. I would still try to get a workout in, which is absurd because I knew that at about 6 or 7 PM every night I would get hit with this bone shaking fever and then I wouldn't be able to get out of bed for the rest of the night. It went on like that for months from February of 2014 through to about November. All these battery of medical tests, I had a heart murmur, I had really severe anemia, I was tested for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, all of these things. Nothing really could explain it.

And ultimately I had to just give up with trying to work a full-time job while being incredibly sick. What a novel idea it was to me at the time. And after months of doing very little work, very little movement, just nourishing myself, really eating like heartily for the first time too, and not trying to be this impressive, productive little worker bee that my health finally started to return. And I had to think about what do I want my life to actually be if this path is clearly not going to be sustainable for me. And that is when my life really changed in a whole bunch of ways. But the first idea that was the kernel of that was this idea that, oh, actually, I don't need to be working all of the time to justify my existence. I can just exist. Nicole Zwaard Is there a correlation between

the stopping of the hamster wheel of productivity and all of the changes that came. Were you able to figure out who you were because you stopped doing what the culture told you to do? Absolutely, one-to-one correspondence. I was just working every day, focusing on just surviving, saying what I needed to say to get through the meeting, bringing what I needed to bring to the work meeting that would be impressive.

And my time off of work was just recovery time. There wasn't any space for dreaming or longing or anything like that. So once I started having to grapple with my body's physical needs, I also started noticing things like my sensory needs and how overwhelmed I was by a lot of sounds and social spaces. And that helped to slowly put me on the path of figuring out that I was autistic. I was actually taking care of my body, taking care of my sensory comfort

and limitations and things like that. And at the same time, I was also going through a gender discovery journey too, because once you realize for yourself, oh, I can't be in this space, the lights are too bright, it's painful for me. You also start to notice, oh, I don't want this makeup on my face.

Oh, I don't want long hair. I don't wanna dress this way. I don't wanna be talked about in this way. And once you start opening that flood gate, there's so many things that you can say no to. And then your actual self is what's left behind when you say no to all of that false stuff. Devin, that's why the helicopters are circling.

That's the gift of your work. It's not just stopping something. It's when you stop that thing, you get to start figuring out who you actually are. Absolutely. Well, that's why that second tenet of the you can't trust the messages and limits from your body. If you are, if you're living your whole life, if the world that we're operating in is predicated on our willingness to override and ignore any truth or messages our body and heart are giving us in order to survive on that path, then you're not going to discover any of the truth that's inside of there because your default is to say

that's irrelevant or that is not only irrelevant, it is a barrier to my survival. Absolutely. Being committed to overwork is basically this dissociative state in a way where you're disconnecting from your body. I once saw this infographic on Instagram. It was meant to be one of those cheery, empowering kind of take a break for yourself kind of messages. And it was saying, don't forget to like take a moment to really enjoy like going to pee when you need to. Like how sick are we that we have to remind people a basic biological function. And this person was very well intentioned, right? But they were framing a basic necessary biological function as self-care. And that's how divorced we are from our bodies that we

see eating, breathing, walking around, away from the computer, taking time for ourselves or being a participant in our communities as self-care rather than that's what being a living human being is. That's what we have to do. And so once you start noticing, oh, I'm uncomfortable sitting in this chair. I can't be at this desk for nine hours, 10 hours, 16 hours a day, then you start noticing a lot of other things

that you're uncomfortable with. And I really feel like you have to say no to a great many things for a long time before you actually develop that voice to say in a more empowered way, okay, now this is what I do want. This is who I do wanna be. But getting to that

point of saying all of those no's is really terrifying for a lot of people and it takes a lot of work. Devin, I feel like my version of this, I'm in about a year out from anorexia recovery and I had to say no to everything in the world because I just, I was like, I have to heal from this and I don't know how. And it took a year of not knowing what to do with myself to start figuring out what I did want to do with myself. But erinoxia is like this. It's like taking your whole life and putting it outside of yourself in a bunch of rules and never paying attention or trusting or believing that your body will tell you what it wants or what it means. Hi, I've never been more excited about an advertisement.

