CIIS Public Programs Podcast

 TRANSCRIPT
 

Kendra: Hi Devon, I'm really excited about our conversation this evening.  

Devon: Hello, good evening. Thanks for having me and doing this.  

Kendra: Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to sort of dive in pretty broadly so that we can kind of really go into some of the places that maybe you want to go this evening around, you know, the topics that you explore in your book and I'm curious if you can just start us out in talking about what is the laziness lie that you discuss in your book?  

Devon: Sure. Yeah. So, the laziness lie is a term that I put on this pretty pervasive cultural belief system that has its roots in puritanism and white supremacy in the U.S., but it's kind of spread everywhere and it's tainted not just our approach to work, but our view of so many things. Our boundaries, our ability to listen to our bodies, all of these different pervasive problems and just kind of moralizing work and it has three major tenets, and the first one is that your worth is defined by your productivity. The second tenet is that you can't trust your needs, your limitations, any feelings that tell you that you need to slow down or change course, and then the third tenant is that there's always more that you could be doing, and like I said, it's not just work necessarily but it's does your body look the correct way or do you have you know, are you presenting yourself in a professional enough way? Are you doing enough activism? Pretty much any realm of life you can be made to feel lazy about. 

Kendra: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you talk about it in all these different areas of life because sometimes when we're talking about productivity, I mean, I know my mind first goes to work, right? Am I being productive in my work? But there's all these other ways in which it plays out in in our lives and I'm wondering if you want to talk about that a little bit more? Kind of how that, what that looks like. 
 

Devon: Sure. So, one thing that I like to stress and encourage people to think about is if you, if you live under a worldview that says work and productivity makes you a good person, taking a lot of things on and achieving a lot of good things makes you a good person, and it's immoral to be lazy, think about how that really distorts your relationship to consent and your ability to say no to really anything. We're really starting with a cultural frame that saying yes to something is morally superior to saying no and that stopping something, not being able to do something, not wanting to do something is something that you kind of have to justify.  

So, that really frays more than just sexual consent, which normally when we talk about consent that's the forefront of people's minds but. Your commitments to two people that you're in relationships with. Your commitment to family members and expectations that they place on you that some of them might be things that don't actually align with your values and who you really are and who you want to be.  

And like I said activism over committing to the point of burnout or I think this is even really closely tied to the problem of performative activism that people want to be good, they want to be virtuous, they want to satisfy that impulse in the back of their mind that they're not doing enough to solve these huge pressing problems, and so they reach for the first available thing that they can do without kind of thinking about is this something that the group that I'm advocating for actually wants? Is this a sustainable commitment? You know, is this something that I can really follow through with, and that's going to be good for me as well as the causes and the communities that I'm trying to serve.  

So, it's really pervasive. I talk in the book also about things like parenting guilt. I think that's a major battleground where no matter what you do, you're going to be criticized and you face so much real and internalized social judgment that you're not checking off all of these boxes, and scheduling all these activities, training your kid to have all these various skills. And yeah, it kind of just spirals out from there. Pretty much any relationship that we have to other people, or to our own bodies and minds it has this cloud hanging over it of don't say no, don't you know say you don't like doing something. Say yes, take it on and if not, why not? What's wrong with you? That kind of thing.  

Kendra: Right. Like I can really see that there's this, it's an acculturation and a lot of it has to do with some of like our unexamined assumptions around who we need to be, what we have to say yes to, what we can say no to or can't say no to, and sort of just going along with whatever we see is this. It's I mean, the way in which you present it is like it's a cultural norm that has been infused in so many different ways that we’re pretty much unaware that this has been a norm, this is a norm that's been you know communicated to us and you do talk about you do talk a little bit about or a lot in your book around ways in which we can become aware of the laziness lie.  

You know, just in our own self-examination process and some of the things that we can do, which I really appreciate that because you know, when there is this acculturation around a specific idea or way of being sometimes if we're given this information and we go now what do I do with this? Right? What do I how do I work; how do I work with this? And so, there's sort of this grounding and like, narrative and personal story. And I'm curious, maybe we'll get back we'll get over to some of that a little bit later in the interview.  

But I'm really curious about, you know, when you started to examine this this idea of laziness and what it meant, you know in in your life and in the lives of people that you were seeing around you, what was that like for you to really start going into this this topic and to uncover some of the things that you've already talked about in just these few minutes of the beginning of our time together? 

Devon: Yeah, that's a question that I don't think I've been asked before about this. It's heavy, the way that this book came into being was that I initially wrote an essay called “Laziness Does Not Exist” that was really just focused on students and how unfair it seemed to me that a lot of professors that I had bumped into at various places where I taught over the years would just write off their students as lazy or kind of just dismiss students assuming that they were faking if they said that a grandparent died or they were sick. You know this just base assumption that students were not taking class seriously, weren't trying hard enough.  

And it was so counter to my own experience from when I was a student and all the stories I was hearing from these students because a lot of them would open up to me about just the incredible number of things that they were juggling in their life and coping with. So, I wrote an essay about that and the reaction that I got from that essay and the number of personal stories that people sent to me is what kind of made me start to realize just how pervasive this problem is, or at least that it was something that I wanted to speak to even further.  

