Toxic Productivity is Dangerous. Why Do We Turn to It in Troubled Times?
I want control over a scary world… but productivity is the path to burnout.
Early on in the pandemic, think pieces abounded about how the pandemic was going to change how we work forever — and for the better. As many white-collar workers were pushed into working from home, the possibilities seemed endless. Flexible working hours! Working in your sweats! The reclamation of commuting time!
As a freelancer and work-from-home veteran, I was skeptical. My experience of shifting away from office work into my own passion projects and business has been that my work wants to expand into every nook and cranny of my life until it takes over. I have to actively resist letting it consume me — and I don’t always manage.
Seven months in, the sheen of working from home has faded.
Mothers struggle to juggle their job with moonlighting as a teacher. Working from home leads to more surveillance, not less.
Suddenly we’re facing a shadow pandemic: burnout.
What is Toxic Productivity?
I first became aware of the concept of toxic productivity when I was setting up my own business three years ago. As I had no idea of what I was doing, I did what every self-respecting millennial would do: turned to the internet for advice.
What I found was a deep well of “inspirational” advice telling me I could achieve my dreams and make six figures in six months if only I “wanted” it enough. This advice encouraged me to “hustle,” to see myself as a “girl boss,” to drink buckets of coffee if I needed to get through the day, and to make sure I remembered how #blessed I was to be living the entrepreneur dream.
If I wasn’t making money or was struggling to find clients, it was because I wasn’t working hard enough.
I had a “mindset” problem. Perhaps I would be interested in taking a course with one of my entrepreneurial tour guides?
But encouraging people to sacrifice sleep or time with loved ones or time just doing nothing isn’t just unrealistic, it’s actively harmful.
And toxic productivity doesn’t just impact freelancers and entrepreneurs.
I’ve heard friends pass on time with their family because they can’t get away from the office.
I’ve witnessed acquaintances stay at work far beyond the end of the workday. Their reason? Promotions are only given to those who show their “dedication” to the company by performing unpaid overtime.
Toxic productivity has long been the organizing philosophy of corporate North America.
Why We Bought into Productivity at All Costs
I knew about toxic productivity.
I’d experienced its impacts on my own health first hand. I’d seen how it had knotted itself into my friend’s lives.
And yet when the pandemic hit, I set myself to get busy.
I started a new creative project. I learned to make sourdough (yes, yes, I’m basic). I taught myself to sew. I threw myself into gardening. I made new resources for work. I redid my professional website. I started writing on Medium (oh, the irony).
Anxiety is my default mode. And one of the kneejerk reactions I have to avoid anxiety is to keep myself busy. If I don’t stop moving, then I don’t have to confront the panic that’s snapping at my heels.
Recently, I was talking to someone about a new project I wanted to start. They were gently encouraging, but they also raised a concern.
They told me that sometimes, when we’re in the midst of chaos, we try to create new things, keep ourselves busy, to be in relentless productivity mode. Our monkey brains will try to get us to outrun the chaos so that we can experience a sense of safety.
The problem is, you can’t outrun a global pandemic.
Surge Depletion & Toxic Productivity
Many of us will have experienced trying to throw ourselves into our work as a way of coping with the pandemic. Many of us will have essentially turned our leisure time into a second shift, full of improvement activities. And this is what a privileged existence looks like… toxic productivity weighs far heavier on working-class and BIPOC communities.
Tara Haelle’s viral piece on Surge Capacity gave a name to what so many of us have been experiencing. In Haelle’s words:
“I know depression, but this wasn’t quite that. It was, as I’d soon describe in an emotional post in a social media group of professional colleagues, an ‘anxiety-tainted depression mixed with ennui that I can’t kick,’ along with a complete inability to concentrate.”
Toxic productivity asks us to ignore the physical and mental cues we receive that our surge capacity is depleted.
Sure, you’re living through a global pandemic, but did you know Shakespeare wrote three plays while under quarantine? Or that Newton discovered gravity?
So why can’t you put in a 10-hour workday and then crush your side hustle in the evening while making macaroons? Slacker.
The Antidote
“I can’t change things, I can’t control the environment. I guess I could never control the environment, but I could problem-solve.”
Brené Brown, Unlocking Us Podcast
Brené Brown talked about surge depletion on a recent episode of her podcast. She identified the exhaustion, chaos, and fear that we’re all currently living through, to lesser and greater degrees.
In Brown’s words, the first step is to acknowledge what is happening. To accept how hard things feel right now.
If you’re losing yourself down a rabbit hole of toxic productivity, that’s not accepting anything — it’s avoidance.
Brown’s second suggestion initially surprised me but then made perfect sense.
We need to find a new source of energy.
Where can we get that energy?
Through play. Brown turns to the research of Stuart Brown, MD to remind us that “The opposite of play is not work, the opposite of play is depression.”
Play, as Brené Brown explains, is time spent without purpose. It is the opposite of toxic productivity.
Relearning How to Play
As a child, I had a rich imaginative world. I could spend hours in the garden, making up stories, dreaming, and running around. Playing came as naturally to me as breathing.
As an adult, even my pleasure activities come with deadlines and to-do lists. If I’m not doing it for the ‘gram, I’m doing it to fulfill an internalized belief that I only have value if I’m contributing 24/7. (Perhaps this is why I struggle to sleep so much… no-one is productive in their sleep).
I don’t have all the answers, but I am setting myself a challenge this week: I’m going to make a list of playful activities that are purely purposeless. Things that I want to do just because, and not to be “productive”.
I fully expect to hate at least 50% of what I try. But my goal is to claw back time and space and energy away from the forces of relentless, toxic, productivity. I want to refill my well.
Care to join me?