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Can you talk to us a little bit about your gender journey? I heard you on a podcast call yourself a gender conscientious objector. So good. I had to stop it. I said, did you hear that? Did you hear that? So good. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's not ironic actually that you bring up the context of eating disorders because that was also a big part of my journey too. I think again, if you're living by the laziness lie, if you're living by this idea that your worth is your productivity, all

of these external judgments, you set all these rules for yourself. And that was one way that I really kind of controlled my body in a gendered way too. So I had very strict rules about, and I don't want to get into anything triggering with these kinds of things, but you know, I had really strict rules about how I needed to move my body and what I needed to have my body look like because that would make it more, you know, compliant and more pleasing to society. And that was a way that I could punish it at the same time for the ways in which it deviated. So for me, my gender as a trans man and my autism are two really inextricably linked things because a lot of autistic people, we can't follow rules that don't make any sense to us. And a lot of society's rules don't make

any sense and they don't explain them to you. From the time you're a really little kid, they have you line up boy, girl, boy, girl, and they don't even tell you, why are we thinking about these categories as if they're important? Why are we separating kids in terms of which bathrooms they're using? You don't even really find out what gender

or biological sex quote unquote is until many years after, years of this indoctrination that here's what you're supposed to wear, here's what you're supposed to do. here's what you're supposed to do. And I could never live up to any of those rules. I was really a failure at a lot of gendered expectations. And you'd get a lot of corrections for that all your life. And at a certain point, if you're lucky,

as I have been to kind of take this mask off, you realize, oh, I actually don't want this conformity anymore. I actually want to throw it in people's faces that there's another way to be. Because I don't think really anyone is actually cisgender, but every child is forced to be. Every child is told you belong to this category. You have to behave in these ways. You have to present in these ways. This is this biologically ingrained truth. And yet for a biologically ingrained truth, we have to just beat it over kids' heads,

relentlessly all their lives. It's so self-evident that we have to police it 24 hours a day. Yes, yeah. It's just natural. It's constant. It's just natural. It's wild. People really treat gender as this like, this taboo, this like religious system.

So I have a chinchilla and one time I was on the chinchilla like forums and someone was like, oh, I really want to get pink fleece for my chinchilla's cage, but he's a boy, you know, like these belief systems, people don't even question it. And so there's, there's a lot of power in just saying, oh wait, actually none of these rules make any sense and you don't have to follow them either. Whatever your identity label is that you go with, none of us have to be doing any of this stuff. It's totally arbitrary. So what is gender to you?

I don't understand what it is. I feel like no one ever answers that question enough for me. I've always said to me, it feels like gender is something that's like on me, but I just can't find it anywhere in me. And I heard somebody say recently that gender is what happens between two people. That it's not in anybody. It's like a set of interactions that we've been conditioned to do between us. Which makes sense to me because I always feel like when someone's saying,

is it a girl or a boy? What they're really saying is, how do we treat this thing? Mmm, yes. What else would we be asking? I think that's a really useful way to think about it because really there is no identity except in relationship to other people. And that's a really big struggle for queer people who are closeted, right? You don't get to live out your identity because it's not being recognized by your people. So when people talk about gender, they talk about a lot of different things, right? Oh, presentation, you know, what labels you identify with,

how you want to dress, how you want to move through the world, what symbols are associated with that category. And that's all well and good. Some of those things are very empowering for people. But I do think that ultimately, it is easier to understand gender as who do you see yourself reflected in? How do you relate to other people? What's your community?

And we might find sides of belonging in multiple different communities, right? So there's a lot of sides of myself that I wasn't able to enjoy until I could be really recognized in community with other gay men, for example. But at the same time, some of my closest friends are butch lesbians who have so much in common with me in terms of just life experience and just how we move through the world. And it's not like I can really put a line in the sand and say, this is a man, this is a butch lesbian, this is a trans woman. We have so much more in common than we have apart. There's so much affinity and most of that affinity is in being told that we're being

our gender wrong, that we're a gender failure in some way. Interesting. Sister, thank you for letting me do that. Go back to laziness now. No. in some way. Interesting. Sister, thank you for letting me do that. Go back to laziness now. No, the intersections are infinite here because I mean even the idea of being a moral failure, those are kind of the cages and the threats right that are out there with all of this. If the world says just be careful to stay on this side of the line so you're not a failure. That is what the laziness lie is doing over and over again. In fact, saying not only will

you be a failure, you are inside of you. You have a moral failing. You have a character flaw if you are failing to be hustling nonstop to meet these unattainable standards that we have set. You say as a social psychologist that like, if someone's behavior doesn't make sense to you, then you just don't fully understand their context. I'm paraphrasing, but it's basically like, everything makes sense in the fullness

of everyone's context. So you just don't see it. When we ourselves are being quote unquote lazy, or what we would label as lazy, or we're lacking motivation, or we're running out of energy, or we see other people operating like that. If that is not laziness, what is that? What is happening there?