So, it's been kind of this, that essay I wrote in 2018, and so I've been thinking about this stuff for a few years now and pretty much that whole time it's just, it's just hearing all these stories from people who they've internalized so much guilt from parents who told them that they were inadequate because they had, you know, executive functioning challenges because they're depressed, or that they have ADHD, or trauma or whatever else. People who are in an industry where, and this is most industries frankly, they're set up in a way that's just not sustainable. They have expectations that are just not, even if we were going by the most cold-blooded productivity research you wouldn't design workdays this way, and yet this is how most workdays are designed.  

Kendra: [Laughing] Right. 

Devon: And then people are blaming themselves when they can't sustain, you know, an 80-hour workday and have to drop out of her career! So, it's heavy, it was especially heavy to hear a lot of peoples’ stories of burnout and also in writing this book I feel really heavily the tension between I want to give people practical advice for how they can take better stock of the stuff in their own lives and I'm also acutely aware that this is a white supremacy problem, this is capitalism problem, this is an imperialism problem, and an individual person can't solve it. And we’ve had a lot of self-help books in the world that are about you know, here set some good work-life boundaries and it's not enough. [Kendra: Right] So, it's a heavy thing to carry and to think about how to navigate responsibly.  

Kendra: Well I really imagined too as a social psychologist too it's like, I mean, you really look at the individual in relationship and so I can see how like even from the perspective I mean, I imagine the perspective that you took in doing your research and in writing this that you know, I mean you thought about the various different webs, and circles, and intersections that you know, people are living within and how this laziness lie affects them and their lives and I'm curious if you want to speak more to that around you know, how privilege does play into the lazy lie and what people can actually do about it as a result? 

Devon: Yeah. It's so striking and it's, I don't think it comes as a surprise to pretty much anyone probably who's here or watching if they're here for this conversation they're probably not surprised to hear it, but the people that I spoke to in the book that we're able to set boundaries or really walk away from a toxic work environment were almost always people who had an economic cushion or access to family who could kind of they could live with to weather the storm, some amount of privilege to make it possible for them to say no in an economic system and a culture where just you know, giving your life to your work is something that's really normalized and often required just to get by.  

So yeah, that's something where I try to encourage people who are reading the book knowing that this book is listed as self-help and it's going to reach a pretty wide audience including people who maybe aren't economically as far left as I am on these things to kind of think about okay clearly these are really systemic problems and I've been taught not only to fear laziness in myself but to look at other people who are marginalized as lazy. So, can I rethink the person on the corner who's asking for money? Can I rethink how I feel about social welfare programs? Or you know, maybe for a lot of people think for the first time about disability benefits and how hard those are to navigate. Or what life's actually like when you're homeless, you know? And I go back and forth on how successful or like whether I took it far enough in the book or you know, like how to thread that needle of getting people on board who maybe aren't fully, you know, let's say in favor of universal basic income or some solution like that yet and slowly kind of moving the tide so that people realize. Okay, yes I'm a lawyer and I'm working 80-hour weeks and I feel horrible about my body and I feel like I never have enough time for my kids, but also I might eventually be able to retire. I might be able to eventually set some limits and who are the other people that don't have that power and how can I take steps and support policies that will help all of us. [Kendra: Mhm] So, yeah.  

Kendra: Yeah. I mean, I really appreciate that perspective because I think it's really important for us as individuals. Especially, you know, if we're sitting in a place of privilege to be able to recognize the steps that we can take for ourselves as well as the things that we can do to support those who maybe aren't in the same position as we are, you know, and to I mean, I like that you bookend your book with that story around you know, the mom I mean, it's a really classic example of like the mom who, you know tells her kid not to give money to the homeless person because you know all the various different reasons that you list and what they're going to do with the money, but the thing is that we don't really know their individual situation and so some of what I'm also hearing you kind of say is it's like, and even in your example around your students is that we have these assumptions based on people's actions and where they might sit but there's something really important about actually getting to know what's going on with them and you speak to this and I'm wondering if you can talk about this a little bit more around how this how laziness can actually be an indicator of something else.  

Devon: Sure. Yeah, so let me be I'll go with one example from the book of this student who tweeted at me after I'd written the essay “Laziness Does Not Exist” and he said, listen, I'm lazy. I'm actually lazy. [Both laugh gently] Which this is the thing that happens people very, very rarely come to me and say, oh, what about my brother-in-law? He's so lazy. Or like, oh, what about my coworker? They're so lazy. It’s almost always, no listen, I'm lazy.  

And this college he kind of said, when I'm depressed, I don't get anything done. I just lay in my bed, and I’m completely like useless and I don't get anything done. And also, when I was in high school me and my friends, we would make kind of a show of procrastinating on papers and I think some people it really was that they just wanted to stick it to the school that they would, you know, do their homework on the bus. Look how could you not call that laziness?  

