The term "cognitive miserliness" comes out of the heuristics and biases literature, where many studies show that people often rely on heuristic short cuts to solve a variety of reasoning problems instead of relying on rules of logic or probability.  The claim is that people are reluctant thinkers, seldom resorting to deep analysis.  There is, however, another aspect in the literature that is seldom discussed:  Labouring in vain.  This refers to situations where people continue to persist on a problem when it would be beneficial to give up and work on a different problem.  This latter is an understudied phenomenon in reasoning, because we seldom afford participants the option to give up.  In this talk, I will present evidence to support both metaphors: People are both reluctant to engage and to disengage analytic thinking.