I’m a lazy person.

What I mean by this is that I do not do my homework; I miss deadlines at work because I’d rather play games than do the work; I have projects I’m excited about but instead of starting them I scroll aimlessly through tumblr. I have occasionally failed to turn in important assignments because I didn’t do them because I didn’t feel like it.

My whole life I’ve thought of this like a personality trait. I can’t do things unless they’re interesting because I’m lazy. I tend to get in trouble with jobs and at school because I’m lazy. I hated the personality trait, I wanted to change it, I aspired rather desperately to be a hard-working person and caused myself a great deal of pain trying to imitate one, but I was still thinking of it as some sort of fundamental tendency, some sort of fact about me.

And then someone asked if I’d tried taking modafinil (a wakefulness drug that is commonly used in my social circles to improve focus and performance and/or skip sleep). 

On modafinil I am a diligent and hardworking person. I can’t watch TV or read books or play games because they bore me: they are not intellectually demanding enough. I have a deeply felt need to be accomplishing things and I go about rather systematically doing so. I am not perfect - I still waste some time blogging and so forth - but I easily accomplish three times as much, and I enjoy every minute of it, and I finish projects and do well in classes and arrive places on time and fulfill obligations. 

The difference is especially startling because I take it, on average, once a week (to avoid growing accustomed to it), so I really really notice the contrast. And it’s a subtle contrast. I’m not more capable of exerting willpower - the things that are hard off modafinil just aren’t hard while on modafinil.  I don’t feel like a different person - I feel exactly the same, I just accomplish stuff. Laziness wasn’t really part of my personality, because the laziness went away and everything else stayed exactly the same. 

I know a lot of people who have a lot of self-loathing over being lazy. Even if they also have executive dysfunction problems, even if they can’t work for health and sickness reasons, they’re convinced that they are, on some level, bad people because they are lazy. If that’s true, then I’m a bad person five days a week, and it takes 50mg of modafinil to make me a good person. 

And if that doesn’t seem right to you, if it doesn’t seem like there’s anything morally relevant there, if it seems like an alternate!me who never encountered modafinil wouldn’t actually be any less virtuous or any less valuable, then maybe thinking about hardworkingness as a virtue isn’t such a good idea.

Now I can sort of anticipate the reaction this will get, which is “but if we don’t praise hardworkingness as a virtue, then people will work less hard, which is actually a problem at least until we revolutionize all of society, so we’ve kind of got to keep condemning lazy people and celebrating hardworking people, don’t we?”

And the answer is, I really don’t think so. See, I used to think that there were lazy people and hardworking people, and I was one of the lazy ones but I’d be hardworking if I actually cared, so clearly I didn’t, so clearly I was a bad person. This was not, in fact, good for my productivity. 

Now I realize that hardworking people mostly find work more rewarding than I do, are better capable of juggling tasks in their head than I am, and filter out distractions better than I do.  And I can use that! “Stop being lazy!” was a terrible thing to yell at my brain. “Filter distractions better - for instance, by blocking websites and studying in environments you register as useful for studying!” is a better thing to yell at my brain. “Start caring!” is a totally useless thing to hammer yourself with. “You don’t find work rewarding in the way that you do when you’re on modafinil, so you’d better come up with a plan to make this rewarding if you want to make it happen” is a good one. 

Moving from ‘this is a personality deficit’ to ‘this is a brain chemistry thing’ enabled me to move from ‘the way to fix this is to be a better person’ to ‘the way to fix this is to use duct tape and glue to work around these stupid holes in my brain’. 

Modafinil doesn’t work for everyone. For most people I think it just makes them less sleepy, it doesn’t alter their executive function very dramatically. But I think lots of people who think of themselves as a lazy person could benefit from hearing ‘it’s not a virtue; if it were, drugs can make me into a virtuous person. It’s a weird communication problem in your motivation center, and that’s absolutely something to fix and work around, but you won’t fix it by trying to be a better human being, any more than you can run a faster mile or turn a better handstand by trying to be a better human being.’

note: this post, like all my posts about modafinil, is written by a close friend who uses modafinil. nothing in this post should be construed as advice to engage in illegal activity.