So, for the first thing that he brought up it was kind of heartbreaking that he knew he had depression and he still didn't think that that was enough of a context to absolve him of being lazy. So, you know in the book I kind of breakdown just let's really talk about physiologically and psychologically what happens when you're depressed. Your sleep is less deep and less restful. You do need more hours of sleep because your sleep quality is poorer. [Kendra: Mhm] Your thinking is your ability to think is slowed down and impaired. Your ability to sequence tasks is impaired. You are marshalling a lot of cognitive resources towards staying alive, and it's this incredibly difficult battle and I think… I hope most of us wouldn't call someone who's on chemotherapy fighting cancer lazy. I think that still happens and certainly a lot of people with physical disabilities get called lazy, but the level that people with invisible illnesses and mental illnesses have it is so far behind that that even someone who's acutely suffering from it wasn't giving himself credit for how hard he was fighting to stay alive.  

And then to go with the more easy to demonize example of some teens who are kind of just screwing off in class, it just made me think about when I was a teenager and how little control I had in the world and how you are developing personhood and you have very little agency, very little control over how you spend your time, and you’re being condescended to in ways that feel like, you know, I'm an adult person [Kendra: (laughing) Right] when you feel like you are being hampered in. So, stealing free time where you can get it and screwing off on rules that you don't agree with, that you are not free to break out of because you're stuck going to school, that to me seems very logical and it's not a moral failure. It's someone for the first time in their life getting to set their own priorities, and we might not agree with those priorities, you know. We’re that kid’s parent you might say, please do your homework. [Kendra: Laughs] This will pay off in the long run, I promise. But you know a person setting goals and putting their energy towards the things that matter to them and withdrawing energy from the things that don't matter to them, that's not laziness. That's a person behaving very rationally. Again, we might disagree with it, but it's not laziness. 

Kendra: Right. Exactly. I mean, it's really about kind of how others are then looking at those particular behaviors or ways of reacting or responding to certain requests or demands from others because if somebody doesn't agree with it, you know, and they say no if the norm is that well if you say no to this and it means you don't care, you're lazy, or whatever it is then you know, I mean, I don't… I wonder if you could speak to that like what someone who doesn't subscribe to this or you know, let's say they read your book and they said yeah, I actually really agree that this laziness idea is a lie, and I don't want to adhere to it anymore. But yet they're still in circles where if they start to change their behaviors, they might be looked upon not in the same light. And so, I'm just wondering if you have any suggestions around what someone might do in that particular scenario. You know, how does somebody start to get, let me rephrase that, like how does somebody start to change their internal relationship to the laziness lie, and then when that happens, you know, how do they then shift their relationship to their external relationships in regard to the laziness lie?  

Devon: Yeah. So, as I kind of alluded to, I think it does come down to taking stock of your values. And then taking stock of how does my day or the life that I've built, and in many ways been forced to build out of necessity, lineup or fail to line up with those values. So, there's a variety of different kinds of questions and activities sprinkled throughout to kind of help think about that.  

But fundamentally it's looking at okay if I really wanted to focus my life on upholding, you know, three values, what would those things be? Would it be family? Would it be equality? Creativity? Making money? What are the things that truly drive me and make me feel alive and then how am I actually spending my day? And what are the goals that I set out to meet that I that I don't meet and how do I feel about those? What are the things that I don't get done that I can kind of just look at the fact that I routinely don't do them and just say I'm going to take this as data. Maybe this thing doesn't actually matter to me, I've just been told that it should matter to me, and so I can let it go. So that might be something like exercising every day. You know, you put it on your calendar, you set this intention and you don't get to it because you're exhausted, or you want to socialize, or play a video game, or whatever it is and maybe if you don't actually see exercising every day as being important for your values, maybe you can just let that go and just say okay this is now my video game hour every day. 

Kendra: Right. 

Devon: And conversely if there's something that you're really setting out to do that you never find time for and it really makes you notice this misstep, and this gap between who you want to be and what your life is actually like, let's say spending time with your kids. Instead of yelling at yourself for lacking willpower to cram all these things into this musket that is clearly too tight asking yourself, what am I going to get rid of? Who am I going to disappoint?  

And that brings me to the next piece and the second part of your question, which is how do you socially begin to do these things? And so, I do talk about, you know pick someone every week that you're going to disappoint. That was a useful way of thinking about it and doing it for me because I was so afraid of people being unhappy with me and disappointed in me and using other people's emotions too much as a guideline for how I was supposed to conduct myself, instead of listening to my own values. [Kendra: Mhm] So for me, it was very useful to set a goal of okay at least once a week someone's going to ask me for something and I'm going to let them down and it will be good practice for me from just even an emotional regulation perspective to recognize this person has asked for something, my gut says I should say yes, I'm going to say no, and I'm going to sit with that distress, and the world's not going to end, [Both laugh] and now I'm not going to resent this person later, which is what I would have done otherwise, or I would have lied to explain why I couldn't do the thing or whatever. So, I think that's really important.  