When we call someone lazy or we call ourselves lazy, usually that means there's some task we expect ourselves to be doing or something we expect ourselves to be accomplishing that we're not, right? And we're really working ourselves up. Or maybe it's just even the idea that we should be doing more than what we're really doing. So when somebody isn't meeting a goal or isn't accomplished something, isn't doing a task, there's a couple of things that can be going on. The first thing that might be laziness is just a difference in values, right? So society might say, it's really important that you do this. It's really important that you put hours and hours into your grooming and you look a certain way. And you might actually deep down not value that. You might think it's really superficial and unimportant. And so you're not actually lazy, you're just correctly allocating

your energy towards the things that actually matter to you. But you still might feel ashamed about that because society says you're supposed to really value having this really impressive clean home, having your brows waxed, whatever. But more often than not, when somebody's beating themselves up for being lazy, what's really going on is they do wanna meet some goal, right? They do wanna write that manuscript. They do want to run that marathon, whatever it is, but they can't do it because there's these barriers

that they are either not seeing or not allowing themselves to recognize as legitimate. So a really big one in a lot of people's lives is people really don't give themselves credit for just the amount of trauma and exhaustion they're dealing with all the time. I think especially in recent years this has become especially pronounced where you'll just sometimes talk to somebody who like all of us has just lived through a multi-year long international mass death event, this

really horrifying and seismic shift in life. And people will still be like, oh, but I didn't get anything done during that time. It's like you survived, that should be enough. It's the ridiculous level of expectation that you're setting out for yourself here that's making you sound in your mind like you're lazy, but that's that you're setting out for yourself here that's making you sound in your mind like you're lazy, but that's because you're not giving yourself credit for taking care of yourself, taking care of people in your community, doing something responsible, keeping yourself as reasonably sane as you can, all of those things, healing from trauma. These are really time-consuming

things. As we were just talking about, overcoming an eating disorder or overcoming being closeted, those are traumas that take years. And that takes a lot of brain power that we don't give ourselves credit for. So that's often a big factor when people think of themselves as lazy is they're not seeing how much their bodies and their minds are just fighting

to put things back together for them and to keep them alive and to take care of other people. I love it. And I've been thinking lately about certain points of my life where I just couldn't do something that I know I needed to do. I wanted to do, and I just couldn't do it. And I've been thinking of it lately. It's a positional shift. It's like we look at it, we're like, the disease is laziness. You have it. As opposed to, no, if you are in that space where you find yourself unable to move or unable to operate according to what your value is, if you actually want to do it, then that

is a symptom of some other thing that is happening and not something you should berate yourself. You should be asking yourself the question like, what is going on in my life? What am I struggling with that this is a symptom of? It's almost like your body is giving you more messages to try to get you to pay attention. When we think about trusting ourselves and trusting our bodies and our messages, and if our message is like, rest, lay down, you're tired, and we're so skeptical of that because the world says no. And what about this fear of like, if I just do what I want, the fucking wheels are going

to come off. I'm going to be in bed for three years if I actually start doing what I want. Because I think that is the fear. It's the same eating disorder fear. Oh, if I intuitively eat, I will never stop eating because I don't actually trust that there's a satiation point anywhere for me. What do you know about that? Yeah. Asking for a friend. Yes. No. Asking for all of us us because this is something that constantly comes up when people hear

about the idea about laziness not existing. They always instinctively go, no, no, no, but I am lazy. That might be true for other people, but I'm so lazy. If I let myself be lazy, the floor would fall out behind me and I would never do anything again. And it is so similar to eating disorder recovery where we see there's often a period of eating disorder recovery, extreme hunger, right? Where you are trying to rebuild your energy stores after not being nourished.

And we see the same thing with burnout sufferers, which I really think most people, if they're at that point, like you just described, where they cannot do the thing, their body is just not letting them do it, that's their body trying to communicate, we cannot sustain what's currently happening. And so when the burnout point hits, we find in research people need weeks, months, sometimes even years of really, really strictly reduced demand in their life

so that they can rest. It's rebuilding those energy stores and it also is reorienting a person's life. Like the goal should never be to return to the punishing lifestyle that gave you the burnout in the first place, or you're just gonna be on that hamster wheel forever. So you need a lot of time to rest and recuperate

and to reorient your priorities and decide, okay, if I only do have a finite amount of time and energy, what am I going to actually do that matters to me? priorities and decide, okay, if I only do have a finite amount of time and energy, what am I going to actually do that matters to me? And who am I going to be comfortable with disappointing? What losses can I accept? Which is a heavy thing to do. But we really find consistently that human beings want to feel like what they're doing

with their life matters. People don't want to just be sitting on the couch all day. People do want to be having lives that are meaningful, whatever that means. That might not mean like capitalist productivity, it might mean being a part of a community, it might mean being there for your family or other people. But people really do immediately find new projects

and problems for themselves when they don't have them. That's just part of the human spirit, you know? And it's a beautiful thing about us. So we really don't need to be worried about being lazy sloths forever. We just need some rest and then our brains will tell us what we're actually called to do. That's right.

