Can We Get Rid of Productivity, Please?
Confessions of an overworking Millennial who’s never “enough”
See that girl sitting in front of the desk?
That’s me.
On the other side, Dr. Leibovitz is looking through my medical history.
“I see you had COVID-19,” he says.
“Pneumonia, actually”. I emphasize the adverb. These days, respiratory illnesses that aren’t a consequence of SARS-CoV-2 are like fake luxury bags.
“I see,” he nods. “Did you get cured?”
“Won’t people die if they aren’t cured of pneumonia?”. That’s the only answer you can give, right?
Silent, he stares at his laptop as if the Holy Virgin just appeared to him. Shortly after, his secretary opens the door; “The doctor is retiring, effectively June 1st”, he dictates to her. That’s what Heaven looks like, then!
The secretary exits the place. The phone rings. “I’m sorry, I need to take this. This patient has been stalking me for the past three days”, he blathers.
Last time I checked, calling a doctor for a prescription is not stalking.
I unlock my phone. I’ve added three flower dresses to my wishlist before his call ends.
“My job requires patience”, he states, as he grabs the results of my blood tests.
“That’s not exclusive to your job”, I reply.
He doesn’t seem convinced. “What do you do in life?”, he asks.
“I’m a researcher and a lawyer”.
“All lawyers must die”.
Excuse me, what the f***?!
Drive To Survive
My uncle is a fanatic of the Grand Prix. For my whole adolescence, Easter Sundays had been about watching Formula1. I’ve asked him why auto racing was considered a sport several times. I argued that it seemed effortless and looked like a hobby for spoilt rich people.
“It’s a misogynist rally. Which role do women have in it? They carry umbrellas to protect drivers from sunlight, as if they were vampires”.
That was the final statement of my case against F1. To a great extent, it still sounds fair.
This April, I watched Formula 1: Drive to Survive. It’s an excellent series with masterful editing. Netflix gained full access to the constructors’ facilities and the drivers’ personal lives. The show purposely depicts how victories are the results of the yearly efforts of hundreds of people. As a counter altar, it shows many failures. Badly screw-ups and how unfaulty they can be.
Its main praise though is the focus on the drivers’ backgrounds. The show is a splendid metaphor of the spinning world in which people in their 20s live. Lewis Hamilton, Charles LeClerc, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon… they’re all 20-something with ambitious dreams. Most of all, they’re Millenials who have been fed up with the myths of the famous drivers that came before them.
They struggle with expectations, rejections, discriminations in the hope they will climb the ladder to the stars. Because they know that people have been there before. They’ve seen it’s possible. Being good enough is not an option. There’s only better. Tiny mistakes are huge stepbacks; anxiety cannot interfere with their results; the toleration they grew on their human — faulty — nature is close to zero.
Any driver hopes to score the fastest lap, while an entire universe of people pressure them more than they pressure themselves.
The most shocking episode shows a deathly accident. Most drivers have been friends with the driver since they were six. They grew up with him. They’re broken.
24 hours later they’re all driving.
Because pilots drive. They get in the f****g car and go full speed. They drive no matter what. No matter what risks they take. No matter how they feel. No matter if the world is crumbling under their feet.
Didn’t Millenials grow up with that belief running in their blood?
You can’t stop, you need to get to the finish line.
Unless your car has an accident or a malfunction.
My Biggest Enemy is Me
In January of 2021, I got tempted by writing on Medium “for real”. I liked how ideas popped up in my mind at any hour of the day. The more I wrote the more I felt like writing. I developed opinions on social issues. New perspectives on the topics I have been working on for years. Tried different styles and forms.
In three months, I started about 160 drafts and published less than 30 stories and a pair of poems. Frequency was never my thing. I tell myself that’s because I already work two daily jobs, yet I’m not sure that having more time would make a difference.
By the end of April, I devoured the stories that Age of Empathy published on burnout. Most of them were written by authors I already enjoyed such as Kelly Eden and Charlie Brown. Their words felt so close that I started questioning how I was feeling.
Here’s the content of a draft I wrote on February 9th:
To my perception, I have been a wreck for over a year. I cannot manage my time properly. I’m always on a rush and I’m not able to spend some quality time with the people I love. Urgent tasks get postponed until they become life-or-death matters. When I finally do them, I’m surrounded by self-doubt.
The people who love me see a different side of this story. To them, I had an insanely great year in terms of results. I’m a postdoc researcher working on a book. I taught my own class at University. I turned my love for fashion and my shopping addictions into something valuable, working as a stylist and quickly rising to the status of second-hand influencer. Within the same 12 months, I got called to freelance for gigantic companies, such as Disney.
