In 2018, American workers left 768 million vacation days on the table. People don’t want to embrace laziness.

“When I see how many vacation days went unused, I don’t just see a number—I see 768 million missed opportunities to recharge, experience something new, and connect with family and friends,” U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow said.

But is ignoring your inner sloth the right way to go?

Inspired by fantasy writer Jules the PenPaladin’s tweet reminding people they’re not hive insects, tumblr users created a thread, where they have been looking at the animal kingdom to see if being sluggish is natural.

Spoiler alert: it is.

Image credits: SQLPi

Jules the PenPaladin doesn’t recall how the idea for the tweet popped into her head, but the writer suspects she just read something about hustle culture, or how people are encouraged “to work themselves half to death and frame it as a virtue.”

“I had probably also had some thoughts on how people tend to not see themselves as animals, and how we are all quite concerned with doing things ‘right,’ being extraordinary, being our best selves,'” she told Bored Panda. “We don’t look at a raccoon and say to it ‘Are you being the best version of yourself? Are you trying your hardest? Are you good enough?’ No, that would be absurd. So why is it not absurd to accept that we, too, are just animals, little clods of dirt who woke up for a little while? (That mental image courtesy of Seanan McGuire.)”

In many ways, we’re talking about toxic productivity — workaholism. The new term, however, can be a little more nuanced than the old phrase. Toxic productivity, according to Brittany Wong, is essentially an unhealthy desire to be productive at all times, at all costs. It’s the constant desire to go the extra mile at work or at home, even when it’s not expected of you.

Toxic productivity is a hungry devil. It doesn’t go away even after the task is complete. Once you’re technically done with a project at work, it can make you feel guilty for not having done more.

For the afflicted, too much is never enough, Simone Milasas, a business coach and author of Joy of Business told Huff Post.

“Toxic productivity can make us feel like a failure if we’re not constantly ‘doing,'” she explained. “When toxic productivity is leading your life, you judge yourself every day for what you haven’t done, rather than looking at what you have accomplished.”

Jules the PenPaladin thinks that “other people benefit when we work ourselves hard – our kids, our bosses, society – so we end up with a strong cultural message that we should all give as much as we can, without anywhere near as strong a balancing message of taking care of yourself, which, yes, includes resting, which looks a lot like doing nothing.”

“Especially in a late-capitalist society like ours, with great wealth inequality and a bootstraps mentality, it is tempting to blame ourselves when we encounter systemic problems (like accessing affordable health care and housing.) I think it’s easier to say ‘I will work harder’ or ‘They are not working hard enough’ than to say ‘Our society has some great big systemic problems of inequality that no amount of work could overcome.’ Only one of these feels hopeless. The others at least feel like they are within individual control,” she said.

Image credits: asianartiste

The pandemic isn’t helping us either. As Kathryn Esquer, a psychologist and founder of the Teletherapist Network, pointed out, that’s primarily because all of our regular routines were put on pause. All of a sudden, we got unprecedented amounts of free time, and many of us threw ourselves into work instead of seizing the opportunity to be blissfully and guiltlessly idle for once.

“We could have used our free time to rest, recharge, and restore ourselves, but many of us filled those hours with more work as a way to feel worthy, fulfilled, and in control,” Esquer said.

There was a viral productivity-pushing tweet, claiming: “If you don’t come out of this quarantine with either: 1.) a new skill 2.) starting what you’ve been putting off like a new business 3.) more knowledge [then] you didn’t ever lack the time, you lacked the discipline.”

But maybe it’s time to sit back and just watch a movie or something?

Jules the PenPaladin has had to come a long way to be able to balance productivity and downtime. “There’s been a lot of facing the limits of my own capacity,” she said. “I had to sell my farm when I went back to work full time, when my doctor gently explained to me that I was literally working myself to death.”

The writer explained that a lot of it has simply been realizing that, “paradoxically, if I wanted to be a good employee and a good mother, I had to maintain boundaries on how much I would give of myself.”

“The biggest part of it was coming to grips with my own mortality, realizing that I had an ever-dwindling number of years left to be alive, and I cared much more about being happy than being productive. I don’t think anyone can be all one or the other, you need both; we’ve just collectively guilted ourselves into valuing productivity over happiness, and frankly, none of us have time for that nonsense. No one’s getting out of this life alive.”

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