Yeah. It reminds me of like a weekend, right? Everybody works really hard and then they sit on the couch all weekend long and they're like, I can't get off this couch. I need another day. I need Monday. I need Tuesday.

It makes me feel like, Oh no, the reason why you're on the couch Saturday and Sunday every weekend is because your Monday through Friday is so bonkers that your body is literally telling you. So you won't stay on the couch. If you quit your job, you will not be on the couch for a month straight, maybe you will, but you'll get fucking bored. I know this.

I went through this when I retired from playing soccer. She has tried to report. I'm here to report. I am very good at laziness. And I accept it now. Like I take afternoon naps every single day. I get into bed at 3 p.m. and I don't get out of that bed whether I'm sleeping or not until 5 p.m.

And Devin, I'll have you know that I am the granddaughter of coal miners, okay? I was not having this shit the first five years of our marriage. I was like, what is gonna happen? Like what if somebody stops by and sees you taking a nap? shit the first five years of our marriage. I was like, what is going to happen? Like, what if somebody stops by and sees you taking a nap? Like, what naps are for toddlers?

Aren't you embarrassed? So Devon, what are we so scared of? That's my first question. What does this represent when we see our child, our daughter, like playing a video game, we're like, that's it. It's over. That's it. She is going to live in our basement until she's 30

and she's gonna play video games. Like, what is this image? What are we so afraid of? I think it's existential dread, right? I think if you're told that your worth is your productivity, that life is working, then if you flip that switch off and you say, okay, no, I'm not gonna work, there's this chasm. What's my life meaning?

How do I prove I'm a good person? What do I do with my time? What's meaningful? It's really terrifying. And I'm the same way as you are Glennon. I still feel like shameful about taking naps. Even with all of the work that I do, I feel like bad about something like that.

So it's really deep conditioning to unlearn. And I think it comes down to us having to actually just sit and decide, okay, I actually get to decide what my life's purpose is or what's meaningful. And that's really scary. That's huge to think about, but it's so liberating too. There's so much that we can derive beauty and meaning and purpose from that isn't just grinding and grinding away all of the time without ever giving ourselves a moment to think about, okay, what do I actually value?

Why do we exist? Why do we exist? That's what the existential dread is. And I do think that just like letting go of anorexia, there is a cost. I think it's important to note that it's not like un-painful to stop doing the thing that the culture rewards you for doing. Whatever the culture has decided power is, like for a white cis woman in my world, it's being fucking skinny. I don't know how to explain it. I'm just telling you that it is.

So I have to say, okay, I'm gonna lose that for this other thing. And in your, this paradigm, if you're stepping off the wheel of productivity, visibility, relevance, all these things that we earn through not checking in with ourselves, you do have to like take some hits. Absolutely. You know, for me, the big decision was to leave any hope of being like a tenure track

professor. When I had that burnout point, that was the path that I was on. Yeah, that was so cool. And I read that I was like, oh, God, that's doing on. Yeah, that was so cool. And I read that I was like, oh God, that's doing it. Yeah, and I realized it was actually, it didn't feel like a loss that much to me because I looked at how those people were living that I knew that were doing that.

Like I had colleagues who applied for no joke, like one of them, 168 jobs in a year. And she got two interviews and she eventually got a job. But you know, in academia, it's very much the case where you just move wherever you do get a job. And I didn't want to be moving to Fargo as a queer person, as a person who likes living in a city.

So deciding that I was going to disappoint all of my faculty mentors and not go down that path and have to invent my own path, it was scary, but it was also, I couldn't do anything but that. And I've talked to so many people who the decision has admittedly been something a lot costlier because I know a lot of disabled people who have decided, okay, you know, I'm going to just live on disability and that means I'm only going to make $14,000 a year. I'm going to have to live with a relative, but then I'll be able to be present to help raise my niece and nephew. I'll be able to do so much more volunteering. I'll be able to make art.

I'm never going to have any money or financial independence, but I'll be woven into this interdependent community. There's all kinds of sacrifices that people make that are really extreme to break out of this hamster wheel. But I think we also get rewarded with so much more connection and authenticity that it is ultimately worth it. And we can look back and say, oh, there's actually no way,

it couldn't have been any other way. It's beautiful. It really is one of the most counter-cultural things you can do. I mean, when you said under our current system, there's so much pressure to just let all of your life be leached out of you in the service of making money and satisfying other people. I don't want to live that way. I don't want to have big career goals or care about doing work that makes me proud anymore. I want to have a life I enjoy instead. That's exactly right.

