According to this cite: http://deadlysins.com/sins/history.html, the Seven Deadly Sins at first included sadness, instead of sloth.
When I told my husband (fellow Doper Andy L) about this, he said, “You mean sloth worked its way up into the list?” 
It’s a sin to be sad? Does God think you’re being ungrateful?
I’ll bet Lust is sticking out her tongue at Sloth. Lasciviously. But it’ll take Sloth forever to notice.
--- Peter Cooke as The Devil in *Bedazzled**
*The real one, from 1967
Pretty much. At least ostensibly. I’d bet that people mired in Melancholy (the usual designation I’ve seen) are hard for other people to deal with, which would be the main motivator for making those lists.
Although seven was so popular that the number of the Deadly Sins was pretty much unavoidable, which sins made the list jostled around for decades, possibly centuries, before becoming standardized. I don’t know if the symetrically necessary Seven Virtues ever settled down.
In some philosophies, misery is the opposite of presence, and presence is seen as a divine state, or a sacrament, or “with god.”
OK, that’s a bit of a stretch.
The ancient world didn’t have much sympathy for mental illness, and in a subsistence community a chemically depressed person is a real liability. Fortunately, in subsistence communities, chemical depression is vanishingly rare.
I always assumed that the inertia depression causes is what caused melancholy to eventually give way to sloth in the list of sins; you can frown all you want but not pulling your own weight is what would really tick off the other farmers.
According to Jimmy Buffett, the 8th Deadly Sin is pizza.
Sloth love Chunk!
Today we call it depression.
When my English class read Marlowe’s version of Faust, the teacher said that Faust was damned because of “despair”, that is, he didn’t think that God could save him from the Devil after he sold his soul. Maybe that’s related to the “sadness” idea, somehow.
If it’s so rare, then why would it have been a sin at one point? And why is it that it’s so rare in those kinds of communities?
I wonder if women suffered from postpartum sloth.
Sadness, which was often called despair, was viewed as the absence of hope. And as such, it was viewed as a denial of God because God was supposed to offer the hope of redemption to anyone anywhere.
Thank you ever so much once again Calvinist work ethic, for teaching us that it’s fine to be miserable as long as you keep bending to the yoke.
The Seven Deadly Sins aren’t Calvinist, they’re Catholic. Calvinists don’t buy that sins aren’t equal.
The virtue corresponding to sloth (its opposite) is leisure, which I think is interesting. Sloth and acedia are more like depression than like relaxation or laziness.