The Answer to “Not Wanting to Work Is Just Self-Indulgence” Lies in What Morality Does Not Measure

You do not want to work. Having thought it, the work of cancelling the thought begins. Everyone is doing it. There is a living to be made. This is what gets called self-indulgence.

The cancelling tends to fail, because the next morning you are back in the same place.

The reason the question of whether it is self-indulgence does not end the return is not that the answer is wrong. It is that the question has been set on a yardstick that carries no scale on the side of conditions.

So whether the answer given is yes, it is or no, it is not, the return does not stop. What was exchanged is the verdict; what is being measured stayed the same.

This is not to say that answering the question is pointless. The answer it is not self-indulgence has a real effect. Getting off the state of blaming yourself takes being told so once from outside. The reason things ease a little immediately after reading it is that the effect is genuine.

What is not working is the step after that. The verdict changes and not one of tomorrow’s conditions moves. And if the reason you do not want to work sits on the side of conditions, that reason will not emerge however precisely the verdict about your attitude is refined.

Two neighbouring states can be set aside first. Where the object of this feeling has already narrowed to the form of employment — where working itself is not the problem but being employed is — Restating the reason for not wanting to be employed from the structure takes that on directly. Where the same feeling comes out in the language of aptitude, as this workplace does not suit me, Not being cut out for employment takes apart the form of employment itself.

What remains is the stage before that narrowing, and everything from here on concerns that stage. The object is still working in general, and the thing has stopped short at the verdict of self-indulgence. At this stage the lack of narrowing looks like the problem, when it is a matter of order. Where the object has not narrowed, what is needed is not resolve. It is a scale on the side of conditions.

Whether you should leave now is not judged here. The facts that make up the judgement are held on your side.

And the appearance of this feeling is not a signal of malfunction. It may be picking up, in a form that has not yet become words, that something in the present conditions does not fit. It is not treated as something to extinguish.

What follows looks in order at where the general answer stops, why the word behind the accusation shuts out talk of conditions, what the yardstick of morality fails to measure, how the condition side divides into six, which of the six rest works on, and how the refusal can be read differently.

Why the Answer “It Is Not Self-Indulgence” Stops There

Search for not wanting to work and the answers tend to lean towards one shape: this is not a defect of yours.

What gets offered as grounds is the universality of the experience. Survey results to the effect that around ninety per cent have thought the same thing are often attached in this context. So many people have experienced it, the reasoning runs, that it cannot be a defect of the individual.

A list of causes follows. Relationships at the workplace, a mismatch with the content of the work, the sense of not being fairly evaluated, the gap between expectation and reality. Burnout is named as a recognised occupational phenomenon. Then the responses. Acknowledge how you feel, analyse the cause, work on the part you can solve yourself, take rest, talk to your manager, add a skill, change jobs.

Japanese-language articles answer the same question with one extra element in it. The question is put there as is not wanting to work amae — roughly, self-indulgence — so the answer arrives as a verdict rather than a diagnosis: it is not self-indulgence. Grounds are offered in the form of the universality of the experience, on the argument that with this many people experiencing it, it cannot be an individual defect. The moral word makes visible a shape the English answer keeps implicit, and the location of the answer is the same in both: the side of attitude and state.

This construction is kind. It does not blame, and it offers practical responses.

What the answer moves, however, is one thing only. It replaces the verdict this is a defect of yours with the verdict this is not a defect of yours. The yardstick stays the same, and both sit on a scale that evaluates your attitude. And as long as the yardstick is the same, the morning-by-morning return does not stop. Being told it is not a defect does not move the fact of going to the same place tomorrow.

There is a further structural limit. Articles of this kind are often written by publications dealing with job changes and careers. So the terminus of the response tends towards find an environment that suits you, because that is the range the publication can move within. Not writing about what lies outside that range is not dishonest.

For the reader, though, it means reading without the range being visible. About what the form of working itself is demanding, not one line is written. What is not written gets received as not existing.

The way the ninety per cent figure is used is also worth looking at. It is cited in the context of many people experience this, so it is not abnormal. A reassuring use.

The same figure, though, admits another reading. If ninety per cent feel the same thing, that is an observation about the distribution of conditions and not only about the distribution of individuals. If a symptom appears in ten per cent of people, it is reasonable to look for reasons specific to that ten per cent. If it appears in ninety per cent, the first candidate is the condition all ninety per cent are held under.