That I think we think that enjoyment is the sum total of collecting these things that we've been told will give us enjoyment. So the family, the career, the accolade, the praise, that that equals enjoyment, but we haven't stopped to like do the math and say, is that so? Does that equal enjoyment? But what you're saying is the life that I want is a life I enjoy. And then I will backfill that life with the things I enjoy. It's a different math, isn't it?

Yeah. It's a constant course correction too, right? Because what is meaningful and valuable to you at one point in life may completely change into something else as your own abilities change, as the world changes. You're able to be more responsive to your actual life circumstances when you move in that way. So, for example, for me right now, I'm doing a lot more activism because of what's going on because there's so many lives on the line right now. I had a few years where I was completely burned out on activism in terms of the real going to protest kind of sense. I was not doing that stuff. I was still trying to be

an important presence for people in my life and for my community in other ways. But now I'm able to kind of move and change with the seasons instead of saying, I need to always be this person, or this is the thing that impressed other people, I need to keep doing this. Now it's like, oh, it's actually fine if I alienate some people, or if I stop being the person I used to be. And that flexibility is incredible. And does that come back from staying embodied? Because then you can check in and figure out where you are in each season. You can lose yourself in anything. You can lose it in activism and you can ingrain the laziness lie into activism

and ruin it all for yourself. And then you're like, wait, I was there because I felt like it and now I'm not even feeling any. So is it constantly staying in your body and trusting your limits and feelings that allows you to evolve with the seasons. Like gender. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It's being more, you know, mindful and grounded in your body and recognizing, learning to listen to dread. That's one thing that I often really strongly encourage people. Tell more. If you're dreading something, that is an important message. That means there is something not right about the situation, whether it's people that you always dread talking to because they're really emotionally invalidating to you. If it's that you crossed your own boundaries and said yes to an obligation and you really

don't have it in you to do it and you're dreading going to it, listen to dread. It's such an important emotion. There's nothing shameful in it. It's another extension of learning to recognize your own consent and your own values is being able to say, oh no, I can't do this. This is not right. And you're absolutely right. Any community activism, often people get really intense into policing who's doing the work, who's sacrificing enough, and it gets really toxic. It's just because of that cultural programming. It's everywhere. I think we have to constantly be on the lookout for more rules that we're holding ourselves to unfairly and just say, oh, actually, I don't believe in those rules. I don't need to

operate in that way. Devin, is fear of laziness, is it possible this is like a generational survival mechanism that has now become maladaptive? For example, the same part of you that's like, I have to keep producing or I'll die, which you got over, because it's not exactly true. But was it true for your great grandparents who had to dread going to the coal mine, but had to continue to override that so that they could survive and feed their families?

I think it was true on a micro level, yeah. I think if, I do ask myself, of course, because there was obviously a really strong labor movement among a lot of coal miners, but I wonder if there had been less indoctrination if people were more interconnected in ways that were just way more difficult back then because they didn't have the technology. If more people who were working in the coal mines had given in to dread and said, no, we're not doing this. We're not going to tear up the earth and ruin our bodies for the sake of producing this fuel, would things have been different. But yeah, they were just fighting to survive. And so they didn't have the luxury of thinking about

what moves me, what's important to me, what do I value? And that's why a lot of people in my family, they made moonshine. Some of them killed each other over bad moonshine deals. It was a whole sordid dramatic family story. These were really unhappy people. You know, my grandmother learned to drive at the age of eight, driving her parents home from the bar in the Appalachian mountains, you know, sitting on her dad's lap driving the car. Like, these were unhappy people.

And I think there has been a generational shift now where we have so much technology, we can communicate with each other. Technology makes a lot of work easier, yet somehow we're still expected to work longer and longer hours, even though the technology has freed up so much of our time in theory. And so I think we are reaching a point where that attitude towards work is so not adaptive. And when I talk to Zoomers, it definitely seems to me like it's changed. When I talk to Zoomers about laziness,

they'll go like, oh yeah, I'm lazy and I'm proud of it. And so that does suggest to me, there's a generational shift happening and a cultural shift happening where these things aren't seen as evil anymore. It's just seen as just a human quality and maybe something you can even be proud of. Busyness isn't a badge of honor anymore.

Yeah, and that's like so many parents, you know, we have three children and it's like, it's interesting how at times I can continue to believe in the productive mind trap. And so if I see my kids in any ways not producing or doing something in their life that's going to help them get into college, whatever it is, I have to like really try to deal with my own self. Like there's so many parents who just keep passing this on to our children. I mean, how many of our parents, my parents, like all these kids these

days, they don't know how to put in a day's work. And that's just like the fucking story we got to keep breaking free from. And it lives all inside of us, you know, because I'm literally just learning about this right the second that I'm like, I've been right for being lazy. This is great news. We were just talking about the generations back and like, was that a lived experience that was reality? If I want to keep these kids fed, if I want to keep a roof, like this is what I have to do even though the dread inside of me is real.

