Devon Price Quotes

“If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.”

“At some point, even the most voracious of readers needs to pull the plug and stop the constant drip of facts, figures, and meaningless Internet fights.”

“Clearly a very lazy person, someone who just needed to work harder to bring themselves out of poverty.”

“Here are some indications that you may still be associating productivity with goodness:

- When you get less done during the day than you anticipated, you feel guilty.
- You have trouble enjoying your free time.
- You believe you have to 'earn' the right to a vacation or break.
- You take care of your health only in order to remain productive.
- Having nothing to do makes you feel 'useless'.
- You find the idea of growing old or becoming disabled to be incredibly depressing.
- When you say no to someone, you feel compelled to say yes to something else to 'make up' for it.”

“I found that by advocating for our right to be 'lazy', we can carve out space in our lives for play, relaxation, and recovery.

I also discovered the immense relief that comes when we cease tying our self-image to how many items we check off our to-do lists.”

“I realized then that my struggles were part of a much bigger social epidemic, something I’m calling the Laziness Lie. The Laziness Lie is a deep-seated, culturally held belief system that leads many of us to believe the following:

Deep down I’m lazy and worthless. I must work incredibly hard, all the time, to overcome my inner laziness. My worth is earned through my productivity. Work is the center of life. Anyone who isn’t accomplished and driven is immoral.”

“If you're entitled to moments of rest, of imperfection, of laziness and sloth, then so are homeless people, and people with depression, and people who are addicted to drugs. If your life has value no matter how productive you are, so does every other human life.”

“The Laziness Lie has three main tenets. They are: Your worth is your productivity. You cannot trust your own feelings and limits. There is always more you could be doing.”

“The Laziness Lie is a belief system that says hard work is moraly superior to relaxation, that people who aren't productive have less innate value than productive people.

It's an unspoken yet commonly held set of ideas and values. It affects how we work, how we set limits in our relationships, our views on what life is supposed to be about.”

“The Laziness Lie is a deep-seated, culturally held belief system that leads many of us to believe the following: Deep down I’m lazy and worthless. I must work incredibly hard, all the time, to overcome my inner laziness. My worth is earned through my productivity. Work is the center of life. Anyone who isn’t accomplished and driven is immoral.”

“The Laziness Lie is a deep-seated, culturally held belief system that leads many of us to believe the following: Deep down I’m lazy and worthless. I must work incredibly hard, all the time, to overcome my inner laziness. My worth is earned through my productivity. Work is the center of life. Anyone who isn’t accomplished and driven is immoral. The Laziness Lie is the source of the guilty feeling that we are not “doing enough”; it’s also the force that compels us to work ourselves to sickness.”

“These types of people often try to cram every waking moment with activity. After a long day at work, they try to teach themselves Spanish on the Duolingo app on their phone, for example, or they try to learn how to code in Python on sites like Code Academy.”

“Wasting time is a basic human need. Once we accept that, we can stop fearing our inner 'laziness' and begin to build healthy, happy, well-balanced lives.”

“We have all been lied to about laziness. Our culture has us convinced that success requires nothing more than willpower, that pushing ourselves to the point of collapse is morally superior to taking it easy. We've been taught that any limitation is a sign of laziness, and therefore undeserving of love or comfort.”

“We live in a world where hard work is rewarded and having needs and limitations is seen as a source of shame. It's no wonder so many of us are constantly overexerting ourselves, saying yes out of fear of how we'll be perceived for saying no.”

“When employees are unable to slack off using the Internet, they find other ways to mentally escape. They 'waste' time making cups of tea, sharpening pencils, or popping into coworkers’ offices to say hello.”

“When you lose power over your own life, you don’t have much reason to stay energized and motivated. So, you protect yourself emotionally by checking out and giving up.”

“Work is the center of life. Anyone who isn’t accomplished and driven is immoral. The Laziness Lie is the source of the guilty feeling that we are not 'doing enough'; it’s also the force that compels us to work ourselves to sickness.”

“If you view young people as 'entitled' for mourning their lost youth and frayed connections, then you're still treating the pandemic like it's some kind of game you can win by accruing enough good-boy self-sacrifice points.”

“There are several mechanisms for why people seem 'less autistic' during a fever.

