Emily had worked hard to make it to her senior year. majoring in engineering, she was usually hitting the books until late into the evening while her roommate was watching a movie or hanging out with friends. Her hard work paid off: she got good grades, earning a GPA high enough to keep her scholarship. The senior design project course was a final rite of passage, but not for the reasons she first expected. She knew it would require buckling down even more to produce an innovative design that built on what she had learned. She knew that she would expect as much or more from herself as her professors expected. What she did not anticipate was the difficulty of working with a teammate who did not pull their own weight. She had seen Matt in some of her courses, but he didn’t seem to take them seriously enough. Somehow he still passed and made it to his senior year. They were assigned to the same team in the first week of the design course, along with two other students. They all dove into the work and contributed the blood, sweat, and tears that would form a great design. Except Matt. He showed up late to team meetings -- if he showed at all. There was always an excuse, some urgent reason that kept him away or prevented him from getting his part done. What work he did contribute was hurried with little thought or work, and outcomes that were half-baked or painfully wrong, In a word, Matt was lazy. Like Tom Sawyer trying to get the neighborhood gang to paint the fence for him, Matt was always looking for an angle. He was forever seeking that magic shortcut that would get him the result without the effort. Matt repeatedly tried to convince the rest of the team that he was the big idea man, not the worker bee. He would claim his contribution was leadership and vision whose value could not be measured by effort alone. Emily wasn’t buying it. Matt wasn’t leading the team; rather, his idleness was weighing them down.
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines sloth as a “disinclination to action or labor.” Sloth is the sin of laziness. A lazy person does not pull their own weight. They doze off instead of dig in. They lollygag instead of labor. They do not take responsibility for their well-being, hoping others will take care of them. They do not contribute to the team, hoping teammates will cover their deficiencies. A lazy person does not take their turn. A slothful person does not do their fair share.
One form of laziness is procrastination. If our delaying tactics result in avoiding legitimate responsibilities or dutiful work, whether intentional or not, it becomes the sin of sloth. “Sluggards do not plow in season; so at harvest time they look but find nothing.” (Proverbs 20:4) In school, you might have had classmates who postponed studying until the night before the big exam. They would suddenly be in a panic, and the less scrupulous would devise ways to cheat, even asking those that studied to help them in their deceit. At work, you may have participated in a team where someone was constantly late finishing their part of the work. This either diluted the quality of the product or resulted in others having to put in extra time to cover the gaps.
A lazy person sometimes explains their disdain for work by claiming to be looking for shortcuts to be efficient. However, their true motivation is the avoidance of exertion. An addict to the lottery is looking for such a shortcut, hoping that a big payoff will mean they never need to work another day. Investors that get duped into a sure pay-off are similarly gambling under the guise of investment, willfully ignoring that something too good to be true probably isn’t.
At first, it may be difficult to discern whether an engineer seeking a shortcut is optimizing the work or avoiding the work. I understand the drive to optimize. I often catch redundancy because I tend to notice patterns. I spot repetition and rhythm in visual images, poetry, episodes of a television show, and more. When I am writing software and I recognize I am writing something redundant, I tend to refactor my code to make it more efficient, avoiding duplication. When I notice I am repeatedly performing the same complex calculation, I build a script or spreadsheet to compute it for me. The challenge in deciding whether to automate (or not) is to balance the extra cost of creating the automation against the savings in labor. If it takes me an hour to write a script to save a few seconds on a calculation I will only perform a dozen times in total, I have wasted the effort. However, if it saves me minutes of time on thousands of calculations, my side effort has paid off handsomely.
The pursuit of efficiency is a significant driver for technology development. Since efficiency is sometimes the excuse for laziness, it may be worthwhile to consider the connection of technology to the sin of sloth. We often pursue technology as a means of saving labor. A labor-saving instrument enables at least two options that take advantage of the savings: increased leisure or increased productivity. A lumberjack armed with an ax might cut down three trees in an hour, but armed with a chainsaw can cut down three trees in just a few minutes. The lumberjack could now choose to take much longer breaks or to cut down a larger number of trees. If I am that lumberjack, is my purpose and calling to take breaks? Is it to cut down as many trees as possible? Perhaps the labor savings can be used in some wiser manner? Perhaps I can now spend more time considering which trees are the best to cut down this season for the quality of their wood and the overall cultivation of the forest. Perhaps I can now spend more time considering safety for myself and my co-workers when I drop the next tree.
Another form of sloth occurs when we lose sight of priorities, spending an inordinate amount of time on an unimportant activity to the detriment of important work. This muddling of our priorities can happen when we stop paying attention and lose focus. Before we know it, we have spent an hour doom-scrolling through bad news or swiping past Facebook posts -- with no time left for the important task of the day. Muddling priorities can also be a more conscious choice. First, we may choose to misprioritize out of fear, because we have anxiety about the difficulty of the work we should be doing, so we simply avoid it. Second, we may choose to misprioritize for purely selfish reasons, putting ourselves above others, choosing pleasure, power, or other self-indulgences instead of fulfilling our duty.
