Why You Don’t (Actually) Suck: What to Do When the “Abyss” Stares BACK
I’ve finally returned safe and sound from keynoting for the Cruising Writers and realized Cait broke into my blog again. CLUE: Cookie crumbs, glitter, red wine stains, and CAIT WUZ HERE LUZR written in crayon on my WP dashboard.
I would expect no less.
Truthfully, I love when she “breaks in” because she’s a master of dropping truth bombs (as well as cookie crumbs), which I hope y’all noted with her last post.
Cait also wrote another blog on HER page: Unproductive: Why the Productivity Industry is Killing Us, which I’d like to riff off today. Productivity can be a good thing, but can also become a soul-sucking abyss.
To quote the great inspirational life coach Freidrich Nitezsche:
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” ~ Freidrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil (Aphorism 146)
Part of me wonders if Nietzsche was like some 19th century Nostradamus who had a vision of my Yahoo mail *shudders*. As usual, Cait had excellent points about our cultural obsession with being more productive. Talk about facing the meaningless existence.
Alas, productivity in and of itself is neutral. Like TNT, radiation, sugar, or yoga pants, “productivity” is neither inherently good or bad.
The nature of “productivity” is always in how we conceptualize and then apply it. If we fail to take control and define our own metrics? We’ll be like a rudderless ship caught in a storm bracing for the inevitable.
Tossed this way and that until we’re ripped apart or run aground, coughing up mixed metaphors.
What’s the Abyss?
[image error]Ennui Cat, Henri the Existentialist Cat, courtesy of Will Braden
You might be wondering why I’m taking time to mention the abyss at all (other than that quoting Nietzsche makes me sound smart).
It’s because productivity when left as a vague construct is just that…an abyss. It’s a black hole, a singularity that can crush everything. A place where no light escapes.
The entire POINT of being more productive—allegedly—is so we can enjoy more free time. Ah, but here’s the rub. We free up time and it creates a vacuum which sucks in more stuff we “must” get done.
This then propels many of us to download an app, buy a new planner, ponder if cloning truly is all THAT unethical after all…
Why? Because we’ve either a) added more stuff onto our own To Do List OR b) allowed other people to shovel their $#@! onto our list.
We can all fall victim to the productivity abyss. It’s so easy to spiral into fixating on all we do poorly. Instead of noting what we’ve accomplished (and maybe celebrating a little), we can only seem to see what we didn’t do.
We pick at every flaw, berating how we could have done better, tried harder, accomplished more.
The world—our culture—wants us to think this way. Why? Because if we believe we’re a never ending failure, they can sell us a program, a book, an app, a service, a pill, a plan, a shrink or all of the above.
Defining Productivity
[image error]Ennui Cat, Henri the Existentialist Cat, courtesy of Will Braden
Before we go any further, I am a huge fan of books, plans, apps, and organizational tools.
Namely buying them…then hoping osmosis can take things from there (not much success on this front, btw).
Sure, on some level, I agree with Cait that the productivity grift is real. Anyone who’s ever been efficient at a “real job” learns quickly to be quiet about that skill…unless you want to be doing the job of three people.
For the same pay.
Alas, while the abyss is real we have to watch either/or thinking. If we fail to define what we want, what productivity means, and WHY we are bothering being productive in the first place, the abyss will eat us alive. We’re inexplicably despondent because we’re exhausted from all this activity that seems to propel us nowhere.
[image error]Ennui Cat, Henri the Existentialist Cat, courtesy of Will Braden
Conversely, we cannot do and control everything. Some of us need a reality check…or a sponsor who can look at our goals and then lovingly inform us we’re totally crazy.
This tends to be a unique problem for us Type A+ folks.
***Yes, Type A+ because we did the extra credit unlike the other slackers.
To define productivity, we need to first seek awareness. Like piling all the stuff from your closet on the bed then sorting through what to keep, what to donate (delegate) and what to trash. If we have no idea what our priorities are, what order they’re in, then we have no hope of defining a meaningful metric to measure success.
Malevolent Metrics & the Abyss
[image error]Ennui Cat, Henri the Existentialist Cat, courtesy of Will Braden
The abyss looooves for us to adopt no metrics or absurd metrics. We’ll be happy when we have five percent body fat, no wrinkles, a spotless home, children who speak three languages, and we donate a month a year serving the homeless in Darfur.
***Makes mental note to find actual location of Darfur.
One thing that jumped out at me when I read Cait’s post was how we can so easily mistake activity or busyness with productivity.
The world claims: Busy is GOOD and not busy is BAD (unproductive).
This is a seriously jacked up metric.
If you’ll pause with me a moment, you’ll see how this makes no sense and is completely at odds with natural law. Our culture (Western culture in particular) shames us for taking time off, going on vacation, sitting still in the quiet…doing….nothing.
Yet, nature has seasons. Winter is the time the world RESTS. This is when the trees deepen their roots so they can better weather and even survive future storms and droughts.
How many of us fall apart when life slams into us because our roots are too shallow?
[image error]Ennui Cat, Henri the Existentialist Cat, courtesy of Will Braden
Nature also teaches us that land that’s overworked eventually won’t produce. If forced to produce, each successive crop will be increasingly sicklier and leaner because the ground is depleted.
The ideal in farming is to let the land go fallow. Give it time to do…NOTHING. Time to “produce” what it wants—dandelions, sunflowers, crabgrass, poison ivy, ant hills, weeds.
When the land has time to do NOTHING, time to be UNproductive….it comes back better than ever.
Why do we use the term, “Dumb as dirt”? Seems to me the dirt’s smarter than I am. The dirt, at least, knows it needs a break. Knows winter is it’s time to…chill 
