How to be unproductive.

Antwerp, BE 9.2023

A couple of months ago, I started to experience mental fatigue. At first, it felt like a cascade of work-related tasks had buffeted my mind to the point of exhaustion. An excessive workload, unrealistic productivity demands, and the mind-numbing nature of most of the tasks involved were typical symptoms that are well-known in the literature on work-related exhaustion and burnout. Yet at the same time, I did not experience other well-known symptoms of these occupational health conditions, such as lack of personal accomplishment and depersonalisation. Perhaps this is to do with the fact that I was able to respond to this onset of fatigue by committing to these tasks with a significant degree of resolve and acceptance. Over the last years, I have perhaps become a little more seasoned in the eb and flow of both professional stress as well as my attitude towards it. Mantras like This is how things are right now and This too will pass have become helpful ways to navigate the mental contractions I experienced. Yet I am well aware that I should consider myself fortunate that all of this did indeed pass and my feelings of professional fulfilment and accomplishment have remained more or less intact. If the analogy for burnout would be an incoming storm, it felt like I had seen it coming directly my way just to barely pass me by.

Of course my reaction to all of this was not exclusively a serene state of equanimity and acceptance. During the most strenuous days (and nights), I vividly experienced the toxicity of the persistent inner critic that told me I should just work harder and that this state was entirely my own fault. In much of the literature on exhaustion, this negative feedback loop is regarded as one of the main reasons why we often feel completely helpless against the unrealistic demands and strenuous workloads in which our lives ensnare us. There is of course much to be said about the onslaughts of the capitalist fetishisation of productivity as well as the neoliberal ideology of individualised responsibility. They make us experience our demands as personally desired and our lack of productivity and success as individually caused. Subsequently, our habitual tendency to ignore the deeper causes of professional exhaustion as indeed structural and systemic makes us the perfect source of our own suffering. The solution is always presented at the insulated level of the individual.

Apart from the pressure of the inner critic, I also became aware of the way exhaustion is presented as a trade-off cost, with entertainment and leisure being the hard won reward at the end of the daily, weekly, or yearly grind. And these have also been coopted by a logic of markets and commodities where our consumption is itself the product being sold, bought, and traded. However, while these musings on work and exhaustion can be found much more eloquently in pretty much any Marxist analysis of the commodification of labour as well as leisure, it seems that the human mind itself has been subjected to the logic of the commodity as it navigates the world in a commodified way. I have written about our fragmented focus and limited attention span before yet it seems that the quality of our mental engagement is not only measured in terms of duration but also in terms of saturation. It is hard not to continue sounding the Marxist drum here but a brief look at the history of modern advertising reveals that the commodity is hardly traded for its intrinsic value but rather in terms of its exchange value, i.e. how it can be traded for something else, which is often just another commodity. Consumption has therefore become a seemingly endless cycle of acquiring commodities that are depleted to the point that new commodities need to acquired. Indeed, one of the most fundamental and aspired values of human existence - happiness - has perhaps become the most aspired commodity of all. Happiness, but also other elusive states of mental and physical wellbeing such as pleasure, relaxation, enjoyment, success, or indeed productivity, has become a commodity of which we always feel just out of reach as we try to acquire it by means of the latest products, lifestyles, experiences, or aesthetics offered by the happiness market.

I am reminded here of the collective exhaustion that was experienced widely during the pandemic four years ago. Terms like ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘the great resignation’ gave the impression that it was possible to just disengage from work that had simply become exhausting. Unfortunately, this trend did not spark the anticipated revolution against the deeply engrained ideology of work in our society. Indeed, it quickly transpired from the way governments and employers around the world responded to the pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns that work and productivity levels were to be maintained at all costs. Ironically, this continuity was not facilitated despite the normalisation to work from home and adopt more fluctuating levels of productivity throughout the day or week but rather because of it. Work continued and so did exhaustion. Indeed, more accounts of burnout have been reported after the pandemic than during it as productivity continues to be one of the main ideological drives behind a capitalist mindset. Yet what has become more obvious than ever is that the real goal is not to actually be productive but merely to appear productive. This performative of optical productivity - where output is more important than outcome - is perhaps the most cynical product of the pandemic: knowing that it does not really matter what one produces as long as one can be observed producing it. 

This outcome is largely facilitated by the commodified mind. Like a product that is alienated from its producer, a mind that navigates the world in a commodified way equally operates in an atomised way where appearance is everything yet nothing is fundamentally achieved or reached. My partner reminded me in this context of how expectations of what it means to be a woman have always required women to behave, act, think, talk, look, dress, and appear in certain ways (which were often articulated vaguely or subliminally) that never provided any recognition or sense of achievement, let alone a chance of identifying in independent ways. Similarly, our desire to be productive and more fundamentally to be happy is promised by means of commodities that never provide a more profound sense of fulfilment. Perhaps my fortune of having maintained this fulfilment throughout the experiences I recently had attests to the fact that I am a man with a tangible sense of professional freedom, even though masculinity has also become subjected to certain expectations and standards. Either way, being spared from a more detrimental experience of exhaustion has made me aware of how a commodified sense of productivity continues to subject so many people to the need to chase something that will never be fully awarded or reached. Ultimately, this is not something that can be achieved by incessantly rebranding productivity in ways that make it appear less demanding or less exhausting. For me, it meant the conscious decision to look for ways to be unproductive within the parameters of my own life and my work. This made me acutely aware of how much the notion of unproductively feels like a stigma that is to be avoided at all costs. Yet in the same way as the literature on exhaustion advises us to accept it as a friend, I decided to see what being unproductive feels like and postpone the urge to be or indeed appear productive a little further beyond my immediate comfort.