Productivity with purpose

“How is it going?”, she asks. “Busy,” I say. We chuckle. We’ve had this conversation a gazillion before.

Here in the US, we live in a culture and a time where busy is the norm and experiencing burnout has become a cliche. Overwork, consumerism, and status seeking are valued. Our minds are over-stimulated and under-nourished. We are so caught up in doing that we forget to just be. The “being” feels foreign, even anxiety-provoking because we don’t know who we are separate from the “doing”.

People want to know how to do more with fewer resources. Accomplish more with less time. Make more money with less effort. Lose more weight without feeling deprived. Meet a life partner without taking emotional risks. How to be happier, right now. As if we just found the right life hack we would be eternally productive, which would equal successful which would equal happy. 

The US is one of the most overworked countries in the world, according to Mother Jones. But that hard work largely translates into profits for the super-rich, not the ones performing the labor.

In academia, we refer to certain people as productive, often based on their number of publications and grants. It doesn't always matter what the quality of their contribution to their team is, whether they are kind or healthy or enjoy their work, productive is the highest rating. A productive epidemiologist once said in a writing workshop that the number of publications we have to our name is THE measure of our worth as scholars. I happen to not believe this, and I see evidence that this is not completely true in academia. And yet, it is true that we are heavily measured on this, and on other ways we demonstrate our productivity, such as getting research grants and performing university service.

To interrupt these patterns we have been socialized into, we first have to recognize them as cultural values that are inherent to capitalism. These ideas are ingrained in us from external sources to sustain the marketplace. These values are not intrinsic parts of being human, nor necessary parts of our personalities or of our survival. Once we acknowledge that these values come from outside ourselves, we can decide whether we truly value these things as our culture has taught us, or whether and how we want to rethink our relationship to these values.