What is it About Having Fun That Makes Us Feel so Bad?
And it’s more to do with the productivity myth than being a fun-hating law student.
In this great piece from Cait Munro, she outlines this ongoing struggle that I think a lot of us, if not most of us, can relate to. Now that a lot of us who have the luxury of having an office job are working from home, time formerly reserved for sitting idly through peak hour traffic to and from work has freed up. With this increase in time, so too have the options for how to spend it.
In economics, one of the key simplifying assumptions made in labour models is that we have two choices on how to spend our time. The twenty four hours in a day are split up between work and leisure.
Yet even when we make the conscious decision to choose leisure — is that what we’re really choosing?
The concept of doing an activity purely for enjoyment’s sake seems superfluous and gratuitous, especially when everywhere you look you are being bombarded with the message that time is a finite resource to be optimised. Even Medium is a good example of this — there are many popular articles on this site which revolve around optimising one’s productivity so that you can pump out 100 articles a month and make six figures in income writing about how to make six figures.
This ubiquitous need to be productive and to optimise the benefits of any activity which we engage in is deeply ingrained in our day to day lives. Jia Tolentino discusses this brilliantly in her 2019 anthology of essays, Trick Mirror. In her essay ‘Always be Optimising’, Tolentino highlights how pervasive this culture of self-optimisation has become, through allegories of athleisure wear and the Sweetgreens’ business model.
“The ideal chopped-salad customer is himself efficient: he needs to eat his twelve-dollar salad in ten minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular twelve-dollar salad in the first place.”
It’s of note that Tolentino’s essays consider collectively the concept of self-delusion. We are living in the age of the productivity myth, the biggest self-delusion of all. Ever expansionary in its focus, we apply the same late-capitalist frameworks which prioritise growth and profitability to ourselves in an ongoing bid to increase efficiency, now neatly packaged as ‘self-improvement’.
Yet, this is conveniently also one of the easiest myths to internalise. No one likes spending time on boring tasks. So surely improving our systems and skills in order to reduce time spent on the tedious things is a good thing?
That’s not the problem though. The problem with the productivity myth is its self-serving nature. Saving time doing mundane tasks reinforces the value of becoming better at managing your time well, which reinforces that your value-add (whether to your own life or for someone else’s business) comes from being good at managing your time and therefore you continue to find ways to improve. Tolentino observes:
‘The hamster-wheel aspect has been self-evident for a while now. (In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “It can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-around higher level of production than a lower one… The higher level of production, has merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.”)’
It’s a heroic and noble pursuit, the goal of self-improvement, we tell ourselves. I once worked for a fast-fashion jewellery company which highlighted ‘continuous improvement’ as one of its key values. I have also interned at a large firm where setting goals and achieving them were a tenement of how your performance is assessed. In both, I felt equally empowered and exhausted. I constantly felt there was something to prove.
It’s a clever tactic, telling people that they’re not competing with each other, they’re competing with themselves.
Except they’re not really. Under a capitalist system, you are still competing with those around you to be the most cost-efficient, best value-add to the company. In a competitive job market for graduates where everyone and their pet dog now has a college degree, you are certainly competing with those around you. The metrics have changed, however, and the aim of the game is to compete with yourself, but with better results than others. You have to beat yourself faster than others beat themselves, in order to prove to the company that you are the one they should keep.
What this means for us is that we are constantly striving to better ourselves, at the cost of our personal time and freedom. Productivity conflates with fun, and this is certainly true of the field of hobbies. Whilst hobbies are defined as a leisurely pursuit, the truth is there are a wide ranging field of interests which you can occupy your time with, and some are inherently more monetizable than others, and therefore more valuable and productive in a society which emphasises wealth as a metric of time well-spent. Spending your time learning to code is productive; making crochet beanie hats for your indoor plants is not (unfortunately).
It’s a struggle I face on a daily basis with my 3 additional hours. Despite my natural proclivity for recreational napping, there is indubitably the pressure looming in the background to gain new skills that I can turn into a side hustle that will keep me afloat when either the pandemic or the robots come for my job.
Having fun for fun’s sake is not something which comes naturally to me. In part, I would like to attribute this to my nature as a Capricorn born to immigrant parents. The pervasive need to feel like I’m accomplishing something has followed me throughout school, and later law school. Understandably, law school attracts painstakingly Type A characters so I do acknowledge I exist somewhat within a bubble where it’s easy to dismiss the burn-out culture as simply a by-product of personality. However, I believe that the very fact that so many of us decided to put ourselves through law school regardless of what we genuinely enjoy, points to something more systemic in our social values and norms. Certainly, even if you didn’t fit the slightly neurotic, overachieving mould before, by the time you graduate you’ve acquired a crippling addiction to self-optimisation and never-ending improvement.
I’ve been on a holiday where resort time was somewhat hampered by reading of company reports in preparation for an interview that I was going to the day after I returned. I have forced my boyfriend to study for an upcoming exam in a Montréal café because I was terrified of not doing well, even though we were in an amazing new city and more exploring could have been done. I have spent the better part of my since 2018 “improving” myself ever since facing a series of flat out rejections from all the clerkship programs I had applied to. By that, I mean I’ve been juggling classes with a part time job, tutoring students on weekends, a volunteering gig and another extracurricular role, whilst trying to bring up my grades and maintain a social life as well (“Because we care about who you are as well, not just your grades.” — every firm representative ever).
I’m not an outlier — I’m sure people have had it worse. But that just brings me back to my original point, which is: why is this our new baseline?
I’m only coming to terms with the toll of my lifestyle now, since the pandemic forced life to a standstill. I haven’t known what still feels like for the better part of two years now. I am still learning to how to embrace it, and not stress out about how I simply do not have the mental bandwidth to learn a new language, or continue trying to learn to code, or to somehow turn my non-existent drawing skills into a new freelance illustration gig.
Trust me, I had many grand plans for trying new things and developing new skills.
I’ve more or less let those go, with a few minor exceptions: I am reading, writing, exercising and cooking more. Nothing on that list is readily able to be commercialised but rather something which I’m doing purely for my personal benefit and enjoyment. I’m not applying any productivity hacks to these rituals. That is to say, I am not doing this with a system in mind, to increase the efficacy of my reading or to optimise my output with writing. I am not looking to become a professional chef or writer or fitness influencer.
It’s not easy. I still freak out about whether I am wasting time or question what the purpose of doing anything is if it isn’t helping me get ahead in life. I still hate sucking at what I am doing, even though that’s normal with new hobbies. I have discovered that markers are incredibly hard to colour with because they stain with the slightest inconsistency in pressure applied. I have learnt that you can still “enjoy cooking” when you do not attempt to make a laksa paste from scratch and cheat using the store bought variety. In fact, you feel better because a cursory skim over the recipe instructions and you realise it would have taken half a day in the kitchen. I’ve decided it’s okay to feel like I’m not really improving.
The productivity myth that hovers over our collective existence should be recognised for what it is; a myth that we allow ourselves to believe, and to which we cling onto as an unchallengeable truth. It’s okay to want to better yourself, but it’s also important to be easy on yourself if you’re done consistently working on improving that metric, especially in these crazy times.
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