The Wit’s Guide to Sloth

Or, the myth of laziness

Rottin’ with Ruffles, Joseph Wright of Derby, 1781

Is sloth truly a sin, or is it — like lust, gluttony, and anger — a secret virtue? Trick question! Sloth doesn’t exist.

“Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.”
— Floyd Dell

Yes, the South American animals are real, and I have recent photographic proof:

But sloth, as in laziness, is not actually a human attribute of note. The academics Rachael Meager and Karl T. Muth made this point a few years back on

Noah Smith

’s Substack under the headline “People Aren’t Lazy (Including You!),” and since it’s paywalled, here are the juicy bits. First, they call up the clever Schrodinger’s Immigrant fallacy, “wherein immigrants are stereotyped as simultaneously stealing your job and too lazy to work.” Then they conclusively demonstrate that laziness is only ever defined as “the inverse of a specific puritanical productivity ideal.” If someone spends the day playing catch with their kid, is that lazy? What if they’re playing catch with their dog? What if they’re playing video games? All possible answers are “arbitrary judgments about which expenditures of time are most meritorious.”

“As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.”
— Samuel Johnson

And then they hit upon a truth so clear that of course Mencken had already said it. In their words, “To call someone else lazy requires less humility, less empathy, and less introspection than admitting one’s own anger and disdain at the prospect that someone else might be enjoying herself.” Or as the Sage of Baltimore put it:

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
— H.L. Mencken

OK, but what about those individuals who are paid to do a job and … don’t? This does happen, or so I have read, and it might actually be to their employer’s benefit. This management mind grape was gifted unto me early in my storied career by Craig Courtice. This short filmmaker who isn’t very tall would gesture around the Don Mills newsroom of the National Post to quickly make the point that there are four types of employees. His categorizations, I would later learn, were drawn from a military management strategy credited to Baron Von Hammerstein-Equord (don’t worry, he was a good German) and outlined thusly by Quote Investigator:

The lesson is that an industrious officer can ruin more things before breakfast than a lazy officer can foul up all day. Or in the newsroom, a clever art critic who produces one brilliant piece a month is worth infinitely more than a mouth-breathing hack whose work drags down the IQ of everyone in the blast radius.

“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness.”
— Agatha Christie

If sloth were to exist, which it doesn’t, except in the form of this awesome dude:

Then I would make this declaration: Sloth must be analog. If you are lazily scrolling through your phone, you are not being idle; you are being manipulated. Just as I posited in my absolute banger on puttering (GWQ No. 253), you can’t putter about online. It’s like wandering around a casino, where every element of the experience is designed to manipulate you. It’s simulated indolence, which means someone worked hard to make your laziness feel hollow.

“It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.”
— James Thurber

Or put it this way: It’s unpaid labour on behalf of the tech companies who need you to put in your hours as a monthly active user. There’s a delightful British idiom for when workers end a shift or go on strike: Down tools. As in, they threatened to down tools if their needs weren’t met. Your phone is a tool, and you can (should!) put it down. Especially now that you’ve finished reading this week’s Get Wit Quick.

“Alas! The hours we waste in work
And similar inconsequence,
Friends, I beg you do not shirk
Your daily task of indolence.”
— Don Marquis

---

Last issue of April means last chance to shout out

Mateusz Napieralski

, the artist behind this month’s Riposte Card. Admittedly, it’s an odd fit with this week’s theme — more creating sounds like more work! Less reasoning, at least? — but we happily contain multitudes. And for just a few bucks, your mailbox can contain said multitudes, too.

---

“It’s not the idle who move us but the few
Often confused with the idle, those who define
Their project in life in terms so ample
That nothing they ever do is a digression.”
— Carl Dennis

Did you notice how I uncharacteristically called my previous issue on puttering an “absolute banger?” Seems like it’s time to address pride! Or not.

That was Get Wit Quick Issue No. 304, drawing on themes of slacking, rotting, loafing, etc., that have become a real theme around here. It’s not lost on me that I’ve never ever (what, never?) missed a week of this newsletter in more than five years and yet I also never ever (hardly ever!) miss an opportunity to rhapsodize about laziness and doing eff-all. Multitudes! The newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck, which was modelled after IBM Selectric typewriters. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I told you to put down your phone already, but if you’ve yet to do so, tap the ❤️ below before you go touch grass.