Hope is the dream of a waking man. —Aristotle

HOPE can be defined as the desire for something combined with an anticipation of it happening. In short, hope is the anticipation of something desired.

To hope for something is to desire that thing, and to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the probability of it happening, though less than one, is greater than nought. If the probability of it happening is one or very close to one, it is not a hope but an expectation; if it is nought it is a fantasy; and if it is very close to nought it is a wish. The borderline between a hope and a wish is moot, and more a question of emphasis than anything else.

In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates says that the statesman Pericles gave his sons excellent instruction in everything that could be learnt from teachers, but when it came to virtue he simply left them to ‘wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord’. This usage of ‘hope’ suggests that hoped for things are partly or even largely outside our personal control.

Even though hope involves an estimation of probabilities, this rational, calculative aspect is often imprecise—indeed, it is often unconscious. When we hope, we do not know what the odds, or at least our odds, might be, but still, choose to ‘hope against hope’. This combination of ignorance and defiance, this ‘hoping against hope’, is integral to hope.

One opposite of hope is fear, which is the desire for something not to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening. Inherent in every hope is a fear, and in every fear a hope. Other opposites of hope are hopelessness and despair, which is an agitated form of hopelessness.

With any hope, the desire can be more or less strong, and, independently, so can the anticipation. For example, it is possible to desire something very strongly, and yet believe that it is very unlikely to happen. In general, something that is strongly desired seems more likely to happen; conversely, something that is very likely to happen, by virtue of being attainable, seems more desirable. In other words, desire is somewhat correlated with anticipation. These same patterns and principes also apply to fear.

It can be instructive to compare hope with optimism and faith. Optimism is a general attitude of hopefulness that everything will turn out for the better or best. In contrast, hope is more particular and more specific (even a pessimist can be hopeful), and also less passive, more engaged, and more vested. To hope for something is to make a claim about something’s significance to us, and so to make a claim about ourselves.

The 13th century philosopher and theologian St Thomas Aquinas said that faith has to do with things that are not seen, while hope has to do with things that are not at hand. If hope is more active than optimism, faith is more active still. Faith is deeply committed.

Hope features prominently in myth and religion. In Aesop’s fables, hope is symbolized by the swallow, which is among the first birds to appear at the end of winter. The famous moral, ‘One swallow does not make a summer’ belongs to the fable of the Spendthrift and the Swallow (or the Young Man and the Swallow).

A young man, a great spendthrift, had run through all his patrimony and had but one good cloak left. One day he happened to see a swallow, which had appeared before its season, skimming along a pool and twittering gaily. He supposed that summer had come, and went and sold his cloak. Not many days later, winter set in again with renewed frost and cold. When he found the unfortunate swallow lifeless on the ground, he said, “Unhappy bird! what have you done? By thus appearing before the springtime you have not only killed yourself, but you have wrought my destruction also.”

In Greek myth, Prometheus stole the secret of fire and offered it to mankind. To punish mankind, Zeus ordered Hephaestus to mold the first woman, a ‘beautiful evil’, out of earth and water, and ordered each of the gods to endow her with a ‘seductive gift’. He then gave this woman, called Pandora (‘All-gifted’), a jar of evils, and sent her to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus. Pandora had been warned not to open the jar under any circumstance, but her natural curiosity got the better of her and she lifted the lid, disseminating every evil over the earth and, in so doing, bringing man’s golden age to its close. Pandora hastened to replace the lid, but all the contents of the jar had escaped—all, that is, except for Hope, which lay all by herself at the bottom of the jar.

Aside from the blatant misogyny, the myth of Pandora is difficult to interpret. Does it imply that hope is preserved for men, making their torments more bearable? Or, to the contrary, that hope is denied them, making their lives even more miserable? A third possibility is that hope was simply another evil in the jar, either a mechanism for tormenting men anew or the kind of false hope that is empty and corrupting. All of these interpretations are in the nature of hope, and so perhaps the ambiguity is deliberate.