There may of course be factors on the individual side common to ninety per cent as well. What can be said here goes only this far: there is no reason for the condition side to drop out of the candidates. The general article still uses the figure only in the reassuring direction.

What the Word Behind the Accusation Originally Pointed At

The Japanese word behind this accusation, amae, became widely known when the psychiatrist Takeo Doi made it the object of analysis in a book published in 1971. The amae there is not a word of censure. It pointed at the shape of a relation in which dependence is offered on the premise that the other party will accept it. Doi noted that a precisely corresponding word is hard to find in other languages, and worked from there towards how relationships are built.

So in its original sense, amae is a description of a relation. It is not a verdict of good or bad. And it required acceptance on the other side to hold at all. You cannot do it alone.

Current usage has moved twice from here.

One is that it became a word of verdict. That is self-indulgence functions as censure, not as a description of a relation.

The other is that the other party disappeared. In the original sense it occurred between two people; now it is used as a property inside an individual. The phrase a self-indulgent person has no other party in it.

These two changes decide the shape of the question. Is not wanting to work self-indulgence is set as a question completed inside you alone. So the answer too becomes an answer about your attitude.

Return to the original sense and the shape of the question changes. If it is the shape of a relation, what should be asked is not are you being self-indulgent but what relation holds between you and the work.

And to ask about a relation, one side alone will not do. As much as your attitude, it means looking at what the work is demanding.

This shrinkage has a practical effect. A word that looks at only one side of a relation makes the other side unaskable. When told that is self-indulgence, all that can be returned is a defence of your own attitude. Try to speak about conditions and it is received as changing the subject.

So from the moment the word appears, the conversation can no longer return to conditions. The word itself has already narrowed what can be handled.

And this narrowing works more strongly when said to yourself than when said by another. Another person can be argued with; against yourself no occasion for argument arises. A this is self-indulgence spoken internally becomes a conclusion without being tested.

Returning to the original sense of a word is not to say that current usage is wrong. Words move, and the moved meaning is the one that actually communicates. What was confirmed here goes only this far: the word as now used has shrunk into a form that looks at only one side of a relation.

What the Yardstick of Morality Does Not Measure

The yardstick of self-indulgence or not measures the strength of your attitude. One end of the scale is enduring and the other is throwing it in. On this yardstick, the sense of not wanting to work is recorded as a tilt towards the throwing-it-in end.

This yardstick measures one thing extremely well: which of two people placed in the same condition will stay longer. That prediction is in fact correct to a degree.

The yardstick, however, has an axis with no scale on it. The conditions themselves.

Two people are in the same workplace; one feels they do not want to work, the other does not. The yardstick of morality reads the difference as a difference of attitude. The conditions of the two, however, are not necessarily the same. The scope they cover differs. The scope they can decide differs. Who they work with differs. Their position within the mechanism of evaluation differs.

The conditions differ and only the attitudes are being compared. This comparison holds only where conditions are identical, and conditions are almost never fully identical in a workplace.

There is a further problem of direction. The yardstick of morality takes enduring as the positive direction. Whoever endured longer is higher on the scale. So continued use of this yardstick delays the noticing of a worsening in conditions. The scale does not fall while the worsening is still being endured.

This produces a practical problem rather than a figure of speech. The fact that demands are higher than last year gets converted into the self-evaluation I am enduring less well than last year. At the point of conversion, the information about higher demands is what disappears. If the sense of not wanting to work is teaching something, it is about conditions rather than attitude — and it is being translated before it arrives.

Continue the translation and a second problem appears: no vocabulary for conditions grows.

Using only the yardstick of attitude, the words available for description are two: enduring and not enduring. Two words cannot distinguish what is happening. So the sentence that comes out is the same every time — consulting a superior, explaining to family, looking back alone. Nothing beyond it has been hard lately can be said.

Unable to say it, the other party cannot move conditions either, because all that can be returned to it is hard is do not push yourself. A shortage of vocabulary connects directly to an absence of response.

Hold a scale on the side of conditions, conversely, and description changes. Say it is not the volume but not knowing what will arrive and when that tells, and the object that can be moved becomes specific. Whether the other party can move it is separate; at least what would have to move for things to change gets into the conversation.