One is lower demand being placed on you when you're sick – the other is that a fever lowers cortisol, the stress hormone!

Together, this means you seem less disabled and in a real way, you are!”

“Almost every Autistic person I spoke to has found that in order to build a life that suits them, they’ve had to learn to let certain unfair expectations go, and withdraw from activities that don’t matter to them.

It’s scary to allow ourselves to disappoint other people, but it can be radical and liberating, too. Admitting what we can’t do means confronting the fact we have a disability, and therefore we occupy a marginalized position in society — but it also is an essential part of finally figuring out what assistance we need, and which ways of living are best for us.”

“Autistic people are constantly having to invent our own unique ways of getting things done. We use extensive research, digital tools, and a variety of little sneaks and cheats to brute-force our way through activities that NT people don’t even think about.”

“For Autistics, this level of scripting and pre-planning is normal. It gives us a comforting sense of mastery and control. However, when neurotypical people figure out we’ve put this much time and thought into activities that are 'basic' to them, they tend to find it very off-putting.

So for masked Autistics, blending in isn’t just a matter of figuring out the right hacks. We also learn to hide the fact we’re relying on such hacks at all.”

“I noticed that there were clear patterns in which kinds of Autistic people succumbed to this kind of fate. Autistic women, transgender people, and people of color often had their traits ignored when they were young, or have symptoms of distress interpreted as 'manipulative' or 'aggressive'.

So did Autistic people who grew up in poverty, without access to mental health resources. Gay and gender nonconforming men often didn’t fit the masculine image of Autism well enough to be diagnosed. Older Autistics never had the opportunity to be assessed, because knowledge about the disability was so limited during their childhoods.

These systematic exclusions had forced an entire massive, diverse population of disabled people to live in obscurity.”

“I started hanging out with group members outside of the group itself, and found I wasn’t ashamed to be a visibly identifiable member of a 'weird' crowd anymore. Instead, I felt accepted.”

“Interestingly, adults are only shamed for having an obsessive interest if that interest is a bit too 'strange', and doesn’t come with the opportunity to rack up a lot of achievements or make a lot of money.

People who routinely complete eighty-hour workweeks aren’t penalized for being obsessive or hyperfixated; they’re celebrated for their diligence. If an adult fills their evenings after work learning to code or creating jewelry that they sell on Etsy, they’re seen as enterprising.

But if someone instead devotes their free time to something that gives them pleasure but doesn’t financially benefit anyone, it’s seen as frivolous or embarrassing, even selfish.

In this instance, it’s clear that the punishing rules imposed on Autistic children reflect a much broader societal issue: pleasure and nonproductive, playful time are not valued, and when someone is passionate about the 'wrong' things, that passion is discouraged because it presents a distraction from work and other 'respectable' responsibilities.”

“It’s neurotypicals who categorized autism as a social disorder. Autistic people don’t actually lack communication skills, or a drive to connect. We aren’t doomed to forever feel lonely and broken.

We can step out of the soul-crushing cycle of reaching for neurotypical acceptance and being rejected despite our best efforts. Instead, we can support and uplift one another, and create our own neurodiverse world where everyone—including neurotypicals — is welcome.”

“Many masked Autistics are sent to gifted education as children, instead of being referred to disability services. Our apparent high intelligence puts us in a double bind: we are expected to accomplish great things to justify our oddness, and because we possess an enviable, socially prized quality, it’s assumed we need less help than other people, not more.”

“Many neurodiverse people suffer from Autistic inertia. The same heightened focus that makes us so good at studying our special interests for hours also makes it challenging for us to get off the couch and attend to the overflowing trash.

To an external, neurotypical observer, it doesn’t look like we’re struggling. It just looks like we’re being 'lazy'. Almost every neurodiverse person I’ve spoken to has been deemed 'lazy' numerous times by exasperated parents, teachers, and friends.

People see us sitting frozen, incapable of taking action, and assume it’s because we don’t care or lack willpower. Then they admonish us for being apathetic and unreliable, which leaves us feeling even more paralyzed by anxiety.”

“Masking also obscures the fact that the world is massively inaccessible to us. If allistics (non-Autistics) never hear our needs voiced, and never see our struggle, they have no reason to adapt to include us.

We must demand the treatment we deserve, and cease living to placate those who have overlooked us.”