March 9, 2024: Sloth
Good afternoon. For those who have recently subscribed to this newsletter, I ordinarily write on a wide range of topics, but mostly things related to environmentalism, broadly speaking. I also usually have a “Quick Hits” section at the end, where I briefly review several interesting papers or items in the news; I plan to resume this next month. For Lent this year, I am doing a seven part series on the deadly sins, and after Easter (March 31 this year) I plan to get back to more worldly topics. This is part 4, sloth, which happens to be a personal favorite of mine. The next three topics, in order, will be avarice, gluttony, and lust.
“Sloth” does not refer to any kind of leisure time or relaxation. The importance of leisure for many different things—refreshing the mind, stimulating creativity, and so forth—is well-established. Getting a good night’s sleep is critical too, which means seven to ten hours per night, depending on the person and the phase of life.
There is a solid theological basis for the importance of leisure as well. The most obvious is the Sabbath, the one day of the week in which we are not to work, which is taken on Sundays for Christians. The principle of the Sabbath reflects the seven days of Creation, in which the seventh day is God’s day of rest. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 378, states,
The sign of man's familiarity with God is that God places him in the garden. There he lives "to till it and keep it". Work is not yet a burden, but rather the collaboration of man and woman with God in perfecting the visible creation.
“Collaboration” is a key word here. Another word for leisure is recreation, which can read as “re-creation”, the idea that by stepping back from our usual work routines, we can see things freshly—“creativity”—and be participants in creation rather than merely subjects. Work often is a burden, as we all know, and this is a consequence of the Fall, but the fact that humans are participants in creation has not been negated. Human co-creative capacity is good and can be seen all around us: families, communities, cities, science and engineering, philosophy, artwork, and so forth. The Catechism further describes humans’ purpose as for love, leisure, and labor. All three are essential.
Orthodox Jewish Shabbat (Sabbath) prohibitions are much stricter than what most Christians observe. I suspect that most readers would find it difficult to fully follow these prohibitions, even in a society like modern Israel that is configured to honoring Shabbat. Nevertheless, most Christians could learn a thing or two from their Jewish friends about taking the Sabbath seriously. Incidentally, this is the reason why I moved the weekly blog post from Sunday to Saturday last year.
I lived in San Francisco a few years ago, and so I am well familiar with the hustle culture that pervades Silicon Valley. This is the culture that celebrates working 80 hours a week, being on one’s cell phone (or two cell phones, as is common in the Bay Area) during all waking hours to be sure one doesn’t fail to respond to a message immediately, and treating every interaction as a chance to build one’s personal brand. I have a hard time seeing how this lifestyle is conducive to doing creative work, let alone supportive of a person’s mental and spiritual needs.
And so, when I talk about sloth, I am not referring to all kinds of leisure or relaxation, but to an excessive amount, or the avoidance of important work, or doing a half-assed job on that work. Michelle Tirronen writes here of three distinct but overlapping forms of sloth: laziness, unmotivation, and depression.
Laziness is simply the preference to, say, play video games rather than do work. I think that’s OK to an extent, and I can fully relate. Laziness differs from unmotivation and depression in that a lazy person enjoys not working.
Of the three, unmotivation is the one that I understand the best. An unmotivated person wants to work hard, and can suddenly get their rear in gear when they come across the right task, but for the work in front of them, the work seems like pointless drudgery, and they simply don’t want to do it. Unmotivation manifests in avoidance tactics like procrastination, easy but ancillary tasks (it is easy to rationalize scrolling through LinkedIn as actual work), and spending an excessive amount of time on unimportant details such as fussing with font sizes in a document.
Depression can be further subdivided into episodic depression, especially that which is triggered by a loss or illness, and chronic/clinical depression that does not have an obvious trigger. Most of us experience episodic depression occasionally, and in this case the only thing to do is put one foot in front of the other and get through it. Chronic depression is a real thing, though not something that I can say that I understand through personal experience, and if one suspects that one is suffering from chronic depression, it is best to seek professional help. Depression manifests as a loss of interest in the basic aspects of life and the sensation of a huge weight on daily activities. A depressed person might know that they “ought to” do some work, but they cannot bring themselves to do so.
Several times, I have come back to Bob Schucts’ Seven Deadly Wounds, the wounds that are often unseen and lead us back into sin over and over again. When we realize that we are avoiding work in a way that is harmful, any one of these wounds might be at play. We may fear, and rationally so, that if we work hard, that there is simply no point to the work; or a coworker will be resentful and sabotage our efforts; or that our work will be criticized and rejected; or that through our faults, our work simply cannot be good. These same wounds might also underlie a tendency to overwork: the feeling that we cannot be good enough if we aren’t always grinding and hustling; or the belief that we need to lie and cut corners to complete.
There is the statistic that 36% of American employees feel engaged at work (although this is presented as a shockingly low number, it is about twice as high as I would have guessed). Managers recognize that this is a problem, and they try to motivate their employees with tactics ranging from insulting to slightly useful. It would be an interesting, Tyler Cowen-like question (I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually has published something on this) of why HR publications are so bad, especially when the realities of employee motivation are not that complicated. People need to feel that their work matters, that they are respected, that they have a meaningful say in decisions that affect their work, that they can set boundaries, and that they receive fair pay and working conditions. I suspect that, while this is simple, much of it entails things that managers can’t or don’t want to do, so they try to cover up the major shortcomings with “perks” like free granola bars at the office and employee-of-the-month plaques.