In Christianity, hope is one of the three theological virtues alongside faith and charity (love)—‘theological’ because it arises from the grace of God, and because it has God for its object. Christian hope is not to be understood as the mere probabilistic anticipation of something desired, but as a ‘confident expectation’, a trust in God and His gifts that frees the believer from hesitation, fear, greed, and anything else that might keep him from charity, which, according to 1 Corinthians 13:13, is the greatest of the three theological virtues. ‘But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.’

Thus, Christian hope is more akin to faith than to hope, it is faith in the future tense. Like prayer, it is an expression of the subject’s limitations, and of his connection with and dependence on something other and greater than himself. Hope is attractive because it is an act of piety, an act of humility.

The inscription on top of the gate to hell which features in Dante’s Inferno suggests that Christian hell amounts to hopelessness, that is, the severance of the bond between man and the divine.

Through me you enter the city of woe, through me you go to everlasting pain, through me you go among the lost people. Justice moved my exalted Creator: by the Holiest Power was I made, and Supreme Wisdom and Primal Love. Nothing before I was made was made but things eternal, and I too am eternal. Abandon all hope, Ye Who Enter Here!

Back upstairs in the land of the living, there is a saying that, ‘there is no life without hope’. Hope is an expression of confidence in life, and the basis for more practical virtues such as patience, determination, and courage. It provides us not only with goals, but also with the motivation to achieve or attain those goals. As Martin Luther says in Tabletalks, ‘Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.’

Hope also makes present hardship less difficult to bear, whether this be loneliness, poverty, sickness, or just the trafficky daily commute. Even in a theoretical absence of hardship, still hope is needed, for man in general is not content to be content, but yearns for enterprise and change.

At a deeper level, hope links our present to our past and future, providing us with a metanarrative or overarching story that lends our life shape and meaning. Our hopes are the strands that run through our life, defining our struggles, our successes and setbacks, our strengths and shortcomings, and in some sense ennobling them.

Running with this idea, our hopes, though profoundly human—because only humans can project themselves into the distant future—also connect us with something much greater than ourselves, a cosmic life force that moves in us as it does in all of mankind and all of nature.

Conversely, hopelessness is both a cause and a symptom of depression, and, within depression, is a strong predictor of suicide. “What do you hope for out of life?” is one of my stock questions as a psychiatrist, and if my patient replies “nothing” I have to take that very seriously.

Hope is pleasurable, because the anticipation of a desire is pleasurable. But hope is also painful, because the desired thing is not yet at hand, and, moreover, might never be at hand. The pain of harbouring hopes, and the even greater pain of having them dashed, explains why people tend to parsimony with their hopes.

At the same time, the sheer desire for something to happen can lead us to overestimate the probability of it happening, and, in particular, the probability of it happening to us. Many if not most hopes are to some extent false, but some, such as the hope of winning the lottery, are beyond the pail.

Whereas realistic or reasonable hopes may lift us up and move us forward, false hopes prolong our torment, leading to inevitable frustration, disappointment, and resentment. By preventing engagement with reality, false hopes entrench an attitude of passivity and servility.

Letting go of false hopes can set us free, but, unfortunately, freedom is not for everyone. Although akin to the grandiose delusions seen in mania, false hopes may be all that a person has to keep going, to prevent the ego from disintegrating, and, in short, to keep sane. Such a person simply cannot afford to be free.

Hope generally gets a bad press from philosophers because it is largely irrational and so inimical to the values and self-construct of the philosopher, who yet would not philosophize without the hope that philosophizing might do something for him. For many philosophers, hope is a sign of helplessness, a regression from reality into fantasy, good for children and Pandora, perhaps, but certainly not for grown-up men.

Existentialists philosophers share their brethren’s disdain for hope, arguing that, by hiding the hard truths of the human condition, hope can lead us into a life that is disengaged and inauthentic.

Yet, the existentialists also have something very interesting to say about hope.

In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, a mythological king of Ephyra who was punished for his chronic deceitfulness by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again.

Camus concludes, ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ [La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut s’imaginer Sisyphe heureux.]

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognizing and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

Conclusion

We can have hopes, indeed, we have to have hopes; but we also have to have insight into our hopes, and into the process and nature of hoping.

Otherwise, we will take ourselves too seriously and suffer for it.

