Youth and education often make a summer deal, and it goes something like this: I work hard all year long to make the grades, so for three months I deserve some well-earned hedonism. I’ll lie around some house anywhere the bills are paid, the pantry is full, and the washing machine is free. Before you sign this deal, let me warn you: it’s a lousy trade.

Fueled by my recent trips to Williamsburg and the HBO miniseries John Adams, I am reminded just how hard our early American ancestors worked. To reach into the past is to appreciate simple labor, to see broken backs, to smell the iron forge. I spend very little of my time these days trying to survive, and that’s a shame. I’m an Arts and Humanities kind of gal, someone who likes my heavy lifting in the shape of ideas and conversation, but my admiration of the past might just get me to pick up an axe or salt my own beef.

Not only did the simple folk work from morning till night trying to stay alive, but the brilliant folks risked everything to fly an airplane or write a Constitution. An idle boy was a disgrace to his father in 1780, but today, idleness has thrown off its ignominy while sloth has become an entire industry. I’m sure there were some lazy chaps in the 1700s who let everyone else churn the butter, but it couldn’t have been this bad, could it?

Our modern bouts of hard work often come by choice, and this is a very different brand of labor. Sure, the high school student might travel to Mexico to fix a local pastor’s church, the middle class dad resurfaces his kitchen floor, the college student becomes a roofer for three-months to pay for college. It is, however, a labor of free will. We nurse our baby blisters and believe ourselves to be grunts, but it’s a sham really. The average American survives so easily.

I am well aware I risk sounding like the old woman who shakes her finger at the boys playing stick ball and asks, “Why aren’t you doing something productive today?” Yet idleness is not the same as play. Play is the happy interval between other meaningful tasks—not a lifestyle of indolence. Young people—and old—will never vanquish a soft mind and body with Gold’s Gym during the day and YouTube clips at night. Idleness is a pervasive worldview that we must conquer with God’s help.

I’m not calling for a primitive, Walden-like existence, nor am I eager to duplicate the back breaking conditions in many parts of the world today. The entrepreneurs of the past and present have paved the way for our extraordinary advantages, but do the ambitions of the five percent merely give the other ninety-five the right to lie around in endless summer vacation? Surely, we can do more with our bodies than this.

Two things in particular prick my conscience as the summer picks up speed: first, a reading of the Proverbs—especially the ones where Solomon urges the indolent to work, store, plan, and sweat. The second is the life of George Washington who, for all his famed patriotism and diplomacy, was also a hardworking farmer. I enlist my mind and spirit quite often in a good fight, but my limbs are getting soft. I think I need to do some heavy lifting, for God’s sake.