Productivity.
Day seven, almost as many monkeys that live in my brain-cage.
There is a self-improvement wormhole present on Medium, and I’m sure many other corners of the internet.
It’s a kind of productivity/life-improvement porn.
I’m not judging, since I literally have been reading this stuff for years. I am part of the problem. But since I have been on the platform for so long, I’ve finally cottoned-on to the monotony of it. The theme is the same. Life can be awesome if you aggressively tackle all weakness on your path to success.
[Funnily enough there is also a flip-side to this coin, failure-porn. Where writers proudly display their worst failures for the world to see because in start-up culture you are a no-one if you haven’t failed a few times. It’s the new badge of honour. Same coin, different side.]
The advice isn’t incorrect. It’s the packaging which I find deceiving. Endless listicles as a format that has been A-B tested to death, sure to lure in suckers like me who think that maybe my life will be better if I follow these five steps. Because that’s literally what they’re telling me in the headline.
The problem, to me it seems, is that these people are incredibly productive and successful at telling other people to be productive and successful. Like a snake eating it’s own tail, they write about being productive, and the act itself is them being productive. They tell you they have nine hacks to increase your web traffic, and then list nine things including the click-bait headline you yourself just clicked on. What if I don’t want to write on the internet about writing on the internet? What if I want to write about the monkeys in my head?
The thing is, it’s all very soothing. It coos to us, life isn’t that tough, it’s not that complicated. It’s a meritocracy and if you just wake up early enough, eat enough kale and meditate hard enough your dreams will come true. Even as I write that, a little part of me believes that is true. Because it means that my fate is in my own hands and if I could just control myself, it’d all be fine.
It feels like insurance against heartache. Against death. Against accidents, collapsing economies, the sometimes cruel twists and turns this life takes that you never saw coming. Against Zumas and Trumps and Brexit and Erdogan and Duterte and Putin. It separates you from the beggar you have to pass every day. You don’t have to face the crushing reality that if the dice had been thrown another way, it could be you.
I’ve been allergic to vagueness my whole life. As I’ve said, I am a neurotic lover of rules. It’s right or it’s wrong. It’s forwards or backwards. Up or down. In or out. Black or white.
Being jobless, losing that part of my identity for a while, has forced me to stretch into the grey. To make more space for it in my monkey-cage of a brain. (I told my boyfriend the other day that of the nine monkeys who live in my head-cage, one has taken on the sole task of singing Ed Sheeran’s “Castle on a Hill” full time. He may think I’m losing it).
So here’s to the grey. The complexity, the vagueness, the inconsistency of life. I’m not going to try soothe my consciousness with these articles for as long as I can resist them.
Until tomorrow.
x
