Kim Kardashian once said, ‘Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days. You have to surround yourself with people that want to work’. ‘If you put in the work, you will get results, it’s that simple.’
All the hours of not working I have put in to watch Kim Kardashian girl-boss her way through this millennium, only for her to berate my lack of work ethic. That hurts, Kim.
To be fair to Kimberly. K, the context of this quote is directed at women in business. I might be a woman but I’m not exactly in the business of doing much. So, I didn’t take this one to heart. I merely laid back and let the algorithm do the work, taking me down a delightful stream of memes. Some people were really quite upset by Ms. Kardashian’s words, and I argue, rightfully so.
Her sentiment echoes the ‘why don’t homeless people just get a job?’ rhetoric. I suspect her billions must be blinding her from all the hard working women that don’t ‘get results’ because it is their labours being exploited in the first place. It’s that simple, Kim.
The internet’s algorithm looped the sound of her voice over and over, Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days. I begin to question that maybe this isn’t about Kim’s work ethic at all, maybe this is about her fear of laziness. Her abjection to it.
I was realising it was this that was actually hitting a nerve for me. Possibly because I felt that way too. I had internalised this abjection, to my own laziness and reluctantly yet undeniably toward others.
There is just something so very aversive about somebody not being bothered to do anything. When I think lazy, you think fat. Fat, Lazy, Fat, Lazy. And we all know being fat is wrong. So is being poor.
Now, I obviously don’t think being fat is wrong, nor lazy, nor poor. It’s not that they’re wrong. It is just that we fear them being right. Right?
Some of this fear is surely practical. My upper lip curls at the undone dishes. The pit of my stomach sinks at the sight, the tableau of too many days spent in bed. Surely my repulsion and anxiety keep me in check to look after my health and environment.
I have been named lazy before. My atypical depression outed me in my absence from school. I remember a friend admitting they just thought I was lazy for not going. One day they thought they would surprise me by visiting me after school only to find me in my room binge-watching TV shows on my laptop. I was so embarrassed and exposed. I didn’t understand my depression then and I didn’t know how to explain myself. I was overwhelmed and sedated. So, I simply internalised the title of lazy and blamed myself for a lack of effort.
Maybe that’s why I dropped out of school. Because I was just one of the nobodies that didn’t want to work these days.
Then I was called lazy when I moved out of home and house-shared with someone that relied on their productivity like their life depended on it. It was inspiring. She would wake up before sunrise - I imagine because I was never awake. She would roll out her yoga mat then work up an appetite to break her fast. Which she would do with a meal of home-made kefir and a hot breakfast. It was to satiate her while she went all the way into the city to work tirelessly on her PhD thesis. Who knew she had the time to think about what I was doing (which was nothing) and to call me lazy for it. Why did it matter to her? Why did my lessened activity bother her?
People have an abjection towards laziness because it threatens their reality of what hard work does for them. ‘If you put in the work, you will get results, it’s that simple.’ The possibility that hard work won’t get you ‘results’ does not align with the fairytale billionaire narrative, and that terrifies people. We want to avoid that narrative like the economic downfall that comes after the plague, except for the part where the rich get richer. We have built a world that means for some people, if you don’t work hard, you’ll die. And for others, if you don’t work hard, you’ll still be cushioned with wealth, but people will say you did nothing to deserve it and you will die from the embarrassment. Maybe Kim Kardashian is working so hard to be the furthest away from death. Kim gets her fucking ass up to work to know she’s alive. She is working so hard, she is close to accomplishing immortality. She works hard to be happy. So, I imagine for her it doesn’t make sense to see somebody happy to not work hard.
It makes me sad that people are conditioned to see others that way. That their first reaction to doing less is that they are lazy, bad, and unworthy, that lazy is death. As if lazy is a plague infecting people with a cloud of apathy and low energy that will soon consume us all. Hustle, Hustle, Hustle away from destitution. Don’t stop for a second, let your pleasure become your work. We can sleep when we are dead.
I’m tired and this hustle makes me want to gag. It retches at the back of my throat as if clinging to walls of my oesophagus and clawing its way back up. My body rejects the hustle like a foreign object, causing inflammation and illness. It is not one of us, get it out! The bile in my stomach bubbles, my pits sweat. Snot is dripping out my nose and I splutter saliva, bent over mopping my brow and upper lip. It is too much to bear. I am overcome and collapse into an assortment of pillows and velvety throws.
Aaah, that’s better. I can see what Kim K means when she talks about hard work. It is hard work resisting being lazy. I’ll be honest and say, I’m not really interested in that work. I’m simply happy to be lazy.
I pluck a feather from my pile of lazy and think, whatever happened to the ‘Dolce Far Neinte’? The sweetness of doing nothing. That is something I strive for.
Isabella Wilcock is experiencing inevitable entanglements with the world and looking to talk about it. She is a Melbourne-based creative writer finishing a Bachelor’s Degree at RMIT University. Her original works in non-fiction and poetry explore contemporary spirituality, contentious comfortability, and the sweet, deep ramblings of the ‘in-between'. Isabella has previously written for the comedy skit show Art’s Revue in 2018, the collaborative blog Sovereign Spaces in 2021, and most recently acted as Creative Director for Writer’s Inferno. When she finally gets her fucking ass up to work, her writing will be able to be found on her online folio.