Shouldn’t I take pride that everything I do eventually ends up for the best? That’s what I’ve heard.
Everybody has its own opinion about my life. Do you want to know mine?
I’m overwhelmed and confused. It seems to me that I have a bunch of profitable skills, but none of them is “conclusive”. I’m becoming a workaholic and I don’t want to. I’m on the edge of exhaustion, always too tired.
You grow up believing in directions. Objectives. But do you always know where you want to go? Because I don’t.
Doesn’t it feel like driving in circles?
Even Ferraris Need Pit-Stops
By the end of March, my car started malfunctioning. My immune system collapsed. At first, I got an allergic reaction to the antibiotics that were used to cure pneumonia. After that, I endured a lot of physical and psychical pain. Two to three migraines per week. I couldn’t sleep. I just felt exhausted and couldn’t focus for more than two hours.
I started seeing doctors. I felt like a collector of Pokémon cards. Psychiatrist? Check. Neurologist? Check. Endocrinologist? Check. Gynecologist? Check.
In the meantime, anybody had a saying on my conditions. “You’re stressed” has been the most common sentence of the past two months. You don’t say?
People served me their own idea of how stressed they were too, because “pandemics suck, right?”. They then discarded any difference between my current situations and their belief to relate. They constantly tried and pretend productivity from me.
“Are you too tired to reply to emails?” “Will you be able to finish that essay in the next two hours?” “Would you mind taking my spot at the conference?” “Why didn’t you look through the papers I sent you last week?”
Whatever is wrong with our society is in there. And it afflicts Medium too, which is why I stayed away from it for a while.
It’s our idea of being productive. Always. More. At least a bit.
Productivity is an 18th-century word. It’s a legacy of the bourgeoise society and the rise of industry.
Getting to the core of productivity is like playing with a Russian doll. Being productive means having the quality or power to produce something. Producing means giving birth to something, making it available to the public.
From a lexical point of view, if you’re putting something out there, you’re a producer. As a writer, it doesn’t matter if you write 10 articles per week. Or twice a month. If your work gets to the public, you’re producing.
Unless you truly believe productiveness is connected to abundance. That connection comes from the competitive market. It’s part of an economic statement, where efficiency is connected to tangible outcomes. And tangible outcomes in a capitalistic world can only mean that no amount is ever “enough”. Otherwise, you’ll stop producing.
Is this understanding of productiveness a healthy concept?
It isn’t.
It is part of a capitalistic way of looking at things and it shouldn’t be applied to souls.
On the Urge To Discard the Showing-Off of Success
The social media era can easily be described as that time where people found a place to display their successes. And it quickly became an urge.
Social conventions lead us to agree on the significance of terms. We may use different languages or spellings, but we all have words of a particular significance.
So, what is success?
Can you define it in an unambiguous way?
Here on Medium, most writers are sharing incredibly positive stories but are uneasy to recognize that they are lucky. Talking about hard work and giving lessons on how to reach personal graals are a must.
Yet, hard work is not a synonym for success. And it doesn’t rhyme with satisfaction. To most people, hard work won’t mean feeling good. It won’t mean knowing where you want to go, let alone getting there.
If you got to this point, you probably guessed there are some interesting materials I could share. How-tos, insightful topics, helpful advice, trivial experiences. Yet, a lot of it is still locked under my vault. You remember the 160 drafts, right? I’m unable to discipline myself to finish them because they are never “good enough”. Is it perfectionism? Partially.
The world that is displaying on Medium collides with my low self-esteem, by constantly redefining my milestones. From this point of view, Medium has been the death of me. It raised a new kind of dissatisfaction. The many things I’ve “successfully” done in my life looked less enriching in a dashboard of money-making side-hustlers and 21-years-old people with six-figure classes.
Yet again, that’s capitalism, baby. There’s no space for “enough”. You’ll always want more.
To the writers who are moving their first steps in here: please, do not let other people’s self-projection define who you are.
To the writers who have climbed to the top of the ladder: please, do not let productivity define who you are.
To all: please, help create a world where people will feel they are enough.
I’ve been unable to finish anything for more than two months. Anything, truly. From work projects to home tasks. I started a decluttering of my wardrobe and right now any room of my apartment looks like it’s World War II.
Somewhere along the road, I decided this draft will be the first thing I’ll finish. A story about accepting that we’re not mental if we can’t stand working 10 hours per day. Or just four. If we got to the end of the day without “producing”.
A story on learning how to be enough.
Do I know how to? Nope. But I believe we need to define better measures for labeling our time on Earth as worthy.
Back to square one. Do we really need to drive, no matter what?