Laziness Does Not Exist

[sl8]

From https://medium.com/%40devonprice/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01

Laziness Does Not Exist
But unseen barriers do.

Devon Price
Mar 23, 2018

I’ve been a psychology professor since 2012. In the past six years, I’ve witnessed students of all ages procrastinate on papers, skip presentation days, miss assignments, and let due dates fly by. I’ve seen promising prospective grad students fail to get applications in on time; I’ve watched PhD candidates take months or years revising a single dissertation draft; I once had a student who enrolled in the same class of mine two semesters in a row, and never turned in anything either time.

I don’t think laziness was ever at fault.

Ever.

In fact, I don’t believe that laziness exists.

[...]

More at link.

[rusty quoin]

1. That was illuminating.

[murielm99]

2. Interesting.

Thank you.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

3. Maybe a student just doesn't find it interesting?

That was the main cause of procrastination for me in school.

Math assignments? I enjoyed those. What was my major in college? Math! No surprise there.

Collecting leaves and placing them in an album for an elementary school assignment? I collected ONE leaf on my way to school on the same day the assignment was due! Most of the other students had gigantic albums of various leaves, all of them labeled by species. Some of them even included photos of the trees with their corresponding leaves.

I understood that a leaf collection in elementary school would have no bearing on my future. My main anxiety was how much the teacher would be enraged at me. To my surprise, she quietly gave me an "F" and that was the end of it. I still passed the class because of my other assignment grades, so my gambit worked out fine.

Acquiring a lot of money never interested me either and, lo and behold, I've never been wealthy despite a high IQ and high grades in school (generally).

One of my brothers performed poorly in school (the worst of my four siblings), but he was also obsessed with money and possessions from the time he was a young child. He's now the wealthiest sibling of my family. Good for him!

[hlthe2b]

4. Bookmarked for later...

procrastinating...LOL

[safeinOhio]

5. Great paper.

Up until I was 40 years old I was always a C- student. I was told I was lazy and thought that was my problem. Then I found a great shrink that told me I suffer from ADD. He talked me into going back to school. He told me all I had to do was, attend every class and sit in the front row. It worked, I got my degree with honors, all As. I had found the problem.

[Igel]

6. Interesting.

Laziness doesn't go straight at rationale. It goes at disinclination or unwillingness to work or do a task.

Doesn't really say why. It just says that if there's something to be done and you don't do it, you need to figure out. Sadly, that usually means on your own--not have others spend days or months trying to understand your psyche, your challenges, and then dispose of them for you or figure out why, really, disinclination to do your work really isn't your fault but necessarily the fault of everybody else, when you weren't doing any of the figuring out because it's not your responsibility to figure out your own life. Parents should do this with their kids, but at some point I really can't be the horrible moral monster for not sorting out my problems, my wife's, my own offsprings', my students', my neighbors', and lots of other people's because, really, I'm the one under--in the rush to avoid morally judging the wrong people--I'm the right person to be judged and condemned.

Sometimes you can't fix the problem. Sometimes just recognizing what the problem is is most of the way to solving it. Sometimes much of the rest of the way to solving it is telling somebody, "You know, the difficulty is this--how can I fix it?" It just moves the disinclination back, and sometimes puts it behind a knowledge wall.

[Aristus]

7. I'm grateful for the compassionate things the article has to say about homeless people.

Life on the streets is a punishing grind. And as much as I would like for my homeless patients to quit smoking, I tend to be a little more indulgent with them over my mainstream patients. Sometimes, a smoke is the only pleasure they're going to have that day. So many of my patients have illnesses that smoking wil only make worse. But for most of the people on the street, getting through their days and nights safely is their overriding concern. It tends to make you adjust your horizons a little.