One of the most serious challenges for Kuwait’s ‘Vision 2035’ economic reforms is the transformation of its oil dependent economy to a more dynamic private sector-led one. In the current system, public and private companies run on monopolies, subsidies, and a general lack of competition. Very rarely are employees fired; absenteeism and inefficiency are rife; and workloads are incredibly light. The issue of productivity strikes at the heart of work life where economic incentives and employment may not be linked. Notable scholars like Hossein Mahdavy, Hazem Beblawi, and Giacomo Luciani have argued that resource booms induce a ‘rentier mentality’; a myopia or sloth that comes from not having any economic incentive to work. As MaryAnn Tétreault once said, ‘the recipient is morally defective’, essentially selling their integrity, citizenship, and principles for a ‘plum job…The lazy and shiftless get government jobs and the economy staggers under their dead weight’. Despite widespread use, these ‘mentalities’ remain more of a fable rather than a product of empirical observations. In practice, these often-cited claims are inaccurately directed solely at nationals, while foreigners working in the country are often treated as immune (if not simply ignored), which has its own orientalist connotations. Do people in oil states think they’re lazy? Is the rentier mentality a poor method of classifying individuals? What are some of the micro-level causes of inefficiency in Kuwait other than regime maintenance? To investigate the roots of the rentier mentality, which I frame as cultural rather than simply politico-economic, I conducted a survey between April and November 2018 that collected over 400 responses. A second and third wave of follow-up surveys will be conducted from February to November 2019. The current results raise fundamental questions about expatriates’ role in Kuwait and the self-awareness of residents both citizen and expatriate alike, and delve further into the ‘insane dependency’ created by state welfare benefits and the “punch in and punch out” mentality of jobs. Furthermore, the results of the survey fit with a conceptualization of rentier mentality that accounts for culture, instead of predominantly political economic concerns. This also moves away from treating the study of psychology as orientalist by allowing people to speak for themselves, instead of simply accusing them of damaging the fabric of their societies. Being lazy is not in ‘the Kuwaiti DNA’ as one respondent noted, nor is it something that revolves around personal choice or state policy in isolation.