[Book] “The Era of Laziness” by Olivier Babeau – my review
I shared a few excerpts from the book The Era of Laziness by Olivier Babeau (Amazon link, Fnac link) on Instagram, and you asked me for its title. So I decided to dedicate a blog post to it. The first book by Olivier Babeau I read was The Tyranny of Entertainment, which I talked about here. The Era of Laziness, released in January 2025, has the subtitle How we and our children have lost the sense of effort.
I think this book could have been titled How ease will destroy us or The era when everyone relies on others’ work. It follows in the footsteps of his previous book on entertainment, because the appeal of easy entertainment is just a symptom of the lack of effort. I’ll touch on some themes from the book here, hoping to make you want to read it.
What is effort?
The author defines effort as “the means by which we change, the solution between what suffices and what we aspire to. Effort is what makes us become other than what we would have been without it”.
His thesis is clear: in the West, we are losing the sense of effort, unlike some cultures like in Asia. The first part of the book reminds us that effort has always been necessary, even for aristocrats, whose social survival depended on their popularity. This analysis is based on a structure similar to Maslow’s pyramid, but I must admit that this part felt a bit long to me.
Choice & influence
Fortunately, the rest becomes more captivating. Babeau points out that today, “the range of choices to make is almost infinite”. In the past, “an individual typically had almost no degree of freedom” : no geographic mobility, few professional or social opportunities. This explosion of choices, far from being a blessing, creates decision fatigue. Even choosing a dish at a restaurant becomes an anxiety-inducing effort:
Nearly 9 out of 10 young people say they are anxious about having to choose among the different options on a restaurant menu. This is called “menu anxiety”.
I’ve listened to podcasts from some well-known bloggers, and they complain like me about receiving questions they call “not very interesting”. Unsurprisingly, these are questions where people either ask the blogger’s opinion on a brand, or ask them to choose between brand A and brand B. I quote Adriano Dirnelli in a Cravate Club podcast: “I hate this kind of question that comes back too often: is this better than that (…) You need to know why it interests us, what it brings that’s different. There are no winners or losers. Men obsessed with these rankings are in a purely classification mindset to tell themselves ‘I have the top of the top, I have the best’. But that’s such a reductive view; it means they don’t have their own judgment to decide what speaks to them, in their person, in their heart, in their head, etc. They need to form their own opinions, go out, experiment, sharpen their eye, and build their own convictions. And that’s the interesting thing: it’s about working on self-development, not having rankings or rules dictated by others.”
And yet, more and more people trust influencers and Amazon reviews before pulling out their wallets, even for a €6 serum! Several people are urging me to buy the reMarkable Paper Pro to give them an honest and complete review, even though the brand offers 100 days of free trial (with free shipping and returns) so they can form their own opinion. As Oscar Wilde said in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”:
To influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.
The loss of effort
I’ve already told you about the perfectionism among craftsmen. In “The Era of Laziness”, there’s this passage that speaks to me deeply; it’s a quote from Charles Péguy:
I saw all my childhood re-caning chairs with exactly the same spirit and heart, and the same hand, as that same people had carved its cathedrals. A chair cane had to be well made. It didn’t have to be well made for the wage or by means of the wage. It didn’t have to be well made for the boss. It had to be well made by itself, in itself, for itself. A tradition, coming, rising from the deepest part of the race, an honor wanted this chair stick to be well made. Every part of the chair that was not visible was exactly as perfectly made as what was seen. This is the very principle of cathedrals.
Olivier Babeau concludes: “in opposition to the logic of energy saving born of the industrial revolution (the concern for productivity), the ancient world rested on the contrary on the principle of useless expenditure.”
Nowadays, any energy expenditure must have an optimal cost/benefit ratio, even in human relations. I noticed in Vietnam how much young people calculated before engaging or not in a conversation, based on the benefits obtained. No more small talk if the person opposite (including a family member) is not likely to be useful to them. On the other hand, they will stop at nothing, have very little ethics if a minimal effort can bring them a lot of money (just look at the % of 18-24 year olds on OnlyFans).
