Being lazy and being uninterested are two different things. When I was a kid I was usually reluctant to do most farm work, because it was boring, but would go for 10 miles runs or long runs, or read multiple books in a day (which many people who love farm work would hate doing.)
Most of what passes for lazy is uninterested in drag.
The old maxim: “work is what you wouldn’t do for free” is part of it, but there are four types of activities on this spectrum.
- “I enjoy doing it for itself and would do it even if I wasn’t getting anything from doing it.”
- “I enjoy it, but wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t getting anything from doing it.”
- “I don’t enjoy it or dislike it, but I’m willing to do it because I’m getting something from it.”
- “I don’t enjoy it or dislike it, and I won’t do it even if I get something from it absent coercion.”
One is your hobbies, vacations and so on. Two is work you like, which doesn’t also fall into the hobby category. Three is most people’s jobs. Four is things you do because if you don’t do it something bad will happen, usually because someone else will make it happen.
When I was a kid most (not all) farm work fell into category four, and most of the rest fell into category 3. I didn’t ever get paid for any of it, but I used to spend some holidays on an Uncle’s farm, and I liked him, and we’d do the farm work then go do something fun. I was getting something from it.
Most of my jobs have been in category 3: I did them because I needed the money. I’m not working construction or baking or being a bike courier, or painting houses or doing life-insurance back-end administration if someone doesn’t pay me.
Blogging and writing fluctuates between category 2 and 1. Some of it I’d have done (or do) even if I wasn’t getting paid , but some falls into “this pays my bills and I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t write this article if it wasn’t my job.” From about 2004-early 2009 the category 2 blogging also fell into “getting something for it” in the sense that I believed in the Netroots, and that we might get enough political power or influence to make good things happen politically. I would never have worked 70-80 hour weeks at FireDogLake just for the money (which was liveable, but only just), I did it because I believed in the mission and when it became clear just how awful Obama was and that the Netroots was falling apart, I quit, because I hadn’t been doing it mostly for the money.
I’m not entirely sure that laziness exists much. So-called “Quiet Quitting”, where workers refuse to stay late or do extra work is just enforcement of what moderns call “boundaries”, and classifying work as category 3. “I’m not doing more work than you pay me for, because I don’t enjoy it.” High wage workers understand that implicit to their high pay is doing more than is “on spec”, but doing more as a low paid worker, unless you think there’s a chance of meaningful promotions and wages is stupid.
When the people at or near the top get a 100x what the people in the middle get, and 200x what the people at the bottom get, and when most people know they’re never getting to the top and most won’t even get to the middle, and when they don’t share in profits, why should they work hard at jobs they don’t enjoy, or wouldn’t do for free?
I had a friend who, for years, had a rule that he wouldn’t do anything for money he wouldn’t do for free. It eventually broke down because if he’d kept the rule he’d have wound up homeless and then dead. His problem wasn’t super-fussiness, he wanted to do jobs that helped people and used his skills, but our society pays best for doing things that don’t help people. Since helping people is sort of an intrinsic reward (you get to feel good about yourself), we think people should do that form almost nothing, or nothing.
The weird thing is that getting people to do what they enjoy means they do more and better work, and that helping people has strong (econo speak) positive externalities. The more your society is focused on doing things that actually help others in some way, the better it is.
But our society concentrates on negative sum games (we are doing more harm than good, overall) and uses money primarily as coercion, rather than using it to allow people to do good things that they want to do, or are at least willing to do.
I don’t like farm work, but I have known many people who love it and do it for almost no money because they want to be farmers. We take advantage of that sort of impulse, in nurses and care workers and increasingly in teachers. Things that are good are done for cheap, and by less people than want to or than we need doing them, so that we can pay other people well to do things that are bad.
What you want to do absent excessive compensation or e is often a good guide for what you should be doing (not always) is often a good guide not only to what is good for you, but what is good for society and we need more of it, not less.
Many people think this means that important things that need to be done like garbage collection, janitorial labor and sewage work wouldn’t get done, but when Graeber did his research for “Bullshit Jobs” he found many people actually preferred that work because it felt useful, even when it paid less. I recently talked to a woman who works for a real-estate company which runs low-end housing. She used to make much, much more working for high end hotels, but she prefers this, because it feels like she’s helping people. “I’d rather clean someone’s shitty toilet after they’ve moved out than do any more of that bullshit.”
Incentives work, but they work best at getting people to do things which shouldn’t be done in the first place.
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