The child’s world is play. Unwillingly and only on compulsion does it perform imposed tasks. (It would have even its education made a kind of play.) Many parents worry about this and complain that their children take no pleasure in work, seem to have no sense of duty, forget to do their school work, and have to be forced to do their exercises. Stupid parents! If they only stopped to think they would realise that this frank display of an impulse to laziness is a sign of their children’s sanity. For we often enough observe the opposite phenomenon. Children who take their duties too seriously, who wake too early in the morning lest they should be late for school, who are always poring over their books, scorning every opportunity to play, are usually “nervous” children. Exaggerated diligence is one of the first symptoms of neurosis.
One who can look back upon his own childhood must admit that the impulse to indolence is stronger than any other childhood impulse. I recall how unwillingly I went to high-school. Once I read in a newspaper that a high-school had burned to the ground and that the pupils would not be able to go to school for several weeks. For days I and my friends were disappointed as we looked at our own grey school building that stood there safe and sound. Had it not burned down yet?! Were we not to have any luck at all?!
Who is not acquainted with the little sadistic traits that almost all children openly manifest? Such a sadistic motive was our secret hope that this or that teacher would get sick and we would be excused from attendance at school. What a joy once possessed the whole class when we discovered that the Latin teacher was sick just on the day when we should have had to recite in his subject! That was a grand prize!
And how the child detests always being driven to work! Always the same disagreeable questions: “Have you no lessons to do to-day?” “Have you done all your lessons?” The profoundest wish of all who do not yet have to provide for themselves is once to get a chance to be as lazy as their hearts might desire.
But we adults, too, who know the pleasure of work and of fulfilled obligations, long for idleness. For us, too, the vice of laziness is an exquisite pleasure. We find it necessary continually to overcome the tendency to laziness by new little resolutions. In the morning laziness whispers; stay a little longer in your warm bed; it’s so comfortable. Another few seconds and the sense of duty prevails over the desire for idleness. In the afternoon we would love to spend an hour in pleasant day-dreams. Work conquers this wish too. And with what difficulty we get out of the performance of some task in the evening! It is an everlasting conflict even though it is in most cases a subconscious conflict with the sweet seducer of mankind: laziness.