The populist narrative of the "lazy job-refuser" is both scientifically false and dehumanizing. Human fulfillment does not come from passive inactivity, but from experiencing agency and purpose. Psychological research demonstrates that all human beings naturally seek the state of Flow—the creative immersion in a task that brings meaning to life. Instead of forcing unemployed individuals into outdated bureaucratic programs or stigmatizing them, we must build structures that allow everyone to contribute meaningfully to the common good.
For me, the Social Democrats stopped being what their founders – Karl Liebknecht, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Käthe Kollwitz, for example – once were a long time ago. One of the worst figures, when it comes to the SPD, is I think Gerhard Schröder, who called the worst war criminal of modern times a “flawless democrat”, is devoted to him to this day and keeps up a male friendship, a bromance, with him. It’s simply unbelievable.
Just as bad, I find, are the statements of a Lars Klingbeil – still finance minister for now, probably not for much longer – who stood up and said: “We make policy for the hard-working people who get up early in the morning.” I find that statement very worrying, because it suggests that there are people who are hard-working, and then there are others who are lazy, who lie around idle and are a burden on us. And if you push that thought further, then we end up very quickly – or maybe not so quickly – but we end up back at “Arbeit macht frei”, work sets you free. That’s the logical consequence: if there are people who are hard-working – the so-called high performers, whose lives have value – then of course they’ll enjoy privileges, while the “lazy” ones who are a burden on us – those we have to say goodbye to, in whatever way.
And I find that absolutely catastrophic, because there are demonstrably no lazy animals, and in the biological sense we are animals – mammals, to be precise. And you can ask scientists: they’ll tell you that in the scientific sense there are no lazy people. For 300,000 years none of us was lazy. What has been proven is that we feel at our best and happiest when we reach a state of flow, the so-called flow. And we reach flow when we create something, when we can pursue an activity that really suits us, that we have a talent for – then we forget everything around us and we’re happy.
When we’re lying in a corner somewhere, we’re unhappy. When we can’t get up in the morning, something is weighing on us: maybe we have depression, maybe we’re so close to burnout that we simply can’t go on – but we’re not lazy. And that’s why this myth of so-called idleness – or even worse: laziness – is not just a myth, it’s a dangerous propaganda narrative. And I resist it with everything I have: every life of every human being, and of every animal too, is valuable!
And forcing someone back into “bread and butter”, to “reintegrate”, is the wrong way. We have a great many terms suggesting that we only recognise people if they somehow produce productive added value – above all in the sense of physical work, the way it happened on the assembly line or the way it used to be in the Ruhr: grafting, when the miners dug the coal or the steelworkers smelted the iron. Those are grafters, they’re hard-working, that’s progress.
So we need a new image of what it means to be human. Say goodbye to the idea that there are lazy people or hard-working people. There are only people, and they are neither lazy nor hard-working: we are happy or unhappy. We are tired or well rested. We are in a good mood or a bad mood. These are states we all go through, regardless of where we stand in society, on which rung, in which class we move. Stop with these narratives that classify us according to our worth. We need a new approach – a human approach.
What do you take away from this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