Desire derives from the Latin desiderare, ‘to long or wish for’, which itself derives from de sidere, ‘from the stars’, suggesting that the original sense of the Latin is ‘to await what the stars will bring’.

According to the Hindu Rig Veda (second millennium BC), the universe began, not with light, but with desire, ‘the primal seed and germ of Spirit’.

Desires constantly arise in us, only to be replaced by other desires. Without this continuous stream of desires, there would no longer be any reason to do anything: life would grind to a halt, as it does for people who lose the ability to desire. An acute crisis of desire corresponds to boredom, and a chronic crisis to depression.

It is desire that moves us, and, in moving us, gives our life direction and meaning—perhaps not meaning in a cosmic sense, but meaning in the more restricted narrative sense. If you are at all reading this article, that is because, for whatever reason or reasons, you have formed a desire to read the article, and this desire motivates you to read it. ‘Motivation’, like ’emotion’, derives from the Latin movere, ‘to move’.

Brain injured people who lack emotions find it difficult to make decisions because they lack a basis for choosing between competing choices. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), the philosopher David Hume famously argued that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, that is, that one cannot deduce or derive moral conclusions from mere facts, and, by extension, that all moral conclusions are grounded in nothing but emotion.

The paradox of desire

We were born from desire, and cannot remember a time when we were without it. So habituated are we to desiring that we are not conscious of our desires, which only register if they are very intense or if they come into conflict with other desires. Meditation may not in itself prevent us from desiring, but it might give us a better insight into the nature of desire, which, in turn, can help us to disengage from unhelpful desires. ‘Freedom’, said the 20th century mystic and philosopher Krishnamurti, ‘is not the act of decision but the act of perception.’

Try for just a moment to stem your stream of desires. This is the paradox of desire: that even the desire to stop desiring is in itself a desire. To get round this paradox, many eastern spiritual masters speak of the cessation of desire, or ‘enlightenment’, not as the culmination of an intentional process, but as a mere accident. Spiritual practice, they maintain, does not invariably or inevitably lead to the cessation of desire, but merely makes us more ‘accident-prone’.

The problem of desire

If desire is life, why should we desire to control desire? —For the simple reason that we desire to control life, or, at least, our life.

Hinduism may name desire as a life force, but it also calls it the ‘great symbol of sin’ and ‘destroyer of knowledge and self-realization’. Similarly, the second of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism states that the cause of all suffering is ‘lust’ in the broad sense of ‘coveting’ or ‘craving’. The Old Testament opens with the cautionary tale of Adam and Eve: had these earliest of our ancestors not desired to eat from the forbidden tree, they would not have been banished from the Garden of Eden into our world of woe. In Christianity, four of the seven deadly sins (envy, gluttony, greed, and lust) directly involve desire, and the remaining three (pride, sloth, and wrath) involve it indirectly. Christian rituals such as prayer, fasting, and confession all aim, at least in part, at curbing desire, as does humility and self-abasement, conformity, communal living, and the promise of life-after-death.

All suffering can be framed in terms of desire. Unmet desire is in itself painful, but so is fear and anxiety, which can be understood in terms of desires about the future, and anger and sadness, which can be understood in terms of desires about the past. The mid-life crisis is nothing if not a crisis of desire, when a middle-aged person comes to the realization that his reality does not live up to his youthful, some might say immature, desires.

If desire is hurtful, so are its products. For instance, the accumulation of houses, cars, and other riches robs us our time and tranquility, both in their acquiring and in their keeping—not to speak of their losing. Fame is at least as compromising and inconvenient as it is pleasurable, and can quickly turn into infamy. This need not mean that we should shun fame or riches, merely that we should not set out for them or invest ourselves in them.

An excess of desire is, of course, called greed. Because greed is insatiable, it prevents us from enjoying all that we already have, which, though it may seem like little, is far more than our forebears could ever have dreamt of. Another problem of greed is that it is all-consuming, reducing life in all its richness and complexity to nothing but an endless quest for more.