When I was reading your work, I felt so lucky to be able to be a recipient of it that could activate it in my life because I have a tremendous amount of privilege and a tremendous amount of agency in my life and enough money and all the things. Where do you see as like the point of access for this larger truth, because truth is truth all the way through. So for the person who is actually right now in this generation today, trying to survive, maybe they have three jobs, maybe they're a single mom. How do I operationalize this in my life? If that is my experience of the world like now?

It's a great question and it comes up in these conversations a lot that, oh, you know, setting limits, being gentle with your body, that's such a privilege, right? That's the way people talk about it, that you have to be really privileged, you have to be wealthy or white or have some kind of sway that allows you to set those boundaries. And that is true when we think about this stuff individualistically. And I think the answer for all of us has to be something more collective than that. So for example, we are in the middle of a really,

certainly for my lifetime, the biggest labor movement that I've ever seen. I came of age during the great recession when we were told you get a job, it's a horrible job, and you're lucky to have it. You just take all of the punches that you get at that job, because most people are unemployed. That is not the reality anymore. There are a lot of industries where they are really desperate for workers and there aren't enough workers to fill those slots, again, because of COVID. That means that the power differential has shifted, not on the

individual level, but in terms of a collective social movement. And so that's why we see such big union drives at places like Amazon and Starbucks and all of these other companies, and in healthcare. Because workers are being pushed past the brink of what their bodies can sustain. And they're coming together and they're saying, we're not going to do this anymore. And I think those of us who have saying, we're not gonna do this anymore. And I think those of us who have the luxury to kind of make those decisions in our own lives, we really have to stand with them

and do all we can to support that because that's the way that it's gonna change. It's a cultural change that needs to shift. It's an economic system change. We are running under an economic model that is not sustainable. And we can see that in what's happening to our planet and just the most basic math.

It just can't, we can't do this forever. But we all can decide whether we wanna keep reproducing the culture that we're in. This point about the collective, this perspective could be viewed in the micro as, oh, you're creating a life you enjoy. Good for you. Very like indulgent from a sense of like an individual.

But this truth about the laziness lie, it is compassion and dignity for yourself. And it is also compassion and dignity for everyone else. When we worry about our own laziness or when we believe and buy into the laziness lie, we're not just policing ourselves. It is also the policing that dictates who in our society does and does not have the right to support and compassion. So can you speak to that when we think about unhoused folks in our nation, addicts, neurodivergent people. What have we as a society decided the laziness lie means about all those people and what they get or don't get? Right.

So one reason that we're all so easy to exploit today is because we're afraid of being homeless. We're afraid of losing our jobs, losing our means of subsistence, our kids not having a future in that sense. There's this real threat that hangs over all of us. And so in some ways, unhoused people are almost used as a tool of indoctrination for all of the rest of us.

And so something that I talk about a lot in Laziness and one of the big inspirations for that book was a friend of mine who was homeless and her writing about her experiences. We need to flip that script on its head by really challenging the narrative that certainly many of us have drilled into our heads when we're kids that, oh, you shouldn't give people money on the street. They're just going to spend it on drugs. They should get a job. These awful myths that don't line up with the reality of what it's like, of how hard it is to just stay alive when you're unhoused. And so I really encourage people to give money to unhoused people when you see them, to talk

to them like a human being, ask them what they need, how they're doing, get to know the ones in your neighborhood. If there are faces that you continually see and have like a presence in your life, see them as your neighbors. That's more important than ever in a world where many cities are outlawing homelessness and arresting these people for having nowhere to go and giving them cash showing that you respect them to make their own choices about what they need right now to survive.

And as my friend Kim, who used to be homeless, has told me and taught me, sometimes if you're sleeping on a cold street and you have all these untended injuries, sometimes the smartest thing you can do is buy a handle of vodka so you can get to sleep. It's not pretty, but they know what they need best, and they know their circumstances best. And so when we give them that dignity back of making their own decisions, certainly we've all spent money in ways that weren't the most responsible and perfect, right? Why don't they also have the right to be human beings in that way? That's something that we can all fight for

in small decisions that we make every day. And then in terms of the policies that we push for too, making it a world where people who don't work, people who can't work are okay. And if we create that kind of world, that offloads a lot of the pressure on us as well, because then we'll know, all right, I'm gonna be cared for,

because I've cared for other people. I've participated in a society where we treat all lives as valuable. And that just snowballs in a really positive way where none of us have to be doing this backbreaking labor anymore and resenting other people who don't or can't do that labor,

because we're all actually cared for. And I really do believe a world like that is possible. I think humans have lived like that in the past and that we can get back to living that way. And that in itself challenges each person to decide what they actually believe about what makes a human being worthy. Because it's like, do you really believe? Have you bought into the idea that no, that person's only worthy if they're working or is that person worthy because they exist? That's what it comes down to. The dread thing just really got me because it is a testament to the power of indoctrination to think that your body could give you a gift like dread. No thank you, no yield, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, no yield, no thank you, no thank you, no to this.

