Strike down your false god, productivity

Nat Dudley
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read
Photo credit: WoCinTechChat https://www.flickr.com/photos/wocintechchat/25926671551/

I remember when I started worshipping productivity. The day that 13-year-old-me walked into my new high school is still fresh in my memory. I was the poor kid in the rich kid’s playground, but more than that, I was the kid with the broken family. The kid with the family filled with violence and horror that was eating away at me, crumbling my confidence. I remember realising that to make it in their world, I was going to have to fake it. I’d have to be better than them — score higher on tests, be smarter and faster and more productive. Some kids hide from the horrors of their lives by being as average as they possibly can be. They blend in, at all costs. Others of us run as hard as we can, our brains telling us if we keep pushing and achieving, no-one will know how bad things really are. We tell ourselves that if we can just achieve one more thing, we’ll be OK. We hide from ourselves in productivity, becoming what appear to be model capitalist citizens.

Until we don’t. Until we can’t. I was 21 when I couldn’t run any more. When the lie of coping caught up to me, and the façade of an overachieving productive member of society came crumbling down. In its place, depression and anxiety. Suddenly, I couldn’t be productive. The thing that had been my shield had been taken away. The external validation and the dopamine hit I’d got from ticking something off my list and sharing things I’d done disappeared almost overnight. I was naked and vulnerable. I felt like a failure.

As the medication and therapy slowly kicked in and I got better, I started to think about my coping mechanisms. I wondered why I, and so many other people, internalised productivity as the primary measure of personal worth. When my productivity was taken away, I was still the same person. I was not intrinsically less valuable as a human being simply because I did not achieve a certain amount per day.

Productivity started as a measure of how effectively we, as a collective, as a people, converted the resources we had into useful outputs. It was meaningful. It had purpose. It was about getting the most out of the land to feed us. Somewhere along the line, this morphed into the unrecognisable pursuit of individual excellence and output at all costs. As individuals, we internalised the idea we had to be productive. That productive was the end goal, and the measure of our worth.

This notion, this worship of individual productivity, is toxic in so many ways. It alienates us from each other as we compete and measure our output. It drives how we’re promoted and paid. It pushes us towards workaholism and stress and busy-at-all-costs. It causes discussion about whether the CEO works harder and deserves more than the cleaner or the miner putting their back and their sweat into each day’s labour, when in reality we need and must value the contributions of all of these people.

Instead of focussing on individuals, we should be focussing on building a productive society. A productive society exists because of the contributions of all of its members, and it exists to take care of all of its members. This includes the ones who aren’t contributing in ways we normally label ‘productive’ through an individual lens. They might be young or old, disabled or sick, taking care of tamariki (children) or whānau (family), or out of work. You don’t have to be working full time to be contributing to our productive society. These people bring joy and laughter and smiles and caring and love to our lives. What is a productive society without those things? Those things make life worth living. Those things enable us all to achieve.

Which takes me back to 21 year old me, depressed and anxious, feeling like a failure for falling off the productivity train. I realised I was aiming for the wrong thing. I realised that my life wasn’t just about my next achievement or output alone. Instead, it was about every part of me contributing in different ways to make our society productive, and that in order to do that I had to be kinder to myself. To be a good friend, family, and community member, I needed to be strong and happy in myself, and doing that mahi (work) was just as valuable as going to an office and churning out what my boss wanted. And that until I did that work, I wouldn’t be able to contribute to making our society productive in the way that I wanted to.

I don’t wear workaholism as a badge of pride anymore. I don’t think stress is something to be proud of. No longer do I place individual productivity on a pedestal. My friend Cate taught me to ask myself one question each day: “What have you done for you today?” It reminds me that taking care of myself and bringing joy and happiness into my life is a priority too. I’m proud when I’m living a happy and balanced life — when I have time to give back to those around me and to look after myself. Strangely enough, in doing that, I’ve found I’m more conventionally productive too. Turns out those 40 hour work week advocates were onto something after all.


Originally published at superyesmore.com.

Nat Dudley

Written by

Head of Design at https://figure.nz. I also write things at natdudley.com

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