Is Discipline Necessary?

Laziness is a social construct that we don’t necessarily need. 

As a carceral society, we punish people for being different. My neurodivergent clients know this as well as anyone else who is part of a marginalized population. From childhood, many of them have learned both directly and indirectly that discipline is a golden standard just out of reach, because it isn’t enough to judge what a person did, but also how they do it. Those who aren’t able to jump through the right hoops are often labeled “lazy,” which is shorthand for a failure to be useful to the mission of capitalism. 

“We produce more value for our employers than any other generation of workers has. We consume more information in a single day than our great-grandparents did in weeks. Yet we feel lazier than ever,” write Dr. Devon Price in “Laziness Does Not Exist. The laziness lie is “a centuries-old belief system that says our worth is determined by our productivity, our limitations are weaknesses and no matter how much we do, it is never enough.” 

For those of us who are familiar with ableism, this is an eerily familiar road that ends in eugenics and genocide. The metaphorical sword that hangs over your head is used to motivate you to behave, conform and serve this system. For many people, fear galvanizes the nervous system, which is why the anxiety-driven, type A personality often succeeds professionally, even as they suffer personally. But for neurodivergent people, fear rights the alarm, but it fails to rouse their motivation in the same way. So they freeze, watching the Titanic approach the iceberg as others jump on the life rafts. 

The neurotypical model teaches us an importance-based system of motivation in this order:

1. Important to you

2. Important to others

3. Important to obtain rewards

4. Important to avoid punishment

   
   

Even there, punishment is the least effective method of behavioral change—but that’s another matter entirely. 

The neurodivergent model proposed by Dr. Bill Dodson presents an interest-based nervous system, one that is motivated by:

• Novelty 

• Interest or passion 

• Challenge

• Extreme urgency

  
  

Some of these motivators overlap with the importance-based system, which is why last-minute procrastination works so well for many neurodivergent people. But nowhere here is discipline, the rote process of training people to obey rules using punishment to correct disobedience. That is about control and power, which has nothing to do with motivation at all. 

The next time you punish yourself for lacking “discipline”, ask yourself, what do you need that discipline for? And could you reach that platform without jumping through that hoop?