If sloth is the avoidance of effort and this is sinful, then it seems the effort is something God desires us to pursue. Why? When receiving a gift that is not as lavish as some others, but that was given with sincerity, we sometimes say “It’s the thought that counts.” What we really meant is that the giver intentionally put effort into the gift. It is not solely the thought that counts -- it is the effort. When we strive toward a goal, we are working. Not all goals are good goals. To discern good work for ourselves, we must examine its purpose.
The purpose of work
A lazy person will sometimes actually work hard at avoiding work. Mark Twain immortalized this type of laziness in his descriptions of Tom Sawyer scheming to convince other people to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence, thereby relieving him of the task. Do work and play have a legitimate purpose in day-to-day human life? Or is work a necessary evil to pay for our play? Considering his success at convincing others to whitewash the fence in his place, Tom mused about the nature of work.
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
Tom realized that work is in the eye of the beholder. However, Twain lures us into a false dichotomy by contrasting work with play, as if work was drudgery to be avoided and play was enjoyment to be pursued.
There is another misleading contrast in the Tom Sawyer mythos that can easily dupe us. We can falsely define work as any task that is forced on us, as any activity that someone else directs us to do. Play is then the tasks we choose to pursue of our own free will. While the boss might assign us tasks that we would not choose ourselves, we do generally have a choice about whether to work for that boss. It is not indentured servitude. Most of us have some choice in our vocation, and this autonomy is a blessing. While we choose to stay on a job, it helps us work through the occasional tasks that are not to our liking. I loved teaching engineering, but I disliked the drudgery of grading. However, it was my choice to teach and I understood the importance of feedback to students, so I did the work.
Modern society paints a certain paradigm of work: the white or blue-collar worker who draws a paycheck for their effort, reports to a boss, and is employed under contract to a corporation. Such a definition is painfully narrow, resulting in a system of worth based on how much one is paid. Work becomes oppressive because we are “working for the man.” Such a definition also results in subtle disrespect of low-paying jobs, careers in non-profit organizations, and a wide spectrum of work that is not paid but is a noble effort towards a purpose. Think of teachers, artists, parents or grandparents caring for young children, adult children caring for elderly parents, and so many other vocations that are valuable out of any proportion to the pay. One blessing of COVID has been the discovery of a new respect for certain types of work. Sure, we already admired front-line workers such as doctors and nurses, and we now appreciate them even more with the pandemic. But we have also learned a new respect for grocery store clerks and delivery drivers. We have gained a new appreciation because of the exposure they risk to supply some of our needs.
If work is not defined simply by drudgery or coercion, then how do we define it? What is its purpose? One could say the first-order purpose of work is to put food on the table. Paul said as much in one of his letters: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) The wisdom literature of the Old Testament tells us this as well: “a sluggard’s appetite is never filled” (Proverbs 13:4) Not only will the lazy person miss a meal, their other basic needs will also go unmet, such as shelter: “through laziness, the rafters sag; because of idle hands, the house leaks.” (Ecclesiastes 10:18) What is the ultimate result of sloth? “The craving of a sluggard will be the death of him, because his hands refuse to work.” (Proverbs 21:25)
We might stop there, defining work to be a means to an end. Work is purely instrumental, a necessary drudgery. Work provides subsistence at least. If there is anything worthwhile beyond that, it is perhaps a means to fund good causes, give to the poor, to fund spreading the good news. However, I suspect there is more to work than merely drawing a paycheck. I believe work also reveals the imago Dei. It demonstrates that we are created in God’s image. We are appointed by God as stewards of his creation, to cultivate and care for it. That is, we are called by God to work. I suspect that work is thus a deeply human characteristic. At its root, work is an intentional effort directed towards a purpose. When we strive toward a goal, whether paid or not, whether physical or mental exertion, we are working. When that goal is aligned with kingdom purposes, when it glorifies God, when it demonstrates love for our neighbor, then that work is itself a sacrifice pleasing and acceptable to God.
Designing technology is work that reflects our Creator and fulfills our role as stewards cultivating the creation. Unfortunately, the choice of which technologies to design and build are driven largely by the ability of customers to pay for the product. This makes sense to a degree, but it tends to make technology a luxury for the wealthy. It takes extra diligence and passion to design for the less well-off in society, e.g., those with physical challenges that need physical aids or the poor who live in areas that lack clean water. If we only design for the wealthy, are we enabling laziness? An argument could be made that someone is going to design it and get paid, so it might as well be me. Yet we could choose to design something nobler, even if the pay is little or naught.
When I first approached writing an article on the deadly sin of sloth, I wondered if I would have much to say. Most engineers I know are not lazy, and I consider myself reasonably diligent. To my surprise, as I started jotting down ideas, it struck me that studying sloth also led me to think about the definition and purpose of work -- and then I had more than would fit in one article! Stay tuned for part 2, where we will explore the purpose of rest, whether technology might make us lazy, and how to seek technological diligence.
