It’s OK to Be Lazy: How Society Turned Leisure Into a Taboo

The face of a successful person can be of any color, bone structure, shape, or size. But behind the face, as nondiscriminatory as we may be, the professional experiences are expected to be of equal caliber all across the industries and fields of success. From the moment we are born, our parents look at us with hope gleaming in their eyes—hopes of our successes, hopes that we will have hordes of professional experience under our belts by the time we are their age. It’s undeniable that we live in a go-getter society. Success is defined by constantly moving and striving for bigger and better; being lazy or complacent is taboo and means that we’re not meant for success. 

Even from kindergarten to middle school, kids are placed in gifted learning programs and encouraged to run for class leadership positions. Of course, these aren’t negative activities in any sense; however, they set the narrative that we are more worthy if we have special talents, if we do more with our time. This narrative only continues to be perpetuated as we get older. By the time we’re in high school, getting good grades is never enough. First of all, it has to be good grades in honors/AP/IB classes. Then, we need sports and leadership positions and volunteer experience and the arts. We need to be in seven different clubs, maybe even start our own. We need to show that we can stretch ourselves to the limit, utilizing every hour of our day, every day of our weeks. All of this is to get into a prestigious university because we’re under the impression that prestige translates to success. Presently, this is the recipe for success and the baseline that every person is expected to reach without question. 

​Once we get to college, it doesn’t get any better. I’ll put things in perspective of the quarter system because that’s what UCSB is on. Most people take more than 12 units per quarter, the minimum requirement to be a full-time student because they’re probably trying to pursue more than just their one major. Not only do we have to do well in our academics, but we’re also expected to be involved in extracurriculars to meet the standards that everyone else is upholding. We show that we’re diverse by having some extracurriculars in our pursued careers and some that support our personal interests. On top of that, we have to show leadership ability through our positions. 

We get jobs to give us professional experience for our resumes, then we need to actually apply to internships through our four years in university; how would we be hireable otherwise? We’re always taking on more and looking for more prestigious titles, things to boost our resumes and LinkedIn profiles because this is the status quo. By the time we exit university, we’re expected not only to have our degrees, but also a resume packed to the brim with size 10 font and no more than 10-square centimeters of blank space. 

Classes themselves are already hard to manage. If we want good grades in this fast-paced 10-week system, we have to study constantly and never fall behind. Beyond school and extracurriculars and work, don’t we also need to maintain a healthy social life, find time to eat, get enough sleep, and exercise? There isn’t enough time in the day to operate so efficiently that we may check all of these to-do’s off our lists without feeling like robots. 

Increasingly, people are deemed successful when they do more: more equals better. More equals smarter. More is impressive, less is average. So my question is: when do we have time for ourselves? When people don’t do as much, they’re looked down upon. We keep piling the responsibilities on ourselves until we’re drowning and it’s too much to handle. At that point, we can’t even do everything we have on our plates well, so why do we subject ourselves to that?

Life isn’t meant to be work, work, work and go, go, go until we die. It feels like as we get older, that’s all that is acceptable. We need to work constantly to survive and make it big. We’re in training to be robots, not people.

Somehow, this go-getter society that we live in has conditioned us to feel guilty for taking time for ourselves—to relax and watch a movie, to invest energy into making sure that our mental health is good and that we’re happy. Oftentimes, we’re so busy fulfilling our myriad of responsibilities that when we actually have a chance to slow down and let our emotions bubble to the surface a little bit, we realize that we’re not really that happy. 

Why don’t we take the time to evaluate why we push ourselves so damn hard when our work isn’t going to be what we remember when we die? Yes, it’s nice to be successful and impressive. We all want our names in shining lights; we all want to be respected. But what if when we’re old and retired, we’ve spent so much time working that we realize we don’t have many strong relationships with the people we love and we’ve never completed our bucket lists? Meaningful lives are made from those moments doing things we love with people we love. 

In our case, mainstream success is opposed to leisure and self-care, equating leisure to laziness. Being busy is lauded while being lazy is a sin. We deserve the time to indulge ourselves and be whole because these healthy, human activities shouldn’t be viewed as taboo laziness. When faced with this societal definition of laziness, it’s okay to be lazy. It’s okay to play and have fun and not push ourselves to our breaking points. I advocate for a life of fullness and human experiences. I advocate for a life of balance.

• fun
• leisure
• mental health
• success
• work