The origins of desire

Desire is intimately connected to pleasure and pain. Human beings feel pleasure at the things that, in the course of their evolution, have tended to promote their survival and reproduction; they feel pain at the things that have tended to compromise their genes. The pleasurable things, such as sugar, sex, and social status, are wired to be desirable, whereas the painful things are wired to be undesirable.

Moreover, as soon as a desire is fulfilled, people stop taking pleasure in its fulfillment and instead formulate new desires, because, in the course of evolution, contentedness and complacency did not tend to promote survival and reproduction.

The problem is just that: our desires evolved ‘merely’ to promote our survival and reproduction. They did not evolve to make us happy or satisfied, to ennoble us, or to give our life any meaning beyond them. Neither are they adapted to modern circumstances. Today, survival is no longer the most pressing issue, and, with more than seven billion people thronging our polluted planet, reproduction can seem almost irresponsible. Yet here we still are, chained to our desires like a slave to his master.

Our intellect, in which we place so much faith, evolved to assist us in our pursuit of the desirable and avoidance of the undesirable. It did not evolve to enable us to resist our desires, still less to transcend them. Although out intellect is subservient to our desires, it is good at fooling us that it is in control.

The world as will

One of the most inspired theories of desire is that of the 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer argues that beneath the world of appearances lies the world of will, a fundamentally blind process of striving for survival and reproduction.

For Schopenhauer, the whole world is a manifestation of will, including the human body: the genitals are objectified sexual impulse, the mouth and digestive tract are objectified hunger, and so on. Everything about us, including even our cognitive faculties evolved for no other purpose than to help us meet the exigencies of will. Although able to perceive, judge, and reason, our intellect is not designed or equipped to pierce through the veil of mâyâ (illusion) and apprehend the true nature of reality. There is nothing in us that can oppose the demands and dictates of will, which drive us unwittingly into a life of inevitable frustration, strife, and pain.

Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself an individual, in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, erring; and as if through a troubled dream it hurries back to its old unconsciousness. Yet till then its desires are limitless, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of its heart. Then let one consider what as a rule are the satisfactions of any kind that a man obtains. For the most part nothing more than the bare maintenance of this existence itself, extorted day by day with unceasing trouble and constant care in the conflict with want, and with death in prospect…

The genesis of desire

It is not so much that we form desires, but that desires form in us. Our desires are hardly ‘ours’. We merely work them out, if at all, once they are already fully formed. To work out my friend’s desires, I observe my friend and infer her desires from her behaviour. And so it is also with myself: I infer my desires from my behaviour. If I am an interested party or a shrewd observer, I might well know more about my friend’s desires than she does herself.

Another reason I might know more about my friend’s desires than she does herself is that people tend to defend against their more unacceptable desires by repressing or denying them. If an unacceptable desire nonetheless succeeds in surfacing into their conscious, still they may modify or disguise it, for example, by elaborating an entire system of false beliefs to reinvent lust as love.

Advertisers exploit this process of desire formation by sowing the seeds of desire into our unconscious, and then supplying some flimsy reasons with which our conscious can justify or rationalize the desire.

Schopenhauer compares our conscious or intellect to a lame man who can see, riding on the shoulders of a blind giant. He anticipates Freud by equating the blind giant of will to our unconscious drives and fears, of which our conscious intellect is barely cognizant.

For Schopenhauer, the most powerful manifestation of will is the impulse for sex. It is, he says, the will-to-life of the yet unconceived offspring that draws man and woman together in a delusion of lust and love. But with the task accomplished, their shared delusion fades away and they return to their ‘original narrowness and neediness’.

Few of our desires surface into our conscious, and those that do, we adopt as our own. But before a desire surfaces into our conscious, it competes with a number of conflicting desires which are all also in some sense ‘ours’. The desire that eventually prevails is often the one that is at the limit of our understanding. This competitive process of desire formation is most evident in psychotic people who hear one or several voices that speak from a point of view that seems alien to them, but that is, of course, their own. To quote once again from Schopenhauer,

We often don’t know what we desire or fear. For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired.

Desires in practice

That our desires are not truly ours is easy to demonstrate. When we make a New Year’s resolution, we declare to ourselves and to others that, in some small measure, we are going to take control of our desires, implying that our desires are not normally under our control. The same goes for vows and promises. But even with the most solemn and public of marriage vows, we often fail to prevail.