I think looking at really deeply ingrained societal rules and recognizing of course everyone around you is influenced by this stuff. So yes, if you start dressing differently people are going to sometimes go, oh that doesn't look professional. Or like, oh you look so tired. You know, like you're going to get these little nudges, and every person kind of has to gauge for themselves what they can get away with saying no to, what they can get away with letting drop, and of course this goes back to the privilege issue. [Kendra: Mhm, right] Where it's very easy for me as a professor to say, well, I'm not going to dress up at work. It doesn't matter. It's actually better if we're not we don't have that pretense. Or you know, it's very easy for me to say that and not everyone can do that. But within the lines that you are in, trusting your own perception of the world that you're in, what can you release that you're just going through the motions because you're afraid of disappointing people that you can just give yourself permission to go ahead and disappoint them or not meet that standard anymore.  

Kendra: Yeah, I like that, and I totally resonate with your example of you know, attuning to other people's emotions and feeling their disappointment or whatever when you say no. So, I can really understand how difficult that can be and I like that idea of doing it in a way that's you know slow where it's kind of like a titration a way of sort of easing into a different way of being rather than thinking that you have to just you know, once you once you agree, you know, if someone were to read your book and then go, yeah, I completely agree with this. I'm going to change my whole life right now. That that's maybe not the best way to go about it that it's something that takes time, and it takes work to really kind of re-author your own understanding of your relationship to the laziness lie, and you know how you've sort of constructed your life according to you know, productivity, and doing more, and feeling like you have to just continue to produce. 

Devon: Right. This is another thing that you like don't be a perfectionist about, right? Like it would be right like you I still do it too, I apply the logic of like, oh, I'm going to be the best at fighting the laziness lie, which what? You know, this is a long process and it's not your fault that you've internalized this stuff. It's not your fault that these expectations have been placed upon you and one of the big failures of a lot of pop psychology, and self-help, and that writing is presenting individual solutions where you just need to be more assertive and as an individual overcome these structural problems, and that's just not how that stuff works.  

I do want to give people kind of a life raft and some tools for okay, you're in a really unfair turbulent situation, here are some things you can hold onto and use to make it more tenable for you. But it's not like, okay today's the day I fundamentally change who I am in every way and have amazing willpower and stop everyone and I'm going to feel bad and like I’m betraying myself if I still succumb to this stuff because we all we all do. 

Kendra: Right. Well and I mean, I think what you're also saying to is like we can't apply the same patterns that produced the laziness lie to unravel them, right? It's really about changing relationships too, and changing patterns too, and really looking at internal values. I mean I know from like a developmental perspective, you know, when we're in like our 20s to late 20s early 30s, we really go through this process of you know, developing our own internal compass to you know, values and moral systems and things like that.  

But if we've adopted this moral system of productivity is related to your worth, then it takes time to re-pattern and to rework not just the internal relationship to those morals and values but re-patterning of our behaviors in the ways in which we relate to the world. And yeah, I mean, I can really see though how it would be really easy in one regard to just apply the same sort of ideas around productivity to the laziness lie. Like I'm going to I'm going to undo the laziness lie and… [laughs]  

Devon: Yeah. Yeah, and we I see it a lot in like activist spaces too, and a lot of people have written about this, adrienne maree brown is probably the like best-known person who wrote Pleasure Activism, person talking about this but this idea that like a practice of like trying to liberate people that’s still rooted in perfectionism, get everything done, take everything on as an individual, policing individuals for are you doing enough for the cause. Like that's still the same mindset of the laziness lie, capitalism, white supremacy, all of those things that are just saying individuals need to be good and virtuous instead of saying how do we build a society that takes care of everyone? 

Kendra: Right.  

Devon: We stop, we throw the are they a good virtuous hardworking person question completely off the table.  

Kendra: Right. Right. It's really a completely different frame and construction around how we value ourselves and how we value each other within our society. I'm really curious if you could talk a little bit more about you know, if we were to shift our perspectives, you know away from you know, this idea of productivity being our worth and really kind of take on your suggestions around the laziness lie, how we might practice self-care and wellness and what that might really look like for someone? 

Devon: Yeah. I think the place to start answering that question is looking at how we think about and talk about self-care right now and how distorted it is. I guess in some ways we're in a better place than we were. I can't remember when I first heard the term self-care, but I was in my 20s, you know, so it was something I was not familiar with up until that point. And so, it's good that it's become a cultural conversation more. It certainly had been researched for a few decades before I heard of it as a person, but it was mostly in the context of social workers, nurses, caregivers, and how do you keep people in these really emotionally turbulent professions stable.  

So, it's good that self-care has become a big conversation in the public landscape, but it's become very much a commodity. A thing that you schedule. A thing that you put on your to do list. Usually, a thing that you buy, whether it's a bath bomb, or a pedicure, or something like that. And it can also be something that you're supposed to kind of implicitly perform. So especially a few years ago Instagram was very bad in this regard. Lots of like bubble bath photos, and photos of the here's this art that I made, here's this beautiful craft, here's you know, this beautiful makeup look I did and it's self-care, but it's also it's also something that I'm going to measure how well I'm doing based on how people receive it. [Kendra: Right] Not that it's wrong to want to broadcast things to the world, I'm on social media constantly. [Both laugh] So, I get that it's a you know, a double-edged sword.  

Kendra: Yeah. 

