Not doing something is actually neutral because it can happen for healthy reasons as well as not so healthy ones. Labelling someone as "lazy" implies that not doing stuff is wrong and is a moral failure of sorts.
In my understanding, "lazy" literally means "one who does not do what he ought to". It is completely descriptive, provides absolutely no new information beyond the obvious, and is only used to assign a value judgement to someone.
And yet people use it in circular arguments all the time: he is not doing homework because he's lazy. If we expand "lazy" to "does not do what he ought to", we get: he is not doing homework because he does not do what he ought to. So sky is blue because all skies are blue... Not really useful for anything except guilt tripping a person, because laziness is bad.
I think there's more to it than that. "Lazy" implies that you don't have a reason for not doing what you ought to do. For example, I might not do something for a myriad of reasons:
- I might have more important things to do
- I might be ill
- I might be missing some prerequisite
- I might be resting because I need my energy for something else
- Someone told me not to do the thing I ought to do
In all of these cases, I'm not doing what I ought to do, but I'm not lazy. Lazy implies that there is nothing preventing me from doing what I ought to do.
If that's the case, lazy is something that never ever happened. There is always a reason. Here are a few more of them:
- I don't want to do it, but I'm afraid to tell you this;
- It seems the task requires a degree of sustained focus that is beyond my capacity;
- What? I'm hyperthyroid;
- I'm busy being afraid of something that could happen to me soon, over which I have no control, or the only control I have is to turn a probable bad thing into 100% sure bad thing; because of that, I am fully on auto-pilot and unable to process anything that requires expending effort to stay focused;
- What? What task? Oh sorry, I was busy trying to calm myself down from an anxiety attack and completely forgot. But now you reminding me is shooting my anxiety back, so kindly please GTFO; I may or may not do the thing, depending on how long it'll take me to calm myself down again.
Etc.
"Lazy" is a pure judgement. It doesn't care about reasons - it's a statement that "this person cannot be relied on". Which would be fair if used only to manage expectations, but it's actually used as a blunt weapon - a crude attempt to make someone reliable by guilt-tripping and peer pressure.
EDIT: a few more reasons:
- Whenever I attempt this task, my mind blanks out. Don't know why. But it's so bad that I can't even break things down into smaller steps.
- Two or three times, I poured all my heart and effort into doing this, and not only you weren't satisfied with the results, you actually ridiculed me for them and accused of not caring, while at no point explaining what your definition of "good result" is. So guess what, this thing got crossed off the list of possible things I could be doing, at a subconscious level. I'm unable to recognize this is a task to be done, unless you request it directly. Which I hope you won't. Fuck you.
- (4 year old version of the above) I tried my best, you didn't even notice, told me I did nothing, and even screamed at me. I'm now experiencing a panic attack when you ask me to do it, which blanks my mind out and freezes me in place. You calling me lazy and screaming more and throwing away my toys doesn't help. Good job at parenting you're doing there.
- (with apologies to 'coldtea) The reason you see me constantly "relaxing" and "having fun" is because I'm constantly 5 minutes away from curling up on the floor and crying. There is no "fun vs. work", there is only "fun vs. pain".
All of the reasons I listed are things I've either experienced or dealt with people who were experiencing them.
That's what you say when you refer to yourself. The problem is with how that term is used by people to describe others.
And personally, I've had plenty of days when, if I didn't know better (or if I was an external observer of myself), I'd definitely say I'm too lazy to play videogames. Most commonly, this happened when, after being overwhelmed with work and responsibilities for a while, I suddenly found myself having one or more free days, like really free, completely for myself. Suddenly, all the things I wanted to do instead of working - including videogames I've been dying to play - didn't seem all that interesting anymore.
My Steam collection is full of games - good, interesting games - that I bought and then barely even played, because it turned out they only seemed fun when I was trying to force myself to focus on work, and lost all allure when I didn't have to.
>In my understanding, "lazy" literally means "one who does not do what he ought to".
Not exactly, it means "one habitually does not do what they ought to, because they'd rather relax, avoid hard work, have fun, and so on, and they're not hard-working or even just-enough working to not fall behind".
> It's a value judgment based on behavior observed.
So it's exactly what I said in the first comment - "lazy" just means "one who doesn't do what they ought to". So it's completely meaningless, except for the part of describing behavior, and cannot be used as an explanation - i.e. "he didn't do his homework because he's lazy" is a circular statement.