Moreover, it is often over the least consequential desires, such as what to wear or what music to listen to, that we seem to exercise the most control, while whom we lust for/fall in love with seems mostly if not completely out of our control. Yet, a single rogue desire can lay waste to the best intelligence of half a lifetime.

In many cases, we simply don’t know what we desire. But even when we do know what we want, we cannot know for sure that it will be good for us. A young man may dream of studying medicine at Oxford, but realizing his dream could mean that he is run-over by a bus three years hence, or that he never realizes his far greater potential as a novelist. Whenever our desires are frustrated, we ourselves should not feel frustrated, because we cannot be sure that what we wanted would truly have been good for us.

Types of desire

Most of our desires are simply a means to satisfying another, more important, desire. For instance, if I feel thirsty and desire a drink in the middle of the night, I also desire to turn the light on, to get out of bed, to find my slippers, and so on. My desire for a drink is a terminal desire, because it relieves me of the pain of thirst, whereas all the other desires in the chain are instrumental desires because they are instrumental to fulfilling my terminal desire.

In general, terminal desires are generated by our emotions, whereas instrumental desires are generated by our intellect. Because terminal desires are generated by our emotions, they are highly motivated, while instrumental desires are merely motivated through the terminal desires that they aim at. In some cases, a desire can be both terminal and instrumental, as when we work for a living, and also enjoy the work that we do.

My desire for a drink is also a so-called hedonic desire, in that it leads to pleasure or the avoidance of pain. Most terminal desires are hedonic, but some might be motivated by sheer will power, as, for example, when I decide to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing.

Of course, it can be argued that there can be no such thing as a non-hedonic terminal desire, since, even when we do the right thing ‘for the sake of doing the right thing’, we experience pleasure in doing so (or avoid pain, for example, the pain of guilt), and so our desire is merely a hedonic desire in disguise.

Nonetheless, some terminal desires, such as hunger and thirst, are evidently more biological than others, and these tend to be highly motivated. On the other hand, more abstract terminal desires may be less motivated because our emotions fail to back them, or back them but only feebly. Unfortunately, the extent to which a non-biological terminal desire is supported by the emotions seems to be completely out of our control. In the words of Schopenhauer, ‘Man can do what he wants but he cannot want what he wants.’

Conversely, it is possible for the intellect to rebel against the emotions and reject a highly motivated terminal desire, but the slave is not as strong as the master and risks being whipped back into his den. Instead of confronting his master head-on, the intellect stands a better chance of prevailing if he replaces his master’s desire with another, or reframes the master’s desire in the master’s own terms—typically by arguing that resisting the desire will lead to more pleasure in the longer term. The intellect can also try to trick the emotions, for example, with a ‘cemetery meditation’ against lust, which involves imagining the dead body of the lusted-after person in various stages of decomposition.

The intellect can fully grasp some truth, but unless the emotions share in that truth, the person cannot find the power to act upon it. This is why good teaching is not just about knowledge, but also, and even mostly, about inspiration.

Finally, desires can also be divided into natural and unnatural desires. Natural desires such as those for food and shelter are naturally limited. In contrast, unnatural or vain desires such as those for fame, power, or wealth are potentially unlimited.

The Ancient philosopher Epicurus teaches that natural desires, though difficult to eliminate, are both easy and highly pleasurable to satisfy, and should be satisfied. In contrast, unnatural diseases are neither easy nor highly pleasurable to satisfy, and should be eliminated.

By following this prescription for the selective elimination of desires, a person can minimize the pain and anxiety of harbouring unfulfilled desires, and thereby bring himself as close as possible to ataraxia (perfect mental tranquility). ‘If thou wilt make a man happy,’ says Epicurus, ‘add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’

Desires and society

Unnatural desires, which are unlimited, have their roots not in nature but in society. Fame, power, and wealth can all be understood in terms of the desire for social status. Indeed, were we to be the last person on earth, being famous, powerful, or wealthy would not only be of no use but would be meaningless. Our desires would be radically different than they are now, and, leaving aside our loneliness, we would stand a much better chance of satisfaction.

