What Looks Like Laziness Is Often Something Else

You think you have gotten lazy. The dishes, the email, the call you keep meaning to make. You catch yourself avoiding things you used to do without resistance and the inner voice arrives on time. Lazy. Disorganized. Slipping.

What you might be doing is something else.

A new book by journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace, drawing on a wide body of research, names a quieter thing running underneath the modern day. Most of us have a basic need to feel that we matter. To be valued for who we are. To know our actions land somewhere. When that need stops being met, a person tends to pull back. Wallace points to a statistic that is hard to set down. About seventy percent of employees report being disengaged at work.

She does not call this laziness. She calls it a protective coping strategy. The nervous system steps away from places that no longer reflect us back. It looks like apathy on the outside. On the inside it can feel like very little at all, which is its own kind of pain.

You can see the misreading in your own head. The shower feels harder. The friend group feels distant. The work feels like motion without meaning. I should try harder. I should care more. But the body is not lazy. The body is doing what bodies do when they keep showing up somewhere and keep not being met. It conserves.

What this means for you

The way back in is smaller than you think. Wallace points to two moves and they are both quiet.

First, mattering to yourself. One small thing you take care of in the morning, before the list begins, that is for you. Coffee in silence. A walk before the calls. The kind of care that has no audience. This is the practice of remembering you count to you.

Second, the part that turns the whole thing. The fastest way to feel you matter again is often to remind someone else that they do. A note. A real question. The name of the barista. The sympathy card someone in your life might not be expecting. Mattering moves both directions, and the giving direction is the one most of us forget is open to us.

You are not lazy. You are tired in a specific way. The tiredness has a shape. The shape can be turned.

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What prompted this: The Hidden Power of Mattering to Others and to Yourself, Greater Good Magazine (UC Berkeley)