Devon: So, at this point the term has become such a commodity that I don't know how we rework thinking of it as just, this isn't a thing that you earn. It isn't a thing that you set aside a little amount of time for. It’s having a completely different outlook to your body and listening to your body and not trying to argue with every feeling that you have. In this regard I'm kind of really inspired by the eating disorder recovery community, where when someone's developing a sense of intuitive eating, you've been ignoring your body's hunger cues for an incredibly long time, so just learning to listen to your hunger and taking that hunger wherever it wants to go without judgment without saying, well, I haven't worked out enough today to be hungry. You know, or to want chocolate just letting it go. I think that approach is really important. It's so far from the way most of us organize our days because of our jobs. 

Kendra: Right. 

Devon: So, I think it would really mean totally reorienting what the workplace looks like. We're in a better moment for that than ever before because of work from home options, but we're also in some ways in a worse place than ever before because it's like you never leave work. So, you never listened to your hunger and boredness. But I think that's what ultimately the goal is of kind of rethinking self-care in terms of what am I going to say no to? What don't I feel like doing? What are ways that I’m trying to meet some societal standard that I don't actually care about, and can I really listen when I feel annoyed, irritated, tired, whatever it is and honor that instead of beating myself up over it.  

Kendra: Yeah, I like that. I mean I think what your example really highlights too is that you know the way in which self-care and wellness has kind of been commodified, it's really about the presentation of it, and you know what your pointing to is really it's less about I mean, it's less about the presentation. Yeah, it might show that you're taking care of yourself, but it's really about the inner landscape and the interrelationship to how you’re caring for yourself, how you're listening to your needs.  

And again, I think the thread that I continue to keep hearing is it's about reorienting yourself around your own internal values, needs, and wants, and distancing yourself from you know, as much as you can from what the expectations are, the societal expectations are around productivity and you know how you’re how you're gaining or losing worth as a result of that. And I understand, you know from you know from some of the things that you've written and talked about I mean your understanding of how this is tied to, you know, industrialization and slavery. I mean, it's so systemic that I you know, there are multiple different intersections and layers that each of us are sitting within that allows us different levels of responsibility as well as availability to making these various changes within our lives so...  

Devon: Absolutely. And I think what breaking out of it looks like is going to vary for each person and based on that baggage that they are that they are living with, under this right? So, you know, there's Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry, who is all about talking about rest as liberation for especially Black women though, like she produces writing and content that's under the like understanding of like the legacy of slavery has tainted everyone's relationship to their bodies as this traumatic event and everyone needs rest very fundamentally, and that's that, that's where it kind of needs to begin and her kind of perspective.  

I also am really inspired by there's an autistic writer and sex educator Stevie Lang, who's been talking I think it was like over the summer that they kind of started doing writing about the fact that for a lot of autistic people, which I also am autistic, self-care doesn't necessarily look like rest. For a lot of us, it looks like engaging with our special interests, the topics and activities that we’re really obsessive about. Like when you're like really, and this is true of people with ADHD too sometimes, if you have a topic that you're right now really obsessive about it actually can be an act of self-care to go, all right, I'm gonna to make a Wikipedia table about all of my favorite Pokemon because the table and the current Wikipedia is trash [Kendra laughs] and I'm gonna stay up, I'm gonna stay up all night making this awesome table and I'm doing something that like society would still see as frivolous. It's work, but it's about something silly and not impressive and so that can be self-care too. So that's something thay I also want to highlight. That like, even the idea of what self-care is and what it looks like is being imposed on you from the outside and sometimes you have to think. Okay. Do I actually want a bubble bath, or do I want to play Call of Duty all night long or like Dungeons and Dragons? 

Kendra: Right. 

Devon: It might be both, but yeah.  

Kendra: Yeah. I mean, it's really about I mean, I think that even from like it makes me remember too that even from like a hormonal perspective that what we need from the from the outside might mean… some people need rest some, people like, you know, like I know for me when I'm overwhelmed and I've had enough, like I need to sleep. [Devon: Mhm] You know, I just need to be like that's how I get that's how I get my rest but like, you know my husband when he's overwhelmed, and he's at his top like he needs to go for a run. And like, you know, from the perspective of self-care, like we're doing the same thing but in two totally different ways and you know his I think his way would be considered more productive if you will, right? The exercising and all of that where you know for me like as I'm sleeping, I'm actually processing. There's you know, I'm somebody who processes a lot and I read a lot, I take in a lot of information and so, you know in addition to like writing in various different ways, I also process when I sleep and so I think that that's also something, you know to… I mean each of us each of us processes information in different ways, we need different outlets in order to just give ourselves that break.  

Devon: Absolutely, yeah.  

Kendra: Yeah. I appreciate that perspective. Yeah, one of the things too, and I wonder if you run up against this, you know, just in academia, that that there's this idea, and this is maybe also in activism as well, that there's this idea that we have to kind of be experts in everything. You know, have to kind of you know, just kind of know everything. And I'm just wondering you know, like how do you see, you know, when we're sort of reading and constantly, you know in that place of like taking in a lot of information, and data points and things like that, you know how information can even overload us and what that might you know, how you can kind of contextualize that within the laziness lie as well.  

