“Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.”
The adages of our forefathers do little to serve us today, in the new age of modernity. Work is something that most of us will will have the privilege of suffering through at least once in our lives. It is abstraction, a general state of circumstances that is defined by the necessity of a task’s completion. Productivity, therefore, is the state in which the things that need to get done, get done, quickly and efficiently.
Being productive is a good feeling. It leaves a person feeling accomplished and focused, satisfied with a job well done. But the true benefit to productivity is that it is supposed to be accomplished in short bursts and phases, in a handful of sprints to the finish line, not a ceaseless monotony of footfalls.
The unconscious need we have to be productive are not only indicative of capitalism as a broken system, but an indictment of the society we have built writ large. Our days are consumed by menial tasks and labors. Respite is only ever found in between the transition from one task to another. Rest is something that simply can’t be scheduled in—there’s far too much to do and not enough time for it.
Have you finished your college applications yet? How about that project for AP Chem? Don’t forget about the rhetorical analysis you need to do on Jane Austen, or those flashcards for history.
Once you’re done with those, remember to take out the trash and clean the house. You have soccer practice at seven and we’re having dinner afterwards at CAVA. I want you in bed by 12 tonight. You’ve been going to sleep too late too often.
From a young age, many of us are primed for this sort of frenetic, non-stop lifestyle. Middle school is filled with sports and extracurriculars, with “advanced level” classes that prep one for high school. When high school finally arrives in its splendor and decadence, the young pupil finds themselves awash in a sea of busy work and much needed review exercises, the biggest being the fact that no one can really tell the difference between the two. Don’t forget that good, well-rounded students also need to participate in extracurriculars and volunteer, colleges won’t even bother looking at you otherwise.
Once that’s sorted, and you finally get into college, try not to be overwhelmed by the dizzying amount of responsibilities and uncanny juxtaposition of near-limitless freedom. After that, just worry about getting viable work experience so you can become a productive and upstanding member of society.
Though, you’ll have to bear in mind that your twenty’s will probably be spent pulling long hours and learning about office politics the hard way. No worries, though, your 50 hour work weeks will undoubtedly reward you with some measure of praise and due diligence from the company, won’t it? Oh. A pizza party. Wonderful.
I have no qualms about the dreary sort of existence I am painting. Nor am I afraid to admit that my own habits as a workaholic make me more than a little biased and partial to what I am presenting. I know that boiling something so complex as reality into a handful of words leaves little room for the many exceptions and special cases sprinkled throughout it to make themselves apparent. Life is buried in the details and joy is nestled within the small, seemingly unimportant moments that dot our existence. To look at things so abstractly and to paint with such broad strokes is almost begging to suffer. But therein lies the central issue: I can paint life in broad strokes.
For all of our meditation apps and mindfulness reminders, for all our screen time reports and motivational posters, the fact of the matter is we all work too much. Two days are not enough to recover and recharge from the forty hour work week. Even then, the line between work and play becomes blurred and morphed: work emails and phone calls interrupt what precious little free time we all have. Weekends can be (and often are) spent dreading M*nday. Time off is used to catch up on the little mountain of house chores and personal duties that have piled up over the weeks instead of relaxing.
This constant stream of tasks and responsibilities is inevitable. Inescapable, even. It is, unfortunately, a byproduct of existence: you will have to do certain things in order to live the life you want. Oh, the absolute horror! the Boomers shudder. Another Zoomer can’t handle the pressure!
But, it is not that the younger generations cannot handle the pressure—the problem is that it’s all some of us have known.
The virtues of the free market tout that innovation is the result of competition, that the best man will triumph over his peers because he can do one thing or another better and more efficiently. Oh god, not another anti-capitalist! Give me a moment, dear reader, I’m getting to my point. Liberalism and Neoliberalism are now the names of the game; in democratic societies, individualism and competition to bring out the best in each of us, which consequently improves society as a result. A noble premise, to be sure, if it wasn’t for the sense of hyper-competitiveness these same frameworks create.
As I mentioned before, and as I’m sure many of us can relate to, much of our time in primary school was spent becoming “more well rounded.” This holistic approach to education is a valiant attempt to create a cultured citizenry and cultivate critical thinking skills and many other buzzwords I’m sure you’ve all heard. While I can appreciate and agree with the necessity of this cultivation, the implicit emphasis it has on the quantity of knowledge and extracurriculars and the pressure it exerts on students leaves much to be desired; students become generalists at a young age, their energy directed towards digging a repository of education a mile wide and an inch deep.
This focus doesn’t end at high school, but is extended into college life: time is not only spent juggling classes and navigating the terror of identity formation, but students are expected to seek out “viable work experience” in order to be “competitive applicants.” We compete against the bogeymen of the 10% of our classes, against some unseen abstraction of Candidate X, the indomitable spirit of productivity that will most assuredly land the internship or job that we so desperately want.
“While you’re sleeping, others are working. First one in, last one out. Rich people wake up early and go to bed late. You have to want to succeed more than you want to breathe; only then can you be successful.”
Motivational accounts with names like “BillionaireMindsets” or “KnowledgeSeekers” purport that hard work and success share a direct relationship, that the more time and effort one puts into something, the more likely they are to succeed. While time investment and worthwhile practice are great ways to hone one’s craft and generally improve their lot in life, such cliches fail to account for systemic inequalities and institutional inequalities that can disadvantage a person, often well before they’re even born. But their points have been made regardless: those of the top of the mountain did not fall there. Hard work is integral to success.
But at what cost? More importantly, why the rush? For what reasons have our educational and economic sectors so heavily emphasized this rapid maturation process? What is so important that it needs to get done on a weekend? What sort of work is so crucial that a person has to check their email before going to sleep? Why have we allowed ourselves to think about our careers first rather than ourselves?
These sort of practices are unsustainable and often end up burning out whoever engages in them. Burnout leaves one feeling unmotivated, nihilistic, and deeply, deeply afraid. What am I besides my work? Is this all I’ll ever amount to? What is the point of clocking in tomorrow?
The lack of barriers between work and personal life have turned out an entire generation of anxious overachievers. Young people face the monster of existential dread decades before that hallmark “mid life crisis” writers are so fond of—now we have quarter life crises and crippling depression, all neatly packaged into cynical 20-something-year-old bodies. The humor of the times reflect this—memes are surreal and more often than not focus around some deeply existential crisis (like global warming and the rise of global fascism) or glaring over-analysis of a person’s character flaws.
An unintended consequence of this hyper-industrialization is the most comical: the rise of Neo-Dadaism. Dada was originally an art and intellectual movement that gained traction after the First World War, when intellectuals and artists alike began to indulge in surrealism and irrationality as a response to the horrors of war. They rejected standard convention and denounced capitalism and the status quo, choosing instead to stare into the abyss and laugh at it. Here we see the same thing: laughter in the face of the absurd.
This essay is over now, I have work to do.
