[I plead guilty to a lot of deadly sins, but laziness is not among them. Somehow I get out of bed, take a deep breath, and plunge right into the work of the day. I’m not claiming it as a virtue, either. There’s something to be said about hanging back and enjoying another banana. SB SM]
Early Christian ascetics counted seven deadly sins—pride, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and lust—that threaten our ascension to goodness (and, by extension, to heaven). But in an era ruled by an all-knowing Internet, a surreal beauty standard, and an insatiable appetite for material wealth, these vices are more of a playbook for success than a warning. What is a sin in 2026? For the Indulgence issue, we asked seven figures—Jamieson Webster, Dries Van Noten, Christine Sun Kim, Griffin Dunne, Mia Khalifa, Brontez Purnell, and Helen Molesworth—to examine how one sin threads its way through their life and work. Here, Molesworth reflects on sloth.
Sloth is, for me, the most complicated of the seven deadly sins. I can easily resist the messy, unkempt part, but sloth also encompasses laziness, an attribute that haunts me. I come by it honestly: I am a Taurus, and indolence is one of the sign’s attributes. We like to lie around and luxuriate. Like Ms. Shirley Chisholm, we prefer to be unbossed (and unbothered).
My idea of a great day is to read in bed, read at the beach, and have a good meal before heading off to bed early. Rinse and repeat. Yet I have never let myself be as lazy as I desire. This is probably because I am plagued by desire: for recognition (pride), beautiful things (envy), and great food (gluttony). Then there’s the unfortunate reality that my taste has always exceeded my means. What’s a middle-class girl to do? I cultivated a work ethic that disguised my truer nature.
This explains why I am attracted to artists who flirt with not working, not making things—artists who succumb to laziness. There’s Lee Lozano’s General Strike Piece, 1969, which starts with a command to herself: “Gradually but determinedly avoid being present at official or public ‘uptown’ functions or gatherings related to the ‘art world.’” Imagine never having to work a room again. Dreamy.
Or how about Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery, also 1969? The invitation to the show read, “During the exhibition the gallery will be closed.” Barry said, “Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world.” In 1970, Tom Marioni started his decades-long The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art. Why make work when you can hang out with your friends? Why not try to do exactly what you want and call it work? It’s no mistake that these gestures emerged during the heyday of the counterculture in America, when everything, even what constituted labor, was up for rethinking.
No tract on an ambivalent relationship to working would be complete without Duchamp’s famous quip: “Deep down I’m enormously lazy. I like living, breathing, better than working.” I have long admired that when he did work, he did so out of view of others. If one was going to indulge in the ego gratification of work, one could at least have the good manners not to turn it into a performance that demanded everyone’s attention and praise. (I confess I find our contemporary equation of being busy with being important incredibly tedious.) Instead, when Duchamp worked, he did so behind a secret door. His final major work, Étant Donnés, 1946–66, one of art history’s most beguiling mysteries, was born from just a touch of sloth.
The problem, of course, with true laziness is that a woman’s work is never done. Just living takes work. Someone’s got to wash the clothes and clean the house and cook the food. This is why the genius Mierle Laderman Ukeles came up with the idea of “maintenance art.” From 1970–73, she made Private Performances of Personal Maintenance as Art in which her daily labor as a wife and mother would count as art. Call it double-dipping.
But perhaps laziness is not the sin we imagine it to be? Perhaps capitalism truly is an aberration? Perhaps work is not what God intended for us after all? In his infamous tract The Right to Be Lazy, 1883, the French writer Paul Lafargue (who happened to be Karl Marx’s son-in-law) wrote: “Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.”
More Deep Dives on the State of the Seven Deadly Sins
What Mia Khalifa Learned From Two Long Years of Celibacy
Deaf Artist Christine Sun Kim on the Anger She Carries in a Hearing World
In an Ozempic-Suffused Scene, Brontez Purnell on Being a ‘Fake Skinny Bitch’
Dries Van Noten Unpacks the Greed That Made Him Step Back From Fashion
According to Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, Pride Gets a Bad Rap
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