I have decided to become a demotivational speaker. I’ll probably do a Ted Talk and write a self-help book. Here are the types of things I will say: it’s fine if you don’t do that. Stay an extra hour in bed. Play with that dog. Take a long lunch. Have a hobby not a side hustle. Stop and chat to your neighbour instead of rushing back to work. Your worth is not in what you produce. You can do it tomorrow. Some dreams are nicer as dreams. In fact, you don’t have to dream at all if you don’t want to. You’re fine as you are. Do the things you enjoy. It’s quite hard to get fired in Ireland. Find a cushy number and keep quiet about it. Imperfection is grand. Dawdle. (I might call the book “Dawdle”).
There are far too many people out there encouraging us to maximise our potential and to follow our dreams and achieve our goals. I just want to be a corrective to that. Young people’s social media feeds are full of over-excited people telling them how to optimise themselves. They tell them how to exercise better or talk to people they fancy better or how they should distance from the sheeple and shmucks who just work 9-to-5 jobs and to instead get side hustles and a grindcore mentality.
The wider world is filled with life hacks, self-help books, productivity guides and parenting manuals, not to mention the performative diaries of rich people in which they get up at 4am to pound a treadmill while perusing their stock options and chatting with their perfect children (who are definitely better than your dull, slack-jawed oiks). In MBAs, middle-management types study the workaholic existences of unhappy billionaires like they are the lives of the saints. In emulating the details of these grey routines, they hope to attract success (even though these stories generally ignore luck and happenstance).
We’re looking in a distorted mirror. In the past we had access to a small number of humans who lived near us. Now we see hundreds of thousands of them, some of whom are freakishly successful and popular and ripped, and it’s obviously going to make us feel inadequate. Productivity influencers also want us to feel like the issues in our lives are a consequence of our own choices rather than being a systemic problem. This is, of course, very helpful to the absolute shower of s****s who own these platforms. Sad people don’t log off. Sad people don’t organise.
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I know a bit about this. Earlier this year, I worked myself into a lather of stress and depression and had to take sick leave. I believed that my worth was related to how much I created. I was mentally and physically depleted. I am largely better, through counselling, exercise and time off (I am lucky to work for an organisation that is supportive of this) but it got me thinking. I keep meeting people who are extremely burned out. I meet them so often that I’m beginning to think burnout is something that exists by design.
Our productivity anxiety is partly a product of how we now conceptualise the market economy. In its most benign conception, the market was an engine for society. Now the market is depicted as an appetite that society must feed lest it get angry and attack us. Capitalism demands endless growth. There is no finish line. This means that endemic in our culture is a belief that as soon as we’ve done one thing we must go on to the other.
The anxiety is turbocharged by data collection. We measure everything we can. Often the actual impact of what we do is elusive and hard to measure. The easiest things to measure are artificially designed targets, quarterly sales, likes, volume. The economist Joseph Stiglitz once said, “what we measure is what we do” and so we chase easy-to-gather metrics more than we chase the more elusive stuff. Even if the metrics represent useful goals, the constant focus on numbers is anxiety creating. The measurement of data leads to the illusion that we have control over that data when, most often, we do not.
There are bigger external forces at play. The developed world apparently can’t provide the same housing, pensions and safety nets it provided after a world war, 70 years ago. The rich take a much bigger share of the rewards for our collective productivity than in the past (these things feel linked). Unions have lost their power. Increasing numbers of people live in a perpetual gig economy (and I know everything I have described in this piece is worse for them). And along with this, burrowed into our brains, is a story that we’re repeatedly telling ourselves – that it’s our own fault. We need to be productive. We must excel. We must always be above average when, in reality, most of us, most of the time, can only be average by definition.
[ Ireland’s Generation Rent: ‘After 12 years renting, I’d like my own front door’Opens in new window ]
It’s been a slow slide away from something better. In the middle of the 20th century, much of Europe developed welfare states in which ordinary people suddenly had education, healthcare, pensions and free time. Politics, for a while, was oriented around the idea of service provision. It wasn’t perfect but it suited the majority. Winning and losing didn’t come into it. Unions and government regulation kept things in check and ordinary people could think about working to live. Those this didn’t suit were a) those who had all the education, healthcare and free time they wanted anyway and now had to pay more tax and b) a certain type of obsessive personality whose life involved zealously chasing things and were consequently annoyed at all the people who worked 9-5 and had time to sniff coffee, flowers and the heads of babies.
Eventually these highly motivated psychopaths, suspecting that many ordinary people were now happier than they were, set out to dismantle the welfare state. This started in earnest in the late 1970s (class mobility in many western countries has stalled since that decade and inequality has increased hugely). In the place of cradle-to-grave care they wanted to give us productivity guilt. In the place of promising ordinary people attainable, comfortable, useful lives, they offered fantastical pipe dreams (“You can’t afford a house? Invest in crypto and become Elon Musk”).
This was just, they said, because we live in a meritocracy and only the very hard working and truly talented really deserve a house or healthcare or a comfortable retirement. Distributing resources based on talent would be a horrible idea even if meritocracy was possible (Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit is worth a read if you don’t intuitively understand why it’s horrible). But meritocracy is a myth anyway. For the most part, hard work and talent aren’t sufficient to achieve everyone’s dreams. Hard work and talent function a lot better with substantial family support and existing wealth. Renowned nepo-babies Donald Trump or Elon Musk are good examples of how all you need to make a big fortune is to start off with a small fortune.
This worldview has wider social consequences. When people have more manageable work