The most basic problem—that a worker feels that there is no point to their work—is something that no manager can fix. David Graeber wrote Bulls-— Jobs, exploring how a large share of the workforce is engaged in work with no social value. Most of Graeber’s assertions have not withstood scrutiny, and even when a worker thinks that there is no social value to their work, there may be value that the worker doesn’t see. I don’t know if a modern HR consultant feels that their work is more, or less, or equally socially valuable than a medieval farmer would feel about their work. There is also the obvious question of why a profit-driven company would hire people who truly serve no useful function.
I suspect that Graeber’s argument is popular because it “feels true”—we can all roll our eyes at the 800 resumes that an employer receives for their entry-level jobs that say, “I am passionate about building React components”—and even more so, it is something that we might want to be true. As a kind of escapism, the belief in the uselessness of modern jobs justifies our sloth. Or perhaps it satisfies our envy: “Look at all those people with mid-six-figure incomes who don’t do anything useful”. The bottom line is that all human societies so far require that most members engage in work that they would rather not do. I commented last year on the myth of hunter-gatherer leisure, which is the idea that at some point in the past, there existed a society in which this was not the case. Whether most people will need to work in the future is a question that I will come back to.
Still, on the other side of the equation, most readers of this blog live in societies where most people have far more wealth than they need for basic survival and comfort. Most of us probably feel that, though our jobs are not useless, they are far from being as valuable as they could be. And for most of us, the labor market is slack and we can easily be replaced. And so we are in a position to think about whether the 40+ hour grind at a job about which we feel lukewarm at best is really the most valuable thing we can do with our lives. This is a luxury that most of our ancestors did not have. Sloth, then, is something I would extend from wasting one’s limited time on frivolous things to wasting one’s limited time unnecessarily at a career. Remember the Fundamental Fact of life: we are mortal, and unlike money, time is a resource that we can never get more of.
“Follow your passion” is a cliche that is abused enough to trigger an eye roll, but there is some value to it. To do good work, we need to be motivated. To be motivated, we need to do things we care about. Sometimes, the motivation is external to the work. We work mediocre jobs because we need the money to take care of our families, which is what we really care about. And that’s OK. But it is too easy for this to turn into avarice (next week), where money and material things, rather than family, are the real motivation.
Rather than “passion”, I like to think of this in terms of “vocation”, which literally means a calling. In the Catholic world, vocation most often refers to a calling to the priesthood or another form of religious life, but a person can hear a vocation to any career or pursuit: marriage, a socially valuable job, or service such as the military or the Peace Corps. A difference in connotation is that passion refers to something within a person, while vocation comes from a higher power. This is why leisure time is so important, and why we should not spend all our leisure time on our cell phones: we need to have our ears and our hearts open to vocation. Otherwise, we can go through the four tragic phases of doing meaningful work.
Phase 1: I will do meaningful work when I grow up.
Phase 2: I will do meaningful work when I have established my career.
Phase 3: I will do meaningful work when I have saved enough for retirement.
Phase 4: I wish I did meaningful work when I was younger.
Another reason we have to listen carefully is that there is an unfathomable universe of things we can be doing. Near the beginning of every Catholic Mass, there is the Penitential Rite, where we acknowledge four ways in which sin manifests: “in my thoughts”, “in my words”, “in what I have done”, and “in what I have failed to do”. The first three things, though there may be many things, are discrete. If there was a week (168 hours) since the previous Mass, of which we were awake for 112 hours, then we could have thought only so many thoughts, said so many words, and done so many actions. But there is a virtually unlimited number of things that we could have done but didn’t do. There are charities we could have volunteered with instead of watching the Godfather trilogy again. There are worthy causes we could have donated to instead of buying an expensive car. There are millions of lonely people who needed to be reached out to, just as we may have been lonely.
Coming back to the future, I argued last year that technological unemployment, or widespread, chronic unemployment resulting from an insufficient demand for labor as a result of labor-saving technological advancement, is not likely in the foreseeable future. But I don’t think it is beyond the realm of possibility that technological unemployment will occur some day, if advances in robotics and artificial intelligence occur as rapidly as some thinkers expect. I find this to be a frightening prospect. Not many experiences are worse than involuntary unemployment. Aside from fear for one’s financial position, unemployment gnaws at a person’s sense of self-worth.
Anxieties about technological unemployment fit with a host of other anxieties about the diminishing importance of the individual. Over the centuries, governments and corporations have replaced the family for elder care via pensions; the education system and professional child care have partially replaced families for child rearing; impersonal job boards and dating sites are replacing the the personal aspects of these functions; and so on. It is now possible to do most of one’s shopping without direct interaction with another person. Maybe artificial wombs will become a thing, and AI companions will be seen as adequate substitutes for person-to-person friendships. With all this, what is the purpose of the individual? That we all live in virtual reality, with no objectives other than pleasure and entertainment, hardly seems a satisfying answer.
Finally, every spiritual tradition recognizes that fulfilling our Earthly potential is very difficult and perhaps cannot be done fully. To make progress requires hard work, which entails both strenuous effort and the willingness to confront those truths that we might prefer not to confront. With sloth, there is no way that we can become our best selves.