But your culture, whether you were raised Catholic or in a pure technical America, or you know, by a football coach or whatever it is, you can turn that dread into a go sign. This is suffering. Suffering means I'm on to something. Suffering means the more dread I feel, the more I should do this thing. Being brave. Pain is weakness leaving your body. Yes, being brave is being afraid and doing it anyway. This feels so horrible that I must be onto something. Okay, it has been life changing, Devin,

for me in my recovery to learn, and I know this isn't always true, whatever, but pain means stop. What? Pain means go. Like, pain means stop felt like the most beautiful, tender gift that I could give myself. I still can't believe I'm allowed to live by it.

Do you have any other like tips like that? Like going back to the micro and not the macro, like dread being one. Are there others that might help these pod squatters who are just even considering this journey of not following the map that the culture is giving us, but trusting that there's some sort of compass inside of us that will lead us? Yeah. Another one that I really like to tell people is resentment.

When you resent someone else for what they're not doing, that means that you're doing too much. That's a really common one. You see it a lot in workplaces where two coworkers will get pitted against each other. That maybe you have one coworker who actually clocks out at the right time at the end of the day, they clock out at 5 p.m.,

they don't do any additional work beyond what they're getting paid to do. They're not making these sacrifices that you're making and you resent them. You think, I'm doing so much. I'm picking up all of this slack. No, your boss is offloading a bunch of work onto you that you're not getting paid for. So you might resent your coworker who has good boundaries. That actually means that you're being taken advantage of right now. You're doing too much. And so instead of trying to get that person punished or making their life hell or seeing them as your enemy, you can just look after yourself and take better care of

yourself, set boundaries for yourself as you deserve to do, and then you're not going to resent the people who do the same thing. I see a similar thing to that happening sometimes in families where sometimes you'll have a family member who's from an older generation, they didn't grow up learning about consent. They didn't know, you know, when they were a kid that they could say no to being hugged. They weren't afforded that. And so they might resent you for saying, oh, I'm not going to show up to Thanksgiving, or no, our kids don't hug. Like they might think, oh, what right do you have to have these boundaries? And that resentment just speaks to the fact

that they never had that right to their own boundaries. So it's not that you're doing anything wrong. It's that there's some part of them that hasn't been nourished. And all we can do in that case is try to support them and model for them what it looks like to actually take care of yourself. And I think that's often what we have to do for ourselves

when we feel resentful of someone else. That's why I climb in bed with you now when you're napping. I know you do. And I usually make it about 12 minutes, Devon, and then I'm like, okay, this has been great. You're working on it. I mean, look, and also I just think it's so important what you just said about the family dynamics.

That was just like a really healing thing for me. Because I do think that maybe my mom has had a bunch of resentment toward me my whole life. And it's probably not because I was gay, but probably more because I lived more free than she was ever able to. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. That's what it all is. Right. When people look down on you because you're enjoying your life, when you're eating what you want, when you're living what you want, it is how dare you? Because

I don't get access to that. Devin, when Glennon was talking about what your kind of strategies or touchstones are, it made me think of Heather Morgan's value-based integration. I was wondering because for so many people who listen to this, we've been kind of on this journey of overwork and trying to even access the point where it's like, I don't even know what I would enjoy. When you're saying create a life you enjoy, I'm so disassociated from enjoyment that I don't even have access to how I would begin to create a life that's like that. Can you take us through a little bit of that? And this is super interesting because

it was established for autistic folks to begin to unmask, right? To get over the masking and live more authentically. But I think it applies here as well. Absolutely, and I think unmasking, even though we talk about it in terms of disabled people hiding their disabilities, I think everybody has to work on unmasking. I think we're all forced to pretend to be someone who we aren't in a bunch of different ways.

