Laziness (also called indolence) is a disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so. It is often used as a pejorative; related terms for a person seen to be lazy include couch potato, slacker, and in Australian slang, bludger.
Despite Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the pleasure principle, American psychologist Leonard Carmichael notes that ‘laziness is not a word that appears in the table of contents of most technical books on psychology… It is a guilty secret of modern psychology that more is understood about the motivation of thirsty rats and hungry pecking pigeons as they press levers or hit targets than is known about the way in which poets make themselves write poems or scientists force themselves into the laboratory when the good golfing days of spring arrive.’
A 1931 survey found that high school students were more likely to attribute their failing performance to laziness, while teachers ranked ‘lack of ability’ as the major cause, with laziness coming in second.
One of the seven deadly sins in Catholic thought is sloth, which is often defined as spiritual and/or physical apathy or laziness. Sloth is associated with wickedness in one of the parables of Jesus. In the books of Proverbs it is stated that laziness can lead to poverty. The demon Belphegor is thought to be its chief demon.
Economists have differing views of laziness. French liberal theorist, Frédéric Bastiat argues that idleness is the result of people focusing on the pleasant immediate effects of their actions rather than potentially negative long-term consequences. Others note that humans seem to have a tendency to seek after leisure. A contributor to the Von Mises Institute writes, ‘For all these arguments against laziness, it is amazing we work so hard to achieve it. Even those hard-working Puritans were willing to break their backs every day in exchange for an eternity of lying around on a cloud and playing the harp. Every industry is trying to do its part to give its customers more leisure time.’
Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises himself writes, ‘The expenditure of labor is deemed painful. Not to work is considered a state of affairs more satisfactory than working. Leisure is, other things being equal, preferred to travail (work). People work only when they value the return of labor higher than the decrease in satisfaction brought about by the curtailment of leisure. To work involves disutility.’
It is common for animals (even those like hummingbirds that have high energy needs) to forage for food until satiated, and then spend most of their time doing nothing, or at least nothing in particular. They seek to ‘satisfice’ their needs rather than obtaining an optimal diet or habitat. Even diurnal animals, which have a limited amount of daylight in which to accomplish their tasks, follow this pattern. Social activity comes in a distant third to eating and resting for foraging animals.
When more time must be spent foraging, animals are more likely to sacrifice time spent on aggressive behavior than time spent resting. Extremely efficient predators have more free time and thus often appear more lazy than relatively inept predators that have little free time. Beetles likewise seem to forage lazily due to a lack of foraging competitors. On the other hand, some animals, such as pigeons and rats, seem to prefer to respond for food rather than eat equally available ‘free food’ in some conditions.
From 1909 to 1914, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease sought to eradicate hookworm infestation from 11 southern U.S. states. Hookworms were popularly known as ‘the germ of laziness’ because they produced listlessness and weakness in the people they infested. Hookworms infested 40 percent of southerners and were identified in the North as the cause of the South’s alleged backwardness.
The Daily Omnivore 
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