Being Lesser?

Sameer Shisodia
Nov 4 · 3 min read

Are you productive enough? Every hour? Every half hour? Every fifteen minutes? Did that productivity tool/app just get into the “see the tiger mode” and get your “focused” and at high alert?

The structure of work seems designed to keep us seeing that tiger all the time, more of the time, and even beyond work hours now (24x7 is how we put it nicely).

Productivity is partly a euphemism. We weren’t meant to be in this mode all the time, continuously. It extracts a price everyday.

As does that notification that tells you you have unread mails and messages, and could miss out on something important.

And as does the promotion telling you how you have to act fast — within minutes or hours — or you’ll miss the best deal ever. Or the update that tells you how the salaries for people with your skills and experience levels are rising and that you could be left behind if you do not keep looking for options. Or the portfolio update that keeps your anxiety levels about the current stock level as pumped up as traders on the floor. And that battery level on the phone that’s starting to get to 27%. And the notice from the tax authorities urging you to pay on time or else. And then the to do lists at home, once work is over. The appliances that need small bits of routine maintenance, or service cycles, or the car that needs a repair, or an oil change. And as IOT happens, all of these will start to send you messages, so you do it in in time because after all prevention is better than cure and a penny saved is a penny earned and a stitch in time saves nine and …..

Anxiety, hyper productivity, more efficiency, anxiety. You’re doing something all the time to make the most, save the most, spend the least, be the best, get the most value - you get the point.

You’re seeing that tiger all the time. So many tigers. Forever hyper alert, hyper efficient, productive, useful, not wasting a second, even “making your leisure/sleep/time-off count” and taking breaks to “recharge, ready for more”.

We’re just killing ourselves. We just heard of someone who — in college — died of a cardiac arrest possibly induced by game addiction and a perpetual state of anxiety that induced. Yeah, yeah, that’s an outlier and not every body will be that badly affected. But everybody is affected in some way or the other by the constant stream of micro-doses of alertness induced, adrenaline and cortisol triggered and anxiety and stress created.

We really need to do lesser, be slower, be deliberate, do stuff within large gaps of nothingness, or slowness. We need to breathe easier (the alert state has this impact almost directly — of interrupting your slow, deeper breathing).

It’s not just the planet that degrowth will heal. It’s all of us.

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