Society also gives rise to destructive desires such as the desire to make others envy us, or the desire to see others fail, or, at least, not succeed as much as us. We suffer not only from our own destructive desires but also from the destructive desires of others, turning into the target and victim of their insecurities. As Schopenhauer says, ‘What every one most aims at in ordinary contact with his fellows is to prove them inferior to himself.’

By overcoming the desire to satisfy, please, impress, or better others, we can start living for ourselves, free from unnatural and destructive desires.

Diogenes the Cynic, who was a contemporary of Plato in Ancient Athens, taught by living example that wisdom and happiness belong to the person who is independent of society.

After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention, which, he maintained, was the false coin of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’ and elected to live in a tub and survive on a diet of onions.

Diogenes was not impressed with his fellow men, not even with Alexander the Great, who, it is said, came to meet him one morning while he was lying in the sunlight. When Alexander asked him whether there was any favour he might do for him, he replied, “Yes, stand out of my sunlight.” To his credit, Alexander still declared, “If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.”

Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes replied parrhesia, which means free speech or full expression. He used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped and asked what he was doing, he would reply, “I am just looking for a human being.”

Conclusion

Luckily, there is no need to imitate Diogenes, and still less to banish desire. Instead, we need to master desire, because, paradoxically, it is only by mastering our desires that we can live life to its fullest. And it is only by mastering our desires that we might at last find some measure of peace.

Further Reading

On Desire, William Irvine

A person is being lazy if she is able to carry out some activity that she ought to carry out, but is disinclined to do so because of the effort involved. Instead, she carries out the activity perfunctorily; or engages in some other, less strenuous or less boring activity; or remains idle. In short, she is being lazy if her motivation to spare herself effort trumps her motivation to do the right or expected thing.

Synonyms for laziness are indolence and sloth. Indolence derives from the Latin indolentia, ‘without pain’ or ‘without taking trouble’. Sloth has more moral and spiritual overtones than laziness or indolence. In the Christian tradition, sloth is one of the seven deadly sins because it undermines society and God’s plan, and because it invites sin. The Bible inveighs against slothfulness, for example, in the Book of Ecclesiastes: ‘By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through. A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.’

Procrastination

Laziness should not be confounded with procrastination or idleness.

To procrastinate is to postpone a task in favour of other tasks, which, though perceived as easier or more pleasurable, are typically less important or urgent.

To postpone a task for constructive or strategic purposes does not amount to procrastination. For it to amount to procrastination, the postponement has to represent poor and ineffective planning, and result in a higher overall cost to the procrastinator, for example, in the form of stress, guilt, or loss of productivity. It is one thing to delay a tax return until all the figures are in, but quite another to delay it so that it upsets plans and people and triggers a fine.

Laziness and procrastination are similar in that they both involve a lack of motivation. But, unlike a lazy person, a procrastinator aspires and intends to complete the task and, moreover, does eventually complete it, albeit at a higher cost to himself.

Idleness

To be idle is: not to be doing anything. This could be because you are lazy, but it could also be because you do not have anything to do or are temporarily unable to do it. Or perhaps you have already done it and are resting or recuperating.

Idleness is often romanticized, as epitomized by the Italian expression dolce far niente (‘it is sweet to do nothing’). Many people tell themselves that they work hard from a desire to be idle, rather than because they value their work or its product. Although our natural instinct is for idleness, most people find prolonged idleness difficult to tolerate. Queuing for half an hour in a traffic jam can leave us feeling restless and irritable, and many drivers prefer to take an alternative route even if it is likely to take them longer than sitting through the traffic.

Recent research suggests that, though our instinct is for idleness, people will pick upon the flimsiest excuse to keep busy. Moreover, people feel happier for being busy, even if their busyness is imposed upon them. In their paper, Idleness aversion and the need for justifiable busyness (2010), Hsee and colleagues surmise that many purported goals that people pursue may be little more than justifications for keeping busy.

