The Awful Need to Feel Productive
My own behaviour baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe. Yet sure if I do things that I really don’t want to do, it cannot be said that ‘I’ am doing them at all – it must be sin that has made its home in my nature. St Paul’s letter to the Romans [Rom. VII.14ff, Phillips translation] Whenever I am gripped by this sense of needing to feel productive, I know how I will end up after it finally runs its course: burnt out, ill and miserable. It is that uneasy feeling that I am not doing enough with my time. It is that queasy anxiety that I am not making the fullest use of each and every possible moment, so I am wasting it. It is that nudging nagging guilty sense that I am not productive enough with my time. I speculate that those feelings are a symptom of living in a technologically advanced and hyper-capitalist society. The cultural conditioning that encourages us to make the most of our time by either amassing money or opportunities is pervasive, subtle and refined. To act is to do and to do is to make money and to make money is to live. If we are doing it with that sequence, then we are wasting our lives. When I am gripped so, the first thing that suffers is my sleep. I have great difficulty shaking off the feeling that sleep is a waste of time. Consciously, I know that is wrong and harmful. I can see myself doing it and am powerless to stop myself. And so I am up late. Deep into the mornings. 2am. 3am. My sleeping hours drop from eight to six to four hours. I wake up the next day feeling ugly with a heavy head. My mood is off. My body feels heavy and unwieldy. I am impatient, grumpy and snappy. Getting through the day becomes a heavy burden. The next thing that takes a hit are my relationships. I do not spend enough meaningful time with my family, friends and colleagues. Meaningful time is not productive in a material sense. Those moments have no capital value to them so it is of less value. When I am tired from the lack of sleep and miserable because I deprive myself of meaningful time with my meaningful people, I start falling ill. But being ill is downtime. Downtime is not productive. So I continue being productive through the downtime thus aggravating my condition. Productive in the sense that I am doing something. Getting things done. Ticking to-do lists off. Putting my efforts into a tangible form so it is proof for others of my productivity, but mainly for myself. It is not important what I am doing. What is important is that I am doing. Productive in that I am awake longer than I am asleep. Productive in that I ‘maximize’ as much of my time as possible. Never have an idle moment. Every gap of time must be filled by doing something that has an ultimate tangible, material product. There is no respite from it. When I get in that zone, I am constantly working, studying or indulging in, what I call, ‘productive leisure’. That is when I am binge-consuming things – books, movies, shows, video clips, etc. My time is reduced to working for others, improving myself or approaching productive leisure like I do work as if to counter it. I have no time for anything else because it is not productive. After being productive at work and leisure with little rest, I burn out. Like a moth to a flame. I lumber around burnt out, ill and miserable. Because I can only sustain such a pace for so long. The older I get, the harder it is to do. In my twenties and thirties, I could do that for months at a time. I don’t know how I pulled that off. These days, three late nights in a row will burn me out, make me ill and miserable. Which is a good thing because the grip of productivity is strong and firm. It does not yield easily. Escaping it requires serious effort. It feels like changing the course of an established river. So it is good that I burn out faster because it is only at that point that the need to be productive relinquishes its grip and rationality, gratitude and moderation over myself can re-established. But even better is avoiding the need to be productive entirely because it is ultimately a red herring. We are not here only to be productive about things. We are here to be. Productivity is a subset of being. When we adopt a reductionist and abstract approach to life, we allow productivity to become primary instead of secondary, where it should always remain. Although production and being productive in life is a mostly good thing and important, we must avoid the mistake of conflating production with life. Life encompasses existence, which is a great deal more than production. [Observation: Interestingly, the SEO Headline Analyzer rated the title of this post “00/100” i.e., this headline will not ‘drive traffic, shares and rank better in search results’. I have long suspected these so-called digital analyzers and advisory tools online are skewed towards encouraging hypercapitalism and consumerism. This little incident supports that impression. Update: Since posting it, I now got a rating of “66/100”. Interesting.]