Opening the Side of Conditions into Six Items

How, then, is the condition side to be seen? There is a framework here with an accumulation behind it.

The psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter recast wear from work not as a property of the individual but as a mismatch between person and job. On that basis they organised the areas in which mismatch occurs into six (Leiter & Maslach, 2003, Research in Occupational Stress and Well-being, 3, 91–134).

First, volume. The state in which the volume of work demanded exceeds what can be recovered from.

Second, the scope that can be decided. The state of not being able to decide what is done and how.

Third, what comes back. Not only money, but recognition and the felt sense that what was done reached someone. With this blank, wear is faster at the same volume.

Fourth, relations with people. Isolation, or continuing conflict.

Fifth, fairness. States such as people who did the same thing being treated differently, or decisions being made without their reasons explained.

Sixth, alignment of values. The state in which what you hold to matter and what the work demands face opposite ways.

The important point about these six is that each can be misaligned separately. With volume appropriate, zero scope to decide still wears. With monetary reward sufficient, values facing the other way still wears. On the second item there is a separate accumulation showing that the combination of load and discretion tells more than load by itself, and that line of work is taken on directly in Not being cut out for employment.

And the single phrase I do not want to work comes out in the same sound whichever of the six it comes from. The output being identical, it cannot be distinguished from outside. Where it cannot be distinguished, the discussion collapses into the single dimension of wanting to work or not. On a collapsed single dimension, only attitude can be discussed. That collapse is how the yardstick of morality gets to function.

Let me name one point on which this framework differs decisively from the yardstick of morality. All six are defined as relations between two terms. Not that the volume is large, but that the volume demanded and the volume recoverable do not match. Not that the reward is small, but that what is handed over and what comes back do not match.

So two people in the same workplace holding different values is not a contradiction. What can be recovered from differs by person, and what is received as reward differs too. There is no need to bring in a difference of attitude to explain one enduring and one not.

Defined as relations, mismatches can be narrowed from either side. For the second, fifth and sixth, however, the width by which the individual can narrow them is small. The scope that can be decided, the fairness of treatment, and what the organisation holds to matter move very little with how you apply yourself.

Of the Six, What Rest Restores and What It Does Not

One response often recommended is rest. This is a correct response, and the range in which it works is fixed.

Mapped onto the six, what rest works on directly is the first, volume. Against a state exceeding what could be recovered from, recovery time is added. This addresses the cause.

It works indirectly on the fourth, relations with people, since distance lowers the temperature of a relation.

Against the remaining four, rest does not work directly. The scope that can be decided does not widen by resting. The amount that comes back, the fairness, and the alignment of values are, at the moment of returning from rest, the same as before it.

This is the substance of the experience I rested and came back to the same place. It is not that rest failed to work; it was not what rest works on.

And the interpretation of that experience makes the problem worse. The fact that nothing changed after rest tends to be read as so it was my problem, on the premise that if conditions were the cause, resting should have restored it — a premise that holds only where the cause was the first item, volume.

There is a further step. The second item — the scope that can be decided — is temporarily maximised by resting. During leave, what to do is decided by you. So the sensation during leave is good and falls the moment of return. This drop is not because the leave was too short but because that item was satisfied only during the leave.

The same happens with the sixth, alignment of values. During leave, time can be spent on what you hold to matter. On return it cannot. The size of the drop expresses the size of the misalignment directly.

So the dip after a holiday is not a record of failure. It is a measurement indicating which item is misaligned. What felt heaviest on coming back tells you which of the six it is.

The same division applies to responses other than rest. Take a change of scene works slightly on the fourth, relations with people, and on nothing else. Change how you think works, in a limited way, only on the sixth, alignment of values. Whether the place it moved to is genuinely a position on your own side, however, is hard to verify afterwards. Whether the misalignment was narrowed or simply put out of view cannot be distinguished at the time.

Change jobs can work on all six, since the conditions are replaced wholesale. The values at the destination, though, are not knowable in advance. So changing jobs has the character less of a response than of a redraw. The probability of drawing well changes with whether the misaligned item has been identified.

Draw without identifying and you tend to draw a destination misaligned on the same item, because the criteria used in choosing are the same as last time. Part of the experience of two or three moves with the same result is explained from here.

