Most of the so-called lazy have simply found themselves in the wrong place
Most of the so-called lazy are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biographies of great people, we are struck with the number of ‘idlers’ among them. They were lazy so long as they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to excess.
Very often the idler is but a person to whom it is repugnant to be forced to spend all their life on rote work while they feel they have exuberant energy which they would like to expend elsewhere. Often, too, they’re a rebel who cannot submit to being fixed all their life to a certian occupation in order to procure pleasures for their employer, while knowing themselves to be far the less stupid of the two, and knowing their only fault to be that of having been born in a hovel instead of coming into the world in a castle.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 12. Objections (p. 214).