First Things First: You’re Not Actually Lazy
How many times this year have you planned a whole new life on a Sunday night — new plan, new playlist, new you, only to forget about it by Wednesday? You know the spiral. High on the promise of a fresh beginning, Sunday you decide tomorrow will be the start of everything: the 6 a.m. alarm, gym, twenty pages a night, the journal, the language app you’ll finally open, and you might even buy that cute planner. Then Monday in fact happens, and by Wednesday the only thing you’ve written in that planner is the date, and perhaps your name.
Here’s the part nobody admits: the problem was never a lack of wanting. You wanted all of it, at the same time, with the same intensity. And funny enough, that turns out to be the fastest way to do nothing — when every option feels yours equally, choosing one feels like giving up the other five. Or ten. So you don’t choose, and keep all of them alive in your head perfectly untouched, only waiting for the day the “right” one finally becomes obvious. What happens is that day might never actually come, and the ambition that was supposed to push you forward ends up being the thing that keeps you still.
So no, you’re not lazy. Lazy people don’t care, and you obviously care way too much. It is mostly fear wearing a tricky disguise — which ends up causing even more fear and guilt. It’s the worry that if you start, the real thing will come out clumsier than the immaculate version in your head, so you keep still and blame your willpower. But it was never about that — there’s something deeper going on, and you’re far from alone in it.
The Most Perfectionist Generation on Record
The word for it is perfectionism, and before you roll your eyes, this isn’t a “you” problem, but more likely a generational diagnosis. Psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill found that this feeling that keeps everyone expecting you to be flawless has jumped by about a third since the late ’80s. So, the pressure is real, and it was wholeheartedly handed to us.
Most of us get one thing wrong about it, though. Perfectionism isn’t the same as wanting to do your best. Brené Brown, a researcher who’s spent two decades studying shame and vulnerability, says it is sort of a shield. We think being flawless will protect us from judgment, so we hide behind “I’ll start when it’s perfect,” and that’s exactly what keeps us stuck. Healthy standards push you to get better at something, while perfectionism is mostly about making sure no one, including you, ever sees you fall short.
We’ve actually seen this exact fear being portrayed before, such as in movies, songs, literature, and even philosophy. It’s on Amy in Little Women, quietly giving up painting because if she can’t be a genius, she’d rather not try at all. It’s in the director in Black Swan snarling at Nina that she could be brilliant, if only she weren’t such a coward. The feeling behind Taylor Swift‘s Mirrorball lives in the same place, that quiet exhaustion of someone who keeps spinning and performing so the cracks never show. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues we’ve become our own exhausted bosses, cracking the whip on ourselves. Underneath all of them is the same fear: having to try at all is proof you’re not good enough.
Now picture all of that, plus a phone in your hand. Your feed never shows the reality, but instead, a thousand picture-perfect, extremely productive lives. It leaves out the messy first drafts behind them, and quietly makes you ask why you’re the only one who hasn’t moved yet.
Stuck Isn’t One Thing
A video essay on being ambitious but lazy ends up in a similar place, only coming at it from a totally different angle. The creator, Lindsiann, takes that big blurry “stuck” feeling and splits it into a few specific types, which helps, because they don’t all have the same fix.
The first is the one you already know: too many options. It’s that same wanting-everything feeling from the very start, and the video pins it to a perfect image — Sylvia Plath‘s fig tree in The Bell Jar. Plath imagined her future as a tree where every branch was a different life. One fig was a husband and kids, one a big career, one years of traveling, one a life spent writing. She wanted all of them, so she couldn’t pick one, and she just sat there while the figs rotted and dropped. (Barry Schwartz has a less poetic name for it, the paradox of choice.)
Then Lindsiann adds two more possible types that, at first, don’t sound like perfectionism at all.
One is comfort. Your life isn’t bad; it’s just kind of fine, and getting up to change it feels like way more effort than what it’s worth. There’s a whole Russian novel about exactly this, Goncharov’s Oblomov, about a man so comfortable he can barely get out of bed. But as I wrote this, I kept circling back to the thought that comfort is never really just comfort. Sit with it, and you usually find fear underneath, the fear of swapping the perfect life you’ve pictured for a real one that might let you down. The fear of the unknown. Which is just perfectionism again, in its sneakiest outfit.
The last one is the real exception — the rare case where the problem really is a lack of wanting, the one thing we ruled out at the start. In an old Herman Melville story, there’s a clerk named Bartleby who meets every request with the same flat line, “I would prefer not to.” If you’ve sworn you want something for years and still haven’t moved an inch, maybe there’s a little Bartleby in you, quietly telling you that you don’t want it anymore, not really.
Notice that whatever shape it takes, the fix is never just trying harder. Almost all of it comes back to the same quiet belief, that if it can’t be perfect, it’s safer not to start at all.
The Way Out Isn’t Being Perfect
So if the way out isn’t trying harder, then what is it? Mostly, it’s having the guts to take the first step and letting yourself be bad at things. Every trap we just walked through runs on one rule: whatever you make has to be perfect right away, or it isn’t worth making at all. Break that rule, and most of the paralysis goes with it.
And look, writing about all this is a lot easier than living it. Maybe the hard part was never understanding the trap, but working up the nerve to pick one thing you want and make it real. So you do it the way you get into a freezing pool: you don’t go in slowly, one step at a time — you just jump, before the part of you that wants to overthink it gets a chance.
Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, calls perfectionism “the voice of the oppressor.” Her fix is almost insultingly simple. Let yourself write a bad first draft, because a bad draft can be edited into a good one, while the flawless version in your head just sits there forever, glowing and useless.
And that thing you keep waiting to feel, the sense of being ready or finally sure, doesn’t actually arrive before you start. It gets built afterward, one clumsy attempt at a time. You don’t get to feel ready first and act second. You mostly just decide to go while you’re still scared, and the feeling catches up later.
You were never lazy. You were just waiting for a permission slip you could have signed yourself the whole time. So sign it, and let the first try be a mess. As John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden, “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
The article above was edited and translated by Ana Beatriz Carvalho Sapata.
Liked this type of content? Check Her Campus Cásper Líbero home page for more!