 
Devon: Yeah. I think that's an under-recognized facet of the laziness life for a lot of people - the pressure to constantly be learning, to constantly be very well-read on every issue, to have an opinion on every issue that's already crystallized, to constantly be following the news, and this idea that if you're not doing all those things, you're a bad person and socially irresponsible and intellectually lazy and all those things. In academia, it definitely takes this form where people 

are so unwilling to admit when they don't know something that's… I feel like the flavor that I see it take the most in academia, even starting out really early in their careers. I just remember, even when I was getting trained and in just teaching like how to be a professor like people were so afraid to admit to their students. Oh, I don't know the answer to that question. And when you're afraid to admit that you don't know the answer to a question, you don't get to model for your students the skills of here's how I go about finding information and digesting it when I don't know the answer.  

And as a scientist, it's really counter to the whole idea of what science is supposed to be - which is tentative, open to revision, serving the public interest. So, for us to act like we know everything or that knowledge is kind of set in stone, it's just really against the whole philosophy supposedly of what we're supposed to be doing. [Kendra: Right] And then academia has so many workplace and worker rights issues. Just the fact that we use graduate students for very, very cheap labor and justify it by saying we're teaching you; we're giving you an education. And it's true, I did learn a lot of things in graduate school, but I had no protections as a worker. I supposedly was supposed to work 20 hours per week, but there was no there was no one keeping track of that. And if I was asked to do more than 20 hours a week, there's nothing I could do to say no, right.  

So that's a very pervasive cultural problem there, and then kind of leaving academia and talking bigger picture, though this is an academic problem as well. We have more information now than any other time in human history. [Kendra: Right] And that includes a lot of junk data because the amount of information on the internet that is created is exponential. So, it just keeps growing and growing at accelerating rates. So, we take in more than people did, you know we take more in a day than people did in a week in the 80s, and that's very stressful. Like you said, you need time and sleep to process information. The process of really breaking down a new, let's say news article, and thinking about okay, how do I reconcile this fact with the things that I already know and believe and what comes next if this is something that's happening, you know in the economy, or in the healthcare system? What do we do next about this? How do I feel about this?  

That stuff all takes time and slowness and if you're just constantly being bombarded or bombarding yourself with information, you don't get to go deeper and your memory of what you've consumed is poorer… your ability to scrutinize real reputable news from conspiracy theories is degraded, it's easier for you to fall for scams, and you're also just physiologically anxious. I think we've all had the experience in this past year of being on your phone too late into the night and then not being able to sleep.  

Kendra: Yeah, and all those Zooms… even though Zoom has offered such a beautiful platform for being able to do things like this and to really, you know communicate in real time across the world it also, you know, I mean Zoom fatigue wasn't a thing, you know until this this last year, you know? 

Devon: Right, yeah! That just the number of social demands being made of us could just because you're just always at home and you can just always up and open up a new Zoom window, it's like unending and so stressful. So yeah, in the book I try to really stress to people that you're not actually a irresponsible person for saying I need to slow way down on this. That's actually the mark of being a more responsible citizen. Like if you're worried about not being active enough or engaged enough on an issue. It's a industry, a news media industry problem that we have constant information and a social media problem that we have constant information. It's not because we actually have like some obligation as citizens to constantly be taking information in. And what we know from decades of research at this point the dates back to when the 24-hour news cycle and 24-hour news channels really started, is that if people consume too much negative news, they actually become more passive and more fearful and less politically engaged. So, setting limits is actually the empowering, and I think like ethically superior thing, because if you care about being involved in issues that matter in the world, you can't be shell-shocked all the time.  

Kendra: Right. Yeah, you need to be able to critically think about your situations and the ways in which you're engaging in the world. And what actions are going to perhaps have the most impact, you know. I'm curious, you know, since you're kind of sort of going that way a little bit, you know, just around how, and I guess it can go both ways this question, but you know, how can we be good activists in the world, you know without kind of succumbing to this laziness lie.  

I think you spoke to that a little bit in that last answer, but maybe you could speak to this a little bit more specifically.  

Devon: Yeah, so the first thing I would say, and this is true of laziness lie and battling it in general. Make sure that you're giving yourself enough credit for all of the things that you're doing. So, a lot of things that we don't consider capital A activism are still materially helping people in your community… being a support person for people in your life who are vulnerable in whatever way, educating people in your life by having just casual conversations with them that are not contentious but are actually like, okay, let's talk about how we both, you know feel about white supremacy and the weird uncomfortable feelings that arises in us. [Kendra: Mhm] And like let's do it from a position of let's both actually talk about it and reflect rather than I'm going to change your mind and change your actions after one conversation because that's when people feel that they shut down anyway, and it’s not how human change works. [Kendra: Right] So, giving yourself credit for every small thing that you do that is making the world a better place. 

One example of this that I often give is my sister, who was not a super politically engaged person. She's 27, I think. Yeah. She's about to be 28, and only voted for the first time in this last election, but she's also an athletic trainer at a school in a rural area that is… because their athletic program is more racially diverse than any other thing would be in the area normally in Ohio, and she is someone who she hears all this locker room conversation and she's constantly shutting down racism. She's constantly shutting down homophobia. Her office is a safe space that girls at the school go to ask questions about things that they can't ask most of their teachers about like serious, you know relationship issues and like sexual health questions. She's doing activism in my book. [Kendra: Yeah] She is making life a better place for Black kids, queer kids, women, all these people in this rural very religious area. And that is way more impactful a lot of the times than a lot of the things that I do that are more showy like whatever you know action it is that I, you know, go to or help organize or whatever it is.  