This, I believe, is a manifestation of the manic defence: the tendency, when presented with uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, to distract the conscious mind either with a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts or feelings. ‘To do nothing at all,’ said Oscar Wilde, ‘is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.’ I discuss the manic defence at some length in my book Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

Albert Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd in his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus. In the final chapter, he compares the absurdity of man’s life with the plight of Sisyphus, a mythological king of Ephyra who was punished for his chronic deceitfulness by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. Camus optimistically concludes, ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ [‘La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut s’imaginer Sisyphe heureux.’]

It should be noted that many people who can seem bone idle are, in fact, nothing of the sort. Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, extolled the virtues of ‘masterful inactivity’. As chairman and CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch spent an hour a day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time’. Adepts of strategic idleness use their ‘idle’ moments, among others, to observe and enjoy life, find inspiration, maintain perspective, circumvent pettiness, reduce inefficiency and half-living, and conserve their health and energies for truly important tasks and problems.

Evolutionary theories of laziness

Our nomadic ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources and to fight or flee enemies and predators. Expending effort on anything other than short-term advantage could jeopardize their very survival. In any case, in the absence of conveniences such as antibiotics, banks, roads, or refrigeration, it made little sense to think long term. Desire led to action, and action led to immediate gratification, without much need for proposing, planning, preparing, and so forth.

Today, mere survival has fallen off the agenda, and it is long-term strategic activity that leads to the best outcomes. Yet, our instinct is still to conserve energy, making us reluctant to expend effort on abstract projects with delayed and uncertain payoffs.

Intelligence and perspective can override instinct, and some people are more future-oriented than others, whom, from the heights of their success, they deride as ‘lazy’. Indeed, laziness has become so closely connected with poverty and failure that a poor person is often presumed lazy, no matter how hard he might actually work.

Psychological theories of laziness

In most cases, it is deemed painful to expend effort on long-term goals that do not provide immediate gratification. For a person to embark on a project, he has to value the return on his labour more than his loss of comfort. The problem is that he is disinclined to trust in a return that is both distant and uncertain. Because self-confident people are more apt to trust in the success and pay-off of their undertakings (and may even overestimate their likely returns), they are much more likely to overcome their natural laziness.

People are also poor calculators. Tonight they may eat and drink indiscriminately, without factoring in the longer-term consequences for their health and appearance, or even tomorrow morning’s hangover. The ancient philosopher Epicurus famously argued that pleasure is the highest good. But he cautioned that not everything that is pleasurable should be pursued, and not everything that is painful should be avoided. Instead, a kind of hedonistic calculus should be applied to determine which things are most likely to result in the greatest pleasure over time, and it is above all this hedonistic calculus that people are unable to handle.

Many lazy people are not intrinsically lazy, but are lazy because they have not found what they want to do, or because, for one reason or another, they are not doing it. To make matters worse, the job that pays their bills may have become so abstract and specialized that they can no longer fully grasp its purpose or product, and, by extension, their part in bettering other peoples’ lives. A builder can look upon the houses that he has built, and a doctor can take pride and satisfaction in the restored health and gratitude of his patients, but an assistant deputy financial controller in a large corporation cannot be at all certain of the effect of his labour—and so why bother?

Other factors that can lead to laziness are fear and hopelessness. Some people fear success, or do not have sufficient self-esteem to feel comfortable with success, and laziness is one way in which they can sabotage themself. Shakespeare conveys this idea much more eloquently and succinctly in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows.’ Conversely, some people fear failure, and laziness is preferable to failure because it is at one remove. “It’s not that I failed,” they tell themselves, “it’s that I never tried.”

Other people are lazy because they see their situation as being so hopeless that they cannot even begin to think through it, let alone address it. Because these people do not have the ability to think through and address their situation, it could be argued that they are not truly lazy, and, to some extent, the same could be said of all lazy people. In other words, the very concept of laziness presupposes the ability to choose not to be lazy, that is, presupposes the existence of free will.

The solution

I could have ended this article with a self-help pep talk or the top-10 tips to overcome laziness, but, in the longer term, the only way to overcome laziness is to profoundly understand its nature and particular causes: to think, think, and think, and, over the years, slowly find a better way of living.