Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast, where two philosophers aim to help you feel better about yourself by pointing

out how your personal problems are tied to big ideas and social issues.

I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Peña Guzman.

People say increasingly that laziness is not a thing.

I feel like at this point in my social circle,

the word laziness is just kind of anathema. You can't use it to refer to yourself or to other people.

And I think this is part of this new movement that treats laziness as just a misnomer.

There's a recent book that came out by the social psychologist, Devin Price,

that I looked at in preparation for this episode, called Laisiness Does Not Exist. And this was based on a

viral essay that they had written, arguing precisely this.

Love a book whose thesis is neatly contained in the title, laziness does not exist.

And you know I love anything that will rationalize my own disinclination to do work to myself.

So I wish I, well, I want to read it now,

but I also wish I could have recommended it to my younger self because I think younger David needed to hear about the in existence of laziness.

Oh, I think my like pathological self writing 50 things to do over the summer when I was

nine years old because I was just overcome with this feeling of not doing enough stuff

needed to read this too.

And one of the really interesting examples that Price gives in developing their argument is the case of depression. So, of course, there are lots of different types of depression, but they're taking

sort of a paradigmatic case of major depressive disorder where, you know, somebody has a really

hard time getting out of bed

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