So, looking for those small opportunities and really valuing those I think is really important, and I think it also helps us build a more sustainable activism because if you're fighting against a huge problem and you never feel like you're making a dent in it, psychologically that is very demotivating. [Kendra: Right] People just can't stick with something like that for the most part. So instead of thinking about how am I going to end climate change? First take some space to mourn the fact that you're not going to like end it. There are going to be losses and damage that we're going to have to deal with, and it's okay to like really feel that fear and sadness. And then think about okay, what can I do in my community to help people who are going to be impacted by this? What can I do to support Indigenous people in my area who are growing plants in traditional ways, small things where I can see hey, here's this native community garden and I helped make this possible or helped support it or fund it or whatever it is. Because those things are important and we're just small humans. We can't save the world individually, but we can do these small things that are rewarding and sustainable that align with our values.  

Kendra: That’s a really important point. I think, you know… just considering everything that we've been talking about and you know, what you present in your book around, you know us feeling like we have to be doing, you know doing these huge things in order for us to have value. That I think it, I mean what I heard you say, is that the importance of valuing all of the little things that we do and to not overlook those things as something that's just like oh, yeah, I just I just did that, or that's just a small thing. But to really recognize that those small things could actually turn into something or actually don't even have to turn into something more. They are enough right? It's like all of that is enough. Which I think is… I don't I don't think you can say that too many times for people.  

Devon: Yeah, because there's a lot of guilty messages that people encounter, and it comes from a place of trauma, right? [Kendra: Right] People are really traumatized by so many injustices and systemic problems in our society. So, they go - well, what are you doing about this? I'm doing all this work, is everybody else doing enough? And it… resentment, and guilting I've noticed almost always comes from a place of someone who is doing too much and carrying too much and not having that seen. So, the solution to that is not to cave necessarily to that pressure and to hold everyone to this standard of okay, activism is my new part-time job and I have to spend XYZ hours per day or week doing all these things. It's too kind of really say okay, none of us individually can undo this. We are all really suffering, and that suffering can take a lot of different forms. And obviously some people are more structurally oppressed than others certainly and being mindful of that is important, but really looking at what can I do to make my neighbor's life better, who you know in my neighborhood can I check up on? Or what small organizations can I help build political power, or who can I just have a conversation with to like to learn more about what their life is actually like and what they actually want? Because none of the groups that we're trying to advocate for, or when we’re advocating for ourselves, we're not monoliths. A lot of times when you’re advocating for… I don't know Indigenous people in your neighborhood might look very different from how it looks you know what it looks like for me here in Chicago might look very different from California, right? 

Kendra: Right, yeah… yeah. I'm curious, you know, just as I know we're starting to get, we're nearing the end of our hour, and so I want to kind of see if you can speak a little bit more to… and I know you've talked about this in so many different ways, but maybe this is maybe some of the more, you know, kind of maybe poignant parts that you want to bring up here at the end around, you know, what we can do or what people can do to really fight back against this lie of laziness. Like what you know, what would you say are some of the like if someone was saying okay, I want to start now. I want to start taking some steps to change my relationship to the laziness lie. What would you say would be some good first steps for someone to take?  

Devon: Yeah. So, one thing I think, and this connects to what we were just talking about, I think… compassion and practicing it for others sometimes makes it way easier for us to be gentle with ourselves. And also, it obviously has these massive societal ripple effects of making other people's lives easier, which is really important. [Kendra: Mhm] So learning and making a practice of slowing down when you feel just dismay at someone's actions and you immediately want to write them off as it's because they're this kind of person… To just kind of okay. Alright, I had that little internal temper tantrum and that's totally fine and natural to initially respond to someone who's disappointed me, or somebody who's done something that's dismayed to go oh, they’re a horrible person. To go, okay. I did that, what could be the broader context that is explaining this. Meaning is this person, you know, if they're sharing lots of misinformation online what fears do they have that have manipulated them into thinking, you know, they need to protect their children from this imaginary cult or whatever it is? Like what are they going through? And how lonely might they be that they're getting, you know kind of indoctrinated with that information, as an example. Or what happens to me in my work a lot is if I hear a co-worker complaining about a student, kind of in a non-judgmental way reflecting – oh it sounds like they're really going through a lot or like oh, that must be that must be really stressful for them if they're you know, five weeks behind on assignments. It's good they emailed you, they were probably really scared to email you. You know, not telling somebody else that they're a bad person for calling that student lazy. [Kendra: Right, right] 

Just kind of slowly modeling the skills, because nobody is a bad person for having internalized this stuff. It's very natural and we all have it. So, modeling that compassion and curiosity and humility… starting to apply it a little bit more to yourself. I'm a big fan of like looking at your pet and noticing that like your pet has worth to you no matter what they're doing. [Kendra laughs] You know my pet chinchilla has not done a productive thing in his life and he's perfect, you know nature I think is really good at helping us kind of remember that stuff. And yeah, and then thinking about what are the moments in my life where I felt the most alive and in line with my values, and how can I make a life that has more of that? So, some of those are small steps that… well there are kind of more, bigger existential things that we will always have to deal with, but you know, it's a process.  

