Sloth

The thief who steals your rest—and brands the exhausted as lazy, so the truly idle may collect in peace

Nobody wants to work anymore.

I have been hearing that sentence my whole life. My father heard it, and his father before him, and if you dig back into the yellowed papers you will find some red-faced gentleman declaring it in 1922, and in 1894, and very likely on the morning after they finished the pyramids. It is the oldest complaint in the bosses' hymnal, and it has one curious and unfailing feature: it is always said about the people doing the work, by the people who are not. The man who has never in his life lifted anything heavier than a contract looks out over a nation of people working themselves gray, and he sighs, and he says: nobody wants to work anymore.

That is Sloth—but not the sloth the preachers mean, and not the sloth that fellow thinks he's pointing at. The deadly thing, the sixth of our seven thieves, is not the tired worker who'd like to sit down. It is a swindle worked in three parts, and it is one of the slickest in the whole catalogue. First, it brands the people who do all the work as lazy. Second, it crowns the people who do none of it as industrious, and pays them handsomely for their idleness. And third, with the proceeds of that lie, it reaches into the one thing a century of struggle finally won for working people and takes it quietly back. What this thief steals, while everyone is busy arguing about who's lazy, is your rest.

I put Sloth sixth, and he is the sneakiest of the lot, because he does his work disguised as a virtue. The other thieves at least have the decency to want something obvious—Greed wants to grab, Gluttony wants to gorge. Sloth works by accusation. He doesn't steal your wallet; he convinces you that the man beside you is a thief, so that neither of you notices the hand in both your pockets. And the accusation always travels in one direction. It is always aimed downward. Have you ever once, in your whole life, heard a man who lives on dividends called lazy? The word is reserved, with great care, for the people who are the least idle in the entire country.

The first lie of Sloth is that the poor are idle. It is the lie of “nobody wants to work,” of the “welfare loafer,” of the demand that we make a hungry man prove he deserves to eat. And it is a flat untruth. The people this slur is aimed at are working two jobs and three, driving for the app after the shift at the warehouse, holding the country up on their backs at hours when the accusers are asleep. Study after study finds the same plain thing: the great majority of working-age people who lean on public aid already work, or are caring for a child or a dying parent, or are too sick to work at all. The slur is not a description of anybody. It is a tool—a crowbar for prying down wages and prying loose what little help the poor are given, all while keeping the worker too ashamed of the word “lazy” to ask for an honest day's pay.

The second lie is the mirror of the first, and far more brazen: that the rich are rich because they work so very hard. Now, I have known some hard-working people of means, and I begrudge no man an honest reward for honest labor. But let us not pretend about where the great fortunes come from. The largest piles in this country are not earned by the sweat of anybody's brow. They are earned by owning—by rent, by dividends, by the interest on money, by stock that swells while its holder sleeps, by the simple magnificent trick of having had money to begin with. There is an old and honest phrase for it: making money in your sleep. We have somehow turned the literal definition of sloth—being paid for doing nothing—into the highest financial achievement a person can aspire to, and given it gentle names like “passive income” and “financial freedom.”

And the proof that this is the arrangement, and not my opinion, is written plainly in the tax code. The money a man makes by working—wages, the paycheck, the thing you trade your one life's hours for—is taxed at rates that climb toward forty percent. The money a man makes by owning—long-term gains, dividends, the rich man's slumber—is taxed at rates that top out around twenty-four, and for many a comfortable household at fifteen, and for some at nothing at all. There is even a special blessed loophole, “carried interest,” that lets the money managers dress up their wages as ownership so they too can pay the lower rate. Warren Buffett, to his credit, said the quiet part aloud: he pays a smaller share of his income to the government than his own secretary does. The state has looked at the man who works and the man who sleeps on his investments, and it has decided to tax the sweat harder than the slumber.

There is a third face to this thief, and it is the one the old monks would have recognized best—for to them sloth was never mere napping. It was acedia, the failure to do the duty that is yours to do, the neglect of what you are charged to care for. And by that older, truer measure, the most slothful people in America are not the poor at all. They are the powerful who will not do the work of stewardship that their power obliges. The landlord who collects the rent on the first and will not fix the heat by the fifteenth. The men who ran a railroad and cut its crews and deferred its maintenance to the bone, season after season, to please the shareholders—until a town in Ohio woke up to a derailment and a sky full of poison. The state that let a city's children drink from lead pipes to save a few dollars. The men who would not spend the money to weatherproof a power grid, and let a state freeze in the dark. That is sloth—real, deadly, negligent sloth—and it is never the kind that gets a man called lazy. It gets him called a “cost-cutter” and put on the cover of a magazine.