The Distance Between “I Do Not Want to Work” and “I Do Not Want to Work in the Form I Have Now”

Seen through the six items, it becomes visible that the sentence I don’t want to work was not accurate.

The subject of the sentence I do not want to work contains the act of working in general. Of the six items, however, not one belongs to the act itself. Volume, discretion, reward, relations, fairness, alignment of values — all of them are items about the conditions of working.

So what is actually being refused is not working but working under the present conditions.

The distinction may look like word-play. Distinguishing, though, adds one thing that can be checked: whether the refusal goes away when the conditions differ.

After leaving music, to build a base for living, I worked for a period as a salesperson in a consumer electronics store. The floor had quotas, which of course could not be moved from my side. For the first stretch, the quota figure was what I took as my criterion too.

Partway through I changed the criterion, stopped selling for the quota, and did only one thing: put in front of the person the combination that cost them least. No hard selling was used at any point. The close rate still went up, people began asking for me by name, and there were occasions when a customer left something behind as thanks after a consultation.

What moved was one thing only: what I took as my criterion. The floor, the products, the hours and the quota figure all stayed as they were. Mapped onto the six, what moved was the sixth, alignment of values, and through it the third, what comes back.

And the side that did not move matters more. The design by which raising your figures raises next month’s target never moved at all. One item can move without the other five following. What I could move from my own side and what I could not divided there, in practice.

The same shape occurs in territory not called work. Absorbed in something chosen by yourself, you lose track of time. You build something out without being asked. That time has the six conditions in place: the volume is decided by you and so is what is done, what is made comes back to you, who you deal with is chosen, questions of fairness do not arise, and the alignment of values is by definition not misaligned.

The same person behaves differently when the conditions change. For anyone holding that observation, not wanting to work cannot be explained by a property of the person alone. That conditions are in it can be said this far.

Where a large change of conditions leaves the refusal at the same strength, conversely, the case sits outside this framework. What to look at then is not a table of conditions but sleep, physical health, and where necessary the medical side. What is handled here is the range in which the value moves with conditions.

Once Income Enters, Three of the Six Move to the Other Side

The absorbed time produces no income, so the objection it is possible because it is a pastime holds.

The objection contains a correct part. Once income is involved, several of the six are necessarily constrained. With another party present, the scope that can be decided narrows, and the alignment of values is never complete. The place where all six are unconditionally in place is the place where no payment arises.

The degree of constraint, however, differs by form. In the form of receiving a commission and delivering, three of the six — the second, third and fourth — are placed on the other party’s side. What is done and how far is set by the commissioning side, the judgment of the result sits there too, and who you work with is not chosen. In the form of making something and leaving it in place, all three stay on your side. At the same level of income, the breakdown of conditions differs.

Draw the line at the presence or absence of income, then, and this difference disappears from view. The sentence of course there are constraints, it is work is correct, and while staying correct it covers over which constraint belongs to which form.

Let me take the natural objection early. That three stay on your side does not make the form of making something and leaving it in place better in every case. What stays is the right of decision, not the result.

In that form the first item, volume, comes at you harder. Since the only person deciding what is done and how far is you, there is also nobody else who can call a halt. In such a place, volume runs upward.

And the third item, what comes back, gets slower. In the commissioned form a verdict returns the following month in the shape of a figure; in the form of making and leaving, the return takes long. Within the same nothing has come back, whether it has not arrived yet or will never arrive is not separable at that point.

A change of form, then, is not an operation that improves all six values at once. It is a rearrangement of which items you take onto your own side. Items taken on can be moved when things go well and cannot be blamed on anyone when they do not. Change the form without counting this in, and the case enters the way of failing that comes from skipping identification.

And there is something worth checking about the absorbed time. Explain the absence of refusal during those hours by saying it was enjoyable, and the account returns to the original measure. Whether something is enjoyable is a variable on the side of attitude.

Rewrite the same hours from the side of the conditions and it runs like this. During those hours someone decided the time to begin, and that was you. Someone decided how far it would go, and that was you. Someone judged the result, and that was you. Three rights of decision were gathered in one person.

The word enjoyable does not appear once in that description. It still explains why no refusal arose. And the description is the more practical of the two, because enjoyment cannot be prescribed while the location of the rights of decision can be moved.

