The Psychology and Philosophy of Laziness
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 30 August 2026.
We are being lazy if we can do something that we ought to do but are reluctant to do it because of the effort involved. We do it badly, or do something else that is less strenuous or onerous, or simply remain idle. In other words, we are being lazy if our motivation to spare ourself effort trumps our motivation to do the right or best or expected thing—assuming, of course, we, someone else, or society have worked out what that is.
The word ‘laziness’ arose in the sixteenth century. Older terms for germane notions are indolence and sloth. Indolence derives from the Latin indolentia, ‘without pain’. Sloth has more moral and spiritual connotations. In the Christian tradition, sloth is one of the seven deadly sins because it invites evil-doing and undermines God’s plan for mankind. The six other deadly sins are lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, envy, and pride, and I’m proud to say that my writings cover them all.
The Bible inveighs against slothfulness in several places, including in Matthew (the Parable of the Talents), Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. Here’s a snippet from Ecclesiastes, in its inimitable style:
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.
Today, laziness is so closely connected to poverty and failure that a poor person is often presumed to be lazy, no matter how hard he or she actually works. But it could be that laziness is written into our genes. Our nomadic forebears had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources, flee predators, and fight enemies. Expending effort on anything other than short-term advantage could jeopardise their very survival. In any case, in the absence of conveniences such as banks, insurance, roads, refrigeration, and antibiotics, it made much less sense to plan for the future. Today, mere survival has fallen off the agenda, and it is long-term vision and commitment that lead to the greatest rewards. Yet our instinct remains to conserve energy, making us averse to abstract undertakings with distant and uncertain payoffs.
Why Are People Lazy?
Even so, few people would choose all the time to be lazy.
Many so-called ‘lazy’ people haven’t yet found what they want to do, or, for some reason, are unable to do it. To make matters worse, the job that pays their bills and fills their best hours might have become so abstract and specialised that they can no longer grasp its purpose or product, and, by extension, their part in improving other people’s lives. Unlike a doctor, farmer, or builder, an assistant deputy financial controller in a large multinational corporation cannot be at all certain of the effect or end-product of his or her labour—so why bother? If a child is denied their passion, they may become ‘lazy’. Conversely, what a supposedly lazy child will work at without prompting—whether we approve of it or not—may tell us something important about where their passion lies.
Other psychological factors that can lead to ‘laziness’ are fear and hopelessness. Some people fear success, or don’t have the self-esteem to feel comfortable with success, and laziness is their way of sabotaging themself. Shakespeare conveyed this idea much more eloquently and succinctly in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows.’ When Destiny knocks at the door, as it does in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, many people run upstairs to hide—thinking, instead, to take their second chance. Destiny, however, only knocks once, and early.
Other people fear, not success, but failure, and laziness is preferable to failure because at one remove. ‘It’s not that I failed,’ they can tell themselves, ‘but that I never tried.’
Yet other people are ‘lazy’ because their situation is so hopeless that they cannot even begin to think it through, let alone do something about it. As these people are unable to address their circumstances, it could be argued that they are not truly lazy—which could be said, more or less, of all ‘lazy’ people. The very concept of laziness presupposes the ability to choose not to be lazy, that is, presupposes the existence of free will.
Laziness may be a problem for the lazy person, but it only becomes a matter for concern when it becomes parasitic—when the lazy person, despite being able to contribute, lives off the efforts of others, or takes from the world more than they give back. This is when people start getting upset.
Laziness, Procrastination, and Idleness
Laziness is often confused with procrastination and especially with idleness. To procrastinate (Latin, literally, ‘to forward to tomorrow’) is to postpone a task in favour of other tasks that are less taxing but also less important or urgent. To postpone a task for strategic purposes does not amount to procrastination; for a postponement to amount to procrastination, it has to represent poor and ineffective planning, and result in a higher overall cost to the procrastinator. It’s one thing to delay a tax return until all the numbers are in, but quite another to delay it so that it ruins our holiday or lands us with a fine or tax inspection. Unlike the lazy person, the procrastinator intends to complete the task, and, moreover, eventually does, albeit at a higher overall cost to themself. Notice, it is not effort per se that the procrastinator is avoiding, but the uncomfortable feelings associated with the task (like boredom or resentment at filing their taxes).
To be idle is to be doing nothing. We could be idle because we have nothing to do, or, more exactly, because we can’t think of anything to do. If we clearly do have something to do, we could be idle because we are lazy, but also because we are unable to do that thing, or because we have already done it and are resting and recuperating. The Church grants a day of rest every Sunday, and a convincing argument could be mounted that rest and recuperation do not amount to idleness. Or I’d be idle every evening. To be properly idle, you need to be fully alert.
More radically, we might choose to remain idle because we value idleness and its products above whatever else we might be doing—which, again, is not the same as being lazy. Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, extolled the virtues of ‘masterful inactivity’. More recently, Jack Welch, as chairman and CEO of General Electric, spent an hour each day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time’. The German chemist August Kekulé claimed to have discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming about a snake biting its own tail. Adepts of this kind of strategic idleness use their ‘idle’ moments, among others, to observe life, gather inspiration, maintain perspective, sidestep nonsense and pettiness, reduce inefficiency and half-living, and conserve health and stamina for truly important tasks and problems. Idleness can amount to laziness, but it can also be the most intelligent way of working—as I once told my boss.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle made idleness the mark of the great-souled, or great-minded, man (the megalopsychos):
Again, it is characteristic of the great-souled man not to aim at the things commonly held in honour, or the things in which others excel; to be sluggish and to hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones.
That’s why I always say to people, read Aristotle.
The Art of Doing Nothing
Idleness is often romanticised, as epitomised by the Italian expression dolce far niente (‘it is sweet to do nothing’). We tell ourselves that we work hard from a desire for idleness. But in truth, we find even short periods of idleness hard to bear. Research suggests that we often make up justifications for keeping busy, and feel happier for keeping busy even when our busyness is forced upon us. Faced with a traffic jam, many people prefer to make a detour even if the alternative route is likely to take longer than sitting through the traffic. Those most able to be idle—think only of the King of England—are often among the least inclined to be.
There’s a paradox here. We are predisposed to laziness and dream of being idle; at the same time, we always want to be doing something, always need to be distracted. Unlike cats, we are unable to lie around all day long, occasionally moving to track the sun—and only in the evening getting up to toy with a mouse. Perhaps what we really want is the right kind of work, and the right balance. In an ideal world, we would do our own work on our own terms, not somebody else’s work on somebody else’s terms. We would work not because we needed to but because we wanted to, not for money or status but for personal fulfilment and (at the risk of sounding trite) for peace, justice, and love.
On the other side of the coin, it’s all too easy to take idleness for granted. Society prepares us for years and years to be useful as it sees it, but gives us no training in, and little opportunity for, idleness. But strategic idleness is a high art and hard to pull off—not least because we are programmed to panic the moment we step out of the rat race. If we cannot entertain idleness, it is also from fear that our thoughts might suddenly add up—which is why thinkers seek it out.
‘To do nothing at all’ wrote Oscar Wilde (d. 1900), ‘is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.’
The world would be a much better place if we all had the strength to spend a year looking out of our window.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Art of Failure, an unconventional exploration of success, ambition, happiness, and the good life.
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