Kendra: Yeah. Well and I love that you talk about compassion and curiosity because those are two components that I often talk about with students around, you know… because you know, I see students feel really judgmental about themselves and about their processes and the way in which their work—whether or not they're doing something that's related to their research or they're doing something that's you know, kind of more of a practice—right, like a practice that they're learning, some sort of like somatic practice or you know, transpersonal practice or whatever… that it's so easy for the judgments and the critical thoughts to come in and there really is something that shifts qualitatively when you shift into a place of curiosity and instead of you know, just creating a judgment that this is the way things are but to get curious about what's happening, what that experience is, whether it's for yourself or for somebody else. It opens up such a broader range of possibilities and it also gives space. It gives space to be less reactive and more to be in that place of like, how do I want to respond to this, or what is a way that would be appropriate to respond to this, you know, and of course depending on your position in relationship to another person, you know that response might look different, but I really appreciate that you that you brought those two components in.  

Devon: Yeah, yeah… and as educators we have to do a lot to kind of drop those walls that keep students from telling us those things. Like curiosity combined with kind of showing that we're actually a safe person and that it’s real curiosity. It's not why can't you do this? It's like how can we do things differently? What are what are the things that I'm asking of you that are not making sense or that are not possible, and I think different places where I've taught they've had different cultures and some of them have had more kind of toxic workaholic shaming kind of cultures than others. [Kendra: Yeah] And in those places, I had to really to an appropriate amount be vulnerable with my own students or kind of acknowledge, you know, here are things that I struggle with or you know, if we're talking about mental health stigma I'm going to tell you that like here we are in the psychology class talking about mental health stigma and I'm going to tell you that there are some people that believe that people with mental illnesses or disabilities shouldn't be psychologists and it's a really damaging view. And I'm you know, and I'm a case of why that's not true and why it's very important for there to be people who are neuro-diverse in this career. [Kendra: Absolutely] And once you say something like that, then students will start kind of like opening up to you and saying hey, you know, I've actually been skipping your class because I'm in an eating disorder day treatment program and I'm just so exhausted just processing all of this stuff and like rethinking my whole approach to food that sometimes I just can't be around people especially after lunchtime. And it's like, oh okay now that I like… thank you for trusting me with that information, I know not every professor would handle it right. Let's talk about what trigger warnings do you need for course material? What can we do when you do need to skip class? But most students have been burned so many times that it takes a while to extend that like you can tell me your context thing. 

Kendra: Yeah, and then to really feel that they can be heard in that. Yeah. It just this is more of a personal question, and I'm just curious about you know, since you've gone down this path of research and writing this book, I'm curious about what is you know, maybe one or a couple of the more significant things that have changed for you in relationship to laziness.  

Devon: Oh gosh. I always feel like such a hypocrite talk about this stuff because it's still so hard. [Both laugh] So I feel like I've had a few key moments in my life where I've gone okay, this is not sustainable. I need to really change course. Like deciding after finishing grad school okay, I'm not going to apply to tenure track jobs. I'm not going to be on that grind. I can't do it. I’m gonna do consulting. I'm going to teach classes here and there, and I'm going to do my writing. That was a big moment for me.  

And I've had these other moments along the way like after I started working on this book of like, okay, I need to stop saying yes to all these committee invitations that I get because writing is the thing that's important, but it's like whack-a-mole. I don't know. I have still so many rules in my head about who I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing and things I feel bad about that I just can't… I have to keep… I have to have a go at them and say like, okay… who… is that me, or is that society that's telling me this? [Kendra laughs] What fears and like stigmas are motivating this… so I think it's kind of one of those things that's a little bit of a wormhole or sort of like telescoping maybe is what I'm trying to say. Where the farther you get, the more you realize you have to go and so it kind of you can feel kind of stuck in doing it, but I try not to be a perfectionist about that stuff. About learning the lazy lie and try to just know that these things will keep popping up and see it as like here's a whole new way that I can get free each time. [Kendra laughs] On a good day. 

Kendra: Yeah, I mean, I love that because I think sometimes when you know, when you've written a book and you know, this is an area of research that you've gone deep into, you know, sometimes people can think like she's got it all figured out or they've got it all figured out… and they do this perfectly all the time. And so, you know, it's really good I think for a lot of people to hear that even though you have the landscape, it's still something that you have to work on every single day.  

Devon: Yeah. That's a thing that I hate about most self-help books. It's like this, the voice is so like of the writer is so detached and like ascended, and maybe it's because I'm a researcher rather than a practitioner that I feel more comfortable being like I'm a mess. It's fine. [Both laugh] Let’s just all work on this together.  

Kendra: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've really appreciated this time being in conversation with you, Devon.  

Devon: Thank you so much Kendra. This was great! 

Kendra: Thanks Devon, take care. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
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