Laziness

Related concepts include sloth, a Christian sin, abulia, a medical term for reduced motivation, and lethargy, a state of lacking energy.

Despite the famed neurologist Sigmund Freud's discussion of the "pleasure principle", Leonard Carmichael noted in 1954 that "laziness" is not a word that appears in the table of contents of most technical books on psychology".

[6][failed verification] This desensitization leads to dulling of the neural patterns and affects negatively the anterior insula of the brain responsible for risk perception.

In these circumstances, laziness can manifest as a negative coping mechanism (aversion), the desire to avoid certain situations to counter certain experiences, and preconceived ill results.

[11] It has also been shown that laziness can render one apathetic to reactant mental health issues such as anger, anxiety, indifference, substance abuse, and depression.

Frédéric Bastiat argues that idleness is the result of people focusing on the pleasant immediate effects of their actions rather than potentially more positive long-term consequences.

Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) acknowledges a small portion of the people have only seen labor and identifies the cause of this indolence to the rise of "slave-holding" society.

John Pendleton Kennedy was a prominent writer in romanticizing sloth and slavery: in Swallow Barn (1832) he equated idleness and its flow as living in oneness with nature.

Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) contrasts realist and romantic perspective of "laziness" and calls attention to the essential convention of aimlessness and transcendence that connects the character.

In Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952) and Good Country People (1955) she depicts spiritual backwardness as the cause for disinclination to work.

The lack of any social function which could be valued equally with a luxurious lifestyle was closely portrayed through lives of displaced aristocrats and their indolence.

The lack of meaningful work was defined as a void which aristocrats needed to fill with pompous culture; Walker Percy is a writer who has thoroughly mined the subject.

But a counter-argument is that the Indonesians, living very precariously, sought to play it safe by not risking a failed crop, given that not all experiments introduced by outsiders had been successful.