Sienna Parekh
After spending endless hours scrolling through social media (I’m not proud of it either), I have noticed that every time I open up Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, even Google, I am bombarded with posts and advertisements on ‘How to be more productive’ and ‘How to improve yourself’. You don’t have to do much digging at all to find that in this day and age, we are obsessed with the idea of productivity.
So, what is productivity? The Cambridge Dictionary defines productivity as “the rate at which a person, company or country does useful work”… pretty vague right? However, the type of productivity that floods our Instagram feeds can be aptly referred to as toxic productivity. This comes hand in hand with ideas of workaholism and ‘hustle culture’ (a term coined by journalist Erin Griffith to describe a cultural obsession of ‘striving’ which is ‘relentlessly positive and devoid of humour). Basically, the main rhetoric of ‘hustle culture’ is that if you work hard enough, you will be successful.
Sound familiar?
If the answer is yes, then you are no doubt familiar with the American dream and the political system of meritocracy. This is a social system, society, or organisation in which people get success or power because of their abilities, not because of their money or social position. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you are well aware, the narrative of such ideals is not true. We are sadly reminded of this every time we read the news or turn on our TVs to see under-qualified, even unqualified people in positions of power around the world. And yet, we still believe that if we work hard enough that we can achieve success or even a comfortable life. As a result, many people live to work rather than working to live, many people work multiple jobs just to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. You have to work so hard to survive that you have such little time to actually enjoy living.
While this common mindset of toxic productivity is already rather worrisome during normal times, the even greater emphasis placed on productivity and doing something every hour of the day during this period of lockdown is all the more distressing. We are already living in a high-stress environment where people are suffering both mentally and physically without the added pressure of writing the new best-selling novel, learning a new language or checking everything off that seemingly never-ending to-do list. This mindset that you must constantly achieve not only worsens one’s mental health but can also discourage action completely.
This issue is not just applied to work-related tasks but also has encroached onto our hobbies, as is a common theme with capitalism, our fun self-fulfilling hobbies are no longer valid unless we turn them into money-making schemes. A person’s worth is now only associated with their usefulness, which correlates with the amount of work they are doing. People have become commodities; our every action is commodified and monetized. Otherwise, it is seen as a waste of time; why spend our time doing something we enjoy when we could be doing something more “meaningful” and “productive” instead?
Of course, there is some positivity in this sudden burst of productivity. Due to the forced clearance of our schedules, we have time to start creating healthy habits and I have thoroughly enjoyed hearing about how my friends have been finding the silver lining around the dark cloud that is lockdown. But if the line between self-improvement and actual self-care is so blurred, how do we know when our mindset has become toxic? The important distinction between the two is that, in self-care, you should not feel guilty for not using your time productively.
Despite this, we must remember that it is a great privilege for us to even consider maximising productivity and pondering how to fill the ever-growing crevasse of time we seem to have on our hands. For many people, from key workers to those who have lost loved ones, this pandemic claims their time, thoughts and lives at this time.
This lockdown period has greatly shaken and changed our time, allowing for a period of reflection and adjustment and it is great to see so many people trying to make something good out of it. However, as you continue to build your ‘summer body’, hone your culinary skills or ace that new instrument, perhaps we can spend some time to reflect on our ideas and mindset around work and productivity. Although this pandemic may have appeared to disrupt your ‘grind’, after some searching, you may find that it was broken to begin with.
I would like to finish this article with some suggestions of self-care activities that you can start off with until you develop your own personalised self-care routine:
Read a book
Light some incense
Go for a run or do an at-home workout (get those endorphins flowing!)
Meditate
Do something you love for however long you feel like doing it
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