How To Overcome Sloth
Sloth is a term used by Christians to define a specific sin that we now think of as laziness. Somehow or other the Germanic word lazy overtook sloth, an Old English word. Based on the word sloth alone, a combination of slow+th, I think we can figure out what it used to mean; someone who is slow to get things done.
Have you ever given a task to someone and it took them all day, or all week, to do it, even though you knew the task would be quick and easy. If I were to walk into your kitchen and look at the sink, would I find day-old dishes or would it be clear and clean? Does your laundry get done as soon as each step is complete, or does it sit and stay awhile as an amorphous blob. Has that blob ever sat around so long it was no longer recognized as clean?
When it comes to physical work, sloth means you’re slow to finish jobs. The Bible lists sloth as one of the seven deadly sins. That’s a pretty harsh assignment to someone who is just slow to get things done. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. You see, when I think of sin, I think of things we do that have natural consequences that are not favorable to anybody. Since most people in history were farmers, sloth would mean your animals could die or escape, your crops could be overtaken by weeds, or you might not have many crops if you didn’t plant enough, or if you were in a colder climate you might not have enough firewood. A slothful person would be a drag on a farm, since every aspect of farming requires physical work. The consequences of this would be, well, deadly in the long run since you could starve or freeze in the winter.
But we aren’t farmers today. The vast majority of us work 9–5 doing some repetitive task that won’t result in your death if neglected (although try telling that to some managers). I’ve read many of the search results for overcoming sloth, and most of them are Christian. I think I’ve discovered a flaw in the basic biblical and modern thinking about overcoming sloth (or laziness).
The typical prescription is that you need get up early, have a to-do list, manage your time, make SMART goals, and all the rest. In other words, stop being so damn lazy! Your typical search result will tell you to start controlling the matter and take charge of your life. I’ve read this type of self-help a lot, and some of it comes from the resurgence of stoicism. The Stoic only worries about what they can control, not what they can’t control.
Makes sense, right?
But how do you discern what is actually under your control? Also, if you start to take accountability for everything in your life, you may end up feeling tremendously guilty. That can lead to a complete and total breakdown where you feel shameful of who you are. Like Flick, from A Bug’s Life, you apologize for being the way you are. I can’t see how that path can fix someone. At least with the Christian, they attempt to replace that guilt-ridden feeling with Jesus’s redemption, although you may end up feeling guilty again the next Sunday sermon you hear.
Logically, I can see where the Stoic is coming from, but in practice, it has never worked for me (or Ryan Holiday, for that matter, whose championing of Stoicism wasn’t enough to help him cope with Covid). I have never been able to shut off rapid, automatic bouts of anxiety or guilt simply by telling myself, “Nah, I’m not going to worry about this thing because I have no control over it.” My body worries anyway, and it’s typically only when the thing has passed that the anxiety passes.
Also, when it comes to laziness, it’s biologically hardwired into us to conserve energy! Have you ever watched Alone? When I watched only a few episodes, I quickly realized almost all of those expert survivalists could easily die of starvation. They knew how to procure food, build shelter, build fires, find water, and all that. And still, it can take forever to get food. Some of them sat by the water fishing all day and still didn’t catch anything. Whenever they tracked an animal, or were building their shelter, they were burning calories. It doesn’t take very many days of work, and no eating, to burn off all of your extra calories and be finished. It’s advantageous in a survival situation to eat a lot then sit around while waiting for more food. If you are fishing or hunting, you have to be able to sit still for a long time. It took one guy hours to build a fire. Patience is a better skill than elbow grease. Somewhere along the way, elbow grease took over.
Today we have adequate shelter, adequate food, adequate water, adequate everything. We forget how tremendously wealthy we are. If you ever forget, watch an episode of Alone and see how our ancestors have suffered (except they probably didn’t because teams of people can divide the labor and enjoy each others’ fruits). Here I want to avoid getting into too much of a digression, talking about all of the great things we have accessible at our fingertips. For instance, in the past, even in my own past, like the 90s, information was not as accessible, and so you could be doing something wrong and not know about it. Let me give an illustration.
When I was a schoolboy, I choose percussion as the instrument I wanted to learn. I learned one way to hold the drumsticks and I was self-taught on my bass pedal. It wasn’t until I picked up drumming again many years later, that I realized some mistakes I made in the past. For instance, I held the sticks correctly, but I was choking them too far down the stick, and so I had a pathetic bounce when I struck the drumhead. When I choked up a little more, my stick would bounce a lot better. Instantly I became faster and my rudiments sounded cleaner. All because of one silly little adjustment I didn’t learn about until I watched a few drum instruction videos. It was the same thing with the bass pedal. I was slamming my foot down on the wrong spot, which eliminated my ability to incorporate more intricate bass drum patterns without double-bass pedals. If you know how to do it right, you don’t need double-bass pedals to do the same beats.