An Answer to “So Should Everyone Go Independent”

If conditions are the cause, move to a form where conditions can be changed — which is to say, everyone should go independent. That objection is bound to come.

It does not come to that. For two reasons.

First. Independence does not improve all six items. The first, volume, tends to increase afterwards, since sales and bookkeeping are done by you. The fifth, fairness, appears less as a problem because the object of comparison disappears, and it comes back in the different form of the other party cuts you without explaining why.

What reliably improves is the part of the second item concerning time and place. Everything else depends on the form the independence takes. As set out where the breakdown of conditions by form was checked, where independence is taken in the form of receiving commissions, the second, third and fourth stay on the other party’s side. Changing the type of contract alone does not change the breakdown of conditions.

Second. Which of the six is heavy differs by person. For someone for whom the fifth, fairness, is heaviest, independence is not necessarily an improvement. An organisation has procedures at least; individual dealing has none. The same holds for someone for whom the fourth, relations, is heavy. Isolation appears more strongly after independence.

So the conclusion here is not go independent. It is identify which of the six is misaligned. Identify it and the options that can move it narrow. Among them may be a transfer, a negotiation about how you work, or a change of form.

Where the refusal has already moved on to the arithmetic of how, then, do I live, How to live when you do not want to work turns on amount, continuity, and who decides separates what the answers arriving from the side of spending do not solve.

Skip identification and go straight to changing the form, and all that remains is the experience of having changed and nothing changing. And that experience tends to strengthen the original conclusion, so it was my problem after all. A change that skips identification carries a route back to the yardstick of morality.

This way of failing has a feature that is hard to see. The larger the change, the heavier the conclusion when nothing changes. If a transfer changed nothing, it was not the department still serves. If leaving the company and going independent changed nothing, the only interpretation left is it was my problem, because the stock of available explanations has been used up there.

So the size of a change is not an index of seriousness. The larger the change made without identifying, the less can be recovered when it misses. Measuring first is cheaper, and seeing which of the six is misaligned does not require leaving. A few weeks of recording where you are will give a fair idea.

The Condition Under Which Refusal Can Be Read as Accurate Information

The refusal is more accurately treated neither as something to be extinguished nor as something to be obeyed. Treating it as a measurement leaves the most information.

Treating it as a measurement comes to this. First, record the day it appeared. Next, put what happened that day against one of the six items. Volume, nothing decidable, nothing coming back, relations, unfair treatment, or misaligned values.

Continue for a number of occasions and a distribution appears. The six seldom scatter evenly; it tends to skew to one or two.

The item it skews to is where your conditions are actually misaligned now. Once that is known, the candidate responses settle. For volume, a negotiation to move volume or a resetting of scope. For the scope that can be decided, a negotiation over discretion or a move to a form that holds discretion. For what comes back, a design in which arrival is visible.

The distribution does not tell you when the refusal will go. Nor does it go the following week. What the distribution hands you is a hold for shifting that sense from information about yourself to information about a situation.

Write I am someone who does not want to work and there is nowhere to go from the point where the writing ends. A sentence stating a property closes there. Write over this month, the refusal appeared concentrated on days when the scope I could decide was zero and it does not close, because the object to check next is named inside the sentence.

You do not want to work, you cancel the thought, and the next morning you are in the same place. That return did not end because the yardstick used by the cancelling had no scale for conditions. On an axis with no scale, measuring repeatedly yields the same value. However much strength of will is added there, the axis itself does not grow.

And the question of whether it is self-indulgence and the question of how conditions are misaligned are both heading for a single point: whether this state can be continued. What differs is that the first looks for its answer on the side of attitude alone, while the second looks at both sides of the relation. Recalling that the word behind the accusation was originally a word for a relation, the second is nearer the older shape of the word.

Move the place where the question is put over to the side of conditions and the same sense turns from an object of verdict into a measurement. What remains after the turn is the work of measuring. Whether to move conditions where you are or to change the form itself is something you can choose once the distribution is in front of you.

The second item and the third connect directly to the form in which income arises, and that structure is handled as a whole in Getting out of the labour-intensive form. Where the item of volume is heaviest, Why raising productivity does not leave you with free time handles where the gains from efficiency go. Where the third item appears on the monetary side, start at Before you negotiate a higher rate, look at who is setting the figure.