Now we arrive at the theft itself—the thing all that lying is in service of. Because once you have convinced the working man that rest is for the lazy, and that the lazy are contemptible, you can take his rest away from him and he will hand it over with an apology. And make no mistake, the rest was taken, for it was first won. The weekend did not fall from heaven. The eight-hour day was not a gift. Working people fought and bled and went to jail for a hundred years for the radical idea that a human life should contain some hours that belong to the human living it. They marched under a banner with the whole of human dignity written on it in one line: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.

And look how much of it has been clawed back. The United States today stands alone among all the wealthy nations of the earth as the only one that guarantees its workers not one single minute of paid rest—not a day of vacation, not an hour of sick leave, not a week to hold a newborn. Every other advanced country on the globe long ago decided that rest is a right. We decided it is a perk, doled out by the boss's mercy, and a quarter of our workers get none of it at all. Meanwhile the machines have grown so productive that a famous economist, looking at the trend a century ago, predicted that by now we would all be working fifteen-hour weeks and wondering what to do with our leisure. The productivity arrived, every ounce of it and more. The leisure did not. It was produced, all right—and then it was harvested and carried upstairs, like everything else, and the worker who created it was handed a second job, an on-call schedule, a phone that never stops buzzing after dinner, and a gospel of “rise and grind” to make him feel like a sinner for wanting to sit down.

Let me be fair, as I have tried to be with every one of these thieves, because there is something honest standing near this swindle that I will not have trampled. Work is not the enemy. Honest labor is one of the good things of a life, and the worker who takes pride in a job well done is no fool—he is the backbone of everything. And rest is not a vice; it is the other half of a whole life, the half the machines were supposed to give back to us. So the thief here is not work, and it is not the worker, and it is not even the idle rich as people—I bear no man ill will for inheriting a fortune he did not ask for. The thief is the arrangement: the one that pays sloth at the top and punishes the appearance of it at the bottom, that taxes the nap of the wealthy lighter than the toil of the poor, and that has taught a hard-working people to feel guilty for needing the rest their own grandparents won with their blood.

And here, as always, I leave the pulpit to its own business. The old books fret about your personal laziness—the extra hour in bed, the chore put off, a private softness for a Sunday confessional. Let the preachers have your conscience about all that; it is no concern of a labor paper's whether you take a nap. What concerns me is the man who told you that nap was a sin while he collected his dividends in his sleep—and the fact that the richest country in the history of the world cannot see its way to granting its people a single guaranteed day of rest. Sloth's real crime was never an idle afternoon. It was convincing the people who do all the work that rest is something they must be ashamed to want.

Now hear the good news, because this thief, like all his brothers, has been thrown down before—and thrown down precisely by people who refused to be ashamed of wanting their rest. The eight-hour day was the very first great demand of the American labor movement, and after a long and bloody fight, the people won it. They won the weekend, that ordinary miracle, so completely that most folks today have no idea it was ever in doubt. They dragged the children out of the mills and gave them back their childhoods. They won Social Security, which is nothing more nor less than the promise of rest at the end of a working life, a dignity in old age that no one should have to earn twice. Every one of those was the people taking their rest back from the thief who said they hadn't earned it.

And the rest of the world shows us daily that it can be done and the sky does not fall. Other rich countries guarantee their workers four, five, six weeks of paid vacation a year and remain perfectly prosperous. Some have passed a “right to disconnect,” so that when the worker goes home, he is actually permitted to be home. They have proven the thing the “rise and grind” preachers swear is impossible: that a rested people is a productive people, a healthier people, and a freer one. We can do all of it here. Guarantee the paid leave. Shorten the week as the machines keep doing more of the work—and hand the leisure back to the people who made it. Tax the idle fortune at least as hard as the working wage. And the next time someone tells you nobody wants to work anymore, you tell him the truth: the people want to work just fine. What they will not do any longer is work themselves into the grave so that a man who does nothing can sleep a little softer.

Eight Hours For What We Will

So when they come to take your rest—and they will come dressed as your own conscience, whispering that a real go-getter would answer the email at midnight, that only a loafer needs a day off, that your tiredness is a character flaw and not a wound—do not believe the part where it's your fault. You are not lazy. You are tired, and you are tired because you are carrying a country on your back while being told the load is light. Reclaim the rest. Refuse the slur. Demand the leisure the machines have already earned for all of us, and refuse to be ashamed of it. And do it together—because one worker who takes a day off is a target, but a whole shop that downs tools at the eight-hour mark is a movement, and a movement is how every hour of rest you have ever enjoyed was won in the first place.

Eight hours for work. Eight hours for rest. And eight hours for what we will—for the kids, the garden, the fishing hole, the long good idleness that is not a sin but the whole reason we labor in the first place. They have spent a hundred years trying to make you believe that rest is for the lazy. Rest is for the living. Take it back. And don't you dare lose hope.

Notes On The Record