And so, information we have today is superior for the reason we can access more humans to teach us. But we often squander this power of unlimited learning in favor of scrolling memes, winning internet arguments, and getting angry at tweets and mobile games. I could be building skills in virtually any area of life, but I spent my time doing the comfortable, easy, familiar, thing. This is because our modern form of laziness is not entirely our fault.
There is hard evidence our laziness is not always our own fault. Take the modern obesity crisis, for example. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, according to the Body Mass Index. Why did this happen, and why is it happening to many countries around the globe? When I’m out and about I usually see overweight people, or fit people, rarely do I see adults who are thin but also not exercise enthusiasts. Basically, I never see the body-types you notice the majority of people had in older films, from the 80s and earlier. Obviously something outside the control of many people has occurred.
We suffer from abundance. Let me give a few examples, some of which may be considered crass. There is so much available to eat, and to eat cheaply, that we can easily fall prey to eating only what tastes best to us, which tend to be very high-calorie foods that don’t satiate. There are so many high production movies and TV shows we can’t help but fill all of our free-time with them. The same goes for video games, with so many being out there, and so many of them designed to be replayable, hundreds and thousands of hours are consumed. Social media is an endless buffet of mind candy. One can seek out internet arguments ad infinitum. If you want to read articles, there are libraries of them available, on any topic, and not a single one will improve your mind. Many are addicted to pornography because there are more videos than time in one’s life.
Just think of the reverse of this abundance. Think of if you were growing up in the mid-1800s. You ate whatever was available, and you almost always worked it off and then some. The average West Point Academy male weighed 138 pounds (I remember being that weight once, as a teenager, and I felt like a skeleton compared to others. I’m in my 180s now and I still feel downright small when I’m at the store). Your entertainment was very limited, and a lot of it had to be bought. There wasn’t much of an entertainment industry, whatever was available you had to live in a big city. Even books were limited. There was almost no pornography, and women’s dresses covered everything up. Go to your local library and find books with pictures of regular people from the 1800s. We are absolutely overflowing with images of naked bodies today. People read a lot of newspapers, and there were all kinds, but no matter how many you had, you always came to an end of it and had to wait. Most of the basic necessities of life were limited, and as such, they limited the options available to people. We would all be the same as the people of then if our options were similarly limited.
I conclude, then, that much of what passes as laziness today is not in your control. I don’t even think we can moderate many of the things available to us. You can’t moderate candy consumption, because once you have the taste for it, it’s easy to go back again and again. You can’t moderate social media very well, it’s too easy to access from your pocket almost anywhere you go. Porn, video games, television, all difficult to moderate because of the pleasure we receive from them. So much pleasure in today’s society, so little happiness.
Therefore, there is only one clear way to eliminate the sloth and laziness in your life, and it’s a painful and difficult road to take: abstinence. You have to eliminate the things that are causing you to be lazy. Do you keep going back to a mobile game on your phone that wastes time and steals your emotional energy? Delete it. Do you scroll Facebook too much? Cancel it, delete any apps attached to it. Mindlessly surfing Instagram again? Delete it. Winning more arguments on reddit? Delete your account and block the website. I myself had to stop buying candy, ice cream, desserts, fast food and, as a result, lost 40 pounds. Do you watch too much TV? Cancel your subscriptions, pack away your TV in storage for awhile.
Basically, if something is making you lazy, you have to get rid of it. Haven’t you had enough of those things anyway? How much more do you really need? If you’re going to actually worry about the things within your control, you need to use that degree of control to eliminate the things that control you, while you still can (an addict struggles mightily to do this). Modern sloth stems from doing nothing because we are too busy wasting time. If you can’t cut the cancers out, you have to learn to live with the guilt, the anxiety, the feelings of failure, the regrets, the embarrassment, the pain of time lost, that all result from your inability to get things done.
If we are ever to succeed in life, we need to have skills (or assets). If you are a millennial like me, and your degree is useless, and you haven’t had a lucky career break, then a skill is your only way out. Sloth creates the modern pain of never getting ahead. There is plenty of pleasure awaiting you when you are ahead, but until then, those things should be eliminated, one by one if they are creating laziness. We often don’t realize how much something steals our energy until it is gone. It’s like ending a bad relationship. There is joy to be found when you break free of your chains. Make a list of all the things that are currently making you lazy, and then formulate a plan to eliminate each one.
This is at least one way you can overcome sloth and laziness. This does not address whether or not your sloth stems from depression or other problems. For instance, you can work your ass off 50 hours a week at a physical job and come home too exhausted to do anything but veg, but that hard work still won’t relieve you because your $15 an hour needs to be $30 an hour so you can pay off debt and save for retirement. Your real problem is that you need a skill to get the experience or the job or the gig that will get you the money you need. It’s totally understandable why you might be lazy and burnt out in that situation, especially if you are stuck. No, I’m talking about laziness that comes from less deep-rooted problems, the little things that add up and prevent you from reaching the next level.
Give abstinence a shot and journal your results.