In France, with the very generous system in place, we have a society “where everyone can live at the expense of others’ efforts. All wealth is illegitimate. Any elite is a scam. Work is a reactionary value. Excellence is elitist, therefore hated. Progress is viewed with suspicion. Science is a mockery (…) Effort is not required. Worse: it is ridiculed. Accused of being anti-egalitarian. Unjust. Bourgeois. (…) The perversion inherent in the democratic principle was to deny greatness (…) Rigor, austere work, hard years of toil, all that no longer appeals. It’s aristocratic. No fun. Too long. We no longer want to see billions of hours of work.” The author compares the number of working hours with other developed countries and the finding is clear: “France works too little, in a less efficient way”.
The author then comments on the race to the bottom that I have discussed at length here ; he gives many alarming figures, and I think these figures confirm the claims of a friend, a French teacher, who told me that her school forced her to raise her students’ grades.
Another interesting piece of information: “reading on the Internet is very different from real reading (…) we only read 18% of a text online”. This explains why my readers ask questions whose answers are already given in the article: they don’t understand a thing!
Then follows a long section on the reliability rate plummeting, again, with figures mind-blowing !!
The times are touchy
The author then tackles difficult subjects such as incels, the unemployment rate among the supposed active population, hypersensitivity (wokism), political correctness, hyperactivity, “cancel culture”, victimization, cultural appropriation, freedom of speech…. He asserts “The times are touchy. People kill for a glance. For nothing.” This is my favorite part of the book because it provides, briefly but effectively, answers to these new social phenomena. I won’t quote more because I want you to read it; the explanations and observations are very interesting.
George Orwell said ” It is quite possible that we are descending into an era when two plus two will equal five whenever the leader decides so. ” We are approaching that.
The Swann Syndrome
Olivier Babeau is a Proust enthusiast, and I love it when he quotes Proust. Of course, this book discusses Swann, the genius who never wrote his work on Vermeer. We have more and more Swanns around us. “The risk of our era is not that there are fewer gifted people with extraordinary potential. It is that these people with extraordinary potential waste their talent by producing nothing or almost nothing.” Moreover, Proust is the example of relentless effort, a life of observation for a cathedral-novel. Millions of words written and rewritten; the 4 volumes of Proust in the La Pléiade collection are proof, with sketches longer than the text itself.
This echoes my personal experience. On my blog and Instagram, I share my journey and efforts as an immigrant from a third-world country, hoping to inspire others. Yet instead of receiving questions like “How to succeed?”, “What books to read?”, or “Where to learn to code?”, I mostly get messages explaining why these people can’t do what I do. At first, it surprised me. Of course, there are a thousand external reasons that can hamper our efforts and prevent immediate results, but that’s no reason to not try anything.
In the Yi King, a millennia-old Chinese text, success rests on three elements: (1) the right time, (2) the right place, and (3) the right person. This entire book has but one goal: to push human beings toward their full potential. Success doesn’t depend solely on us, but since we don’t always control the timing or context, the only thing we can control is ourselves. So we must constantly seek to improve, to be ready when the opportunity arises. A good example comes from Asia, where the current crisis is driving thousands of people to enroll in evening classes to train and adapt to the job market. They know the economic climate isn’t their fault, but that doing nothing to evolve, on the other hand, would be their fault. Because ultimately, success lies not in the completion of a particular project, but in our ability to surpass ourselves. And that takes effort.
“The cardinal sin of effort is holding people responsible. Celebrating those who make an effort is implicitly accusing those who don’t, and holding them responsible for their situation.” Yet it’s not about ignoring the impact of chance or circumstances. Luck plays a role, undoubtedly. But without effort, how can we know if we’ve had our chance? It’s like hoping to win the lottery without ever buying a ticket.
In short, The Era of Laziness (Amazon link, Fnac link) is a major wake-up call. The author predicts the fall of Western civilization if we don’t rehabilitate effort.
A society that no longer knows hardship ends up breeding generations that don’t appreciate what they have. Never having had to fight for anything, they nonetheless expect everything to be owed to them. Gradually, values and reference points fade, replaced by a constant quest for instant gratification. When effort, innovation, and ambition disappear, all that’s left is a society collapsing in on itself, unable to regain its momentum. I highly recommend this book, especially for its reflections on new social dynamics where emotions and opinions trump facts.