So Heather Morgan is an autistic coach who developed this values-based integration process for autistic people who, you know, they've been pretending to be neurotypical for so long that they might not even know who they really are behind that mask. We've been talking a lot today about living in accordance with your values,

but I think for a lot of people, that's a tough question, because it's like, well, I don't even know what they are. I've just been trying to live and have people think I'm a good person all this time. Yeah, yes, yes. It's really, again, at that existential void. Like if I'm not defining myself by how I look to other people or what I'm doing, what am I? And so she really came up with this brilliant exercise and she does do trainings now for

therapists who want to take clients through it that really makes it more concrete. And she says, just think of five key moments in your life throughout all different ages, all different places in your life where you felt really alive, where you really felt like not self-conscious, not in your head, you were present. And when you think about those moments, those key memories, you think, oh, if all of life was like this, life would be amazing. So it can take some time to kind of sit and reflect on what those five moments might be. I really worked on it the whole time I was writing the book Unmasking Autism to figure out what mine were. And everybody's will be different. Some people it'll be things like, oh, my wedding day. And okay, why was that day

important? It was because I was around my family and I was just in connection with the person I was in love with. And it was a moment of celebration and everybody being together. Somebody else's key moment might be something like when they were just working on an artistic project that was really fulfilling to them. And they were just really in the zone painting that painting, making that music track, whatever. They can be beautiful moments in nature, any number of different things. We look at those memories and those moments and we ask ourselves just, what was special about that moment? What made it possible for me to be myself? And what does it reflect about what is important to me? And from that, you just want to draw out, okay, I value nature. I value creativity. I value connection. I value love. Whatever those things are for you. And then

you can really start thinking for yourself once you've articulated what those values are, what steps can I take now to create the conditions that I can have more of those moments? What does it mean to live more in accordance with those values? And I think it's just a really endlessly useful task for reconnecting. Heather Morgan says basically that the compass is inside of us. We can actually trust ourselves. When we're pretending to be someone we're not, it's because we don't trust ourselves. We're afraid of the person inside. But by looking back on those moments, we can realize, oh no, there's nothing to be afraid of here. Who I am is a wonderful thing and it's a guide towards the kind of life that I should be having.

Through all of it, like gender and the shame book, it's like what's underneath all of this and the neurodiversity. I feel like you're just walking around the world and you're just going, the emperor has no clothes. That emperor also has no clothes. Also that emperor. Naked emperor again. Why is everybody naked also has no clothes. Also that emperor. Naked emperor. Why is everybody naked?

All the emperors are naked. And it's like, beautiful. It's wonderful. And everybody's like, oh, that's why I didn't feel right. It's really good stuff, Devin. Really appreciate you. Thank you. Much of my life, I was like this very negative voice all the time,

you know, that people didn't want to hear. So it's always so strange now that like I can say, oh, this is a sham. And like people are ready for it. People are ready to be like, oh yeah, no, this is a sham. Yes, yes. So let's just end with dump truck. Can we just end with dump truck? Tell us why dump truck once and for all just like eviscerates the laziness lie.

Yeah. Yes. So for those who don't know, I talk in Laziness Does Not Exist about Dump Truck, who's my chinchilla. And he is a really great model for beating the laziness lie for me because he's never been productive a day in his life. He's never done something that was a productive service to anyone. In fact, he's very destructive.

He's torn up floorboards. He's wrecked a lot of things. He's chewed up a lot of things during moments when I wasn't looking. He's not a productive force. He's not a value generating force. But I would never judge his life on those terms, right? Every single day when I turn around

and I see him eating his hay, I think, oh my God, it's so beautiful. He's eating. Him just being alive is like this most exquisitely beautiful, pure thing in the world. Yeah. You know, when he's sleeping, I'm in love with him when he's sleeping. Like when he's just sitting there staring into space, it's the most beautiful, weird little thing in the goddamn world. What is he thinking about? I don't know. Yeah. And I think animals can do that for us.

Animals can really remind us that we can just be alive and that's beautiful. Like if him eating is the most beautiful thing I've seen in the world, like maybe there are people that feel that way about me just existing. And maybe I can feel that way about other people. Like we're just human animals and that's enough.

Devin, you're proposing a different God here. That's what you're doing. You're proposing a different God and that is big stuff. Look out for those helicopters, Devon. Thank you. Thank you, Devon, for your work. We adore you. Thank you for having me. This was really lovely. All right, pod squad. Go forth and be lazy. You're going to need all three of those books, y'all. See you next time. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you'd be willing

to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey,

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and the show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Alison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz. I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle. And I continue to believe That I'm the one for me And because I'm mine, I walk the line We're adventurers and heartbreaks on map A final destination we lack We stopped asking directions To places they've never been, and to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home And through the joy and pain that our lives bring We can do a hard thing I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start I'm not the problem, sometimes things fall hard

And I continue to believe the best people are free and it took some time but I'm finally fine cause we're adventurers and heart breaks on that our final destination we lack we've stopped asking directions To places they've never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home and through the joy and pain that our lives bring, we can do our thing. We're adventurers and heartbreaks on map We might get lost but we're okay that we've stopped asking directions To places they've never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home

And through the joy and pain We can do hard things. Yeah, we can do hard things. Yeah, we can do the hard thing