📚 Laziness Does Not Exist Book Club-Week 2️⃣

Hi! Thank you all for your patience with my VERY delayed publishing of this blog post/book club reading update!

It turns out I completely misjudged how much time + capacity I would have for non-fiction reading over the last couple of weeks… and here we are on October 7th, & I am finally catching up on Week 2.

There is probably something mildly amusing about falling behind on a book called Laziness Does Not Exist. I am choosing to interpret this as an opportunity to practice the exact message of the book rather than as evidence that I am bad at book clubs.

And with that, onto Week 2!

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📖 Week 2: Sept 21-27 | Chapter 2 Rethinking Laziness (p37-72)

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This chapter still feels very “intro” to the concept to me. I found it mildly interesting, but I also definitely zoned out a fair bit unless I had the book in front of me and the audio in my ears to really focus.

I’m hoping the book gets a little more meaty or substantial as we get further into it. Ch. 3 is called “You Deserve to Work Less,” which already sounds more interesting to me than Ch. 2, so I’m hopeful. 👀

And, as I mentioned in week 1, if you’re on StoryGraph (or if you’ve been meaning to make the switch from Goodreads/Amazon to StoryGraph — Black, female-owned company!), now’s the time! One of my favourite features is Buddy Read, where we can see each other’s thoughts/comments as we read along. 📚

Anywayyy, now that I have finally arrived at Week 2… 😂 here are my thoughts + feelings from Ch. 2:

Onto the “types of lazy”…

🧠 Depressed People

I think it was a pretty ambitious undertaking to cover depression + the “laziness lie” in about a page and a half.

This section was fine, but I definitely found myself wanting more context. Depression can affect motivation, energy, concentration, executive functioning, decision-making, interest, hope, etc. — and I think some of that nuance would have strengthened this section. Basically, I was left thinking: yes… but can we please talk about this for more than a page and a half? 

⏳ Procrastinators

Similar feeling here.

I would have liked the author to connect procrastination more explicitly with anxiety and depression, rather than giving it its own separate category under “types of laziness.”

Perfectionism and caring a lot about doing something “right” can absolutely contribute to procrastination — but that’s not the whole picture. Procrastination can also be a pretty prominent feature of anxiety and/or depression, which are barely explored in this section.

So this felt like a bit of a glaring missed opportunity to me.

😶 Apathetic People

And again… I’m not entirely convinced by the separation of depression and apathy here.

Apathy can be a pretty significant part of depression, so separating the two so neatly didn't quite make sense to me.

I also wasn’t sure I agreed with framing deciding something isn’t relevant to us and therefore not doing it as apathy. Sometimes we just… don’t want to do the thing. Or we decide something isn't important enough to spend our limited energy on. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re apathetic or “lazy.”

I think the author was trying to define apathy in a particular way using James and the school example, but I didn’t find that explanation particularly convincing.

The discussion of apathy as a trauma response, though? That made a lot more sense to me. I actually wish the author had led with that and spent more time connecting apathy with trauma, depression, power inequalities, and the reality of having limited capacity.

My thoughts on the rest of the chapter…

Yes 👏 yes 👏 yes 👏

There was a lot in the rest of the chapter that I really did connect with, particularly the idea that what we casually label as “laziness” is actually be a signal that someone is at their limit.

The quotes above really captures one of the ideas that stood out to me: we have pretty unrealistic expectations about how much humans should be able to produce, accomplish, and keep accomplishing without consequences.

“We are not machines” also feels like a pretty good reminder for me personally while I am currently trying to catch up on my own book club that I am behind on....

Here are some other quotes that also are worth re-reading:

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What’s next?

I am… catching up!

Week 3 → Ch. 3 (p. 73–104) --> Coming soon-ish

Week 4 → 🛌 Rest / Catch-up Week 🍂

Which, as you can probably tell, has become less of a scheduled rest/catch-up week and more of a “Monica is actually using the catch-up week to catch up” situation.

So if you’re also behind: welcome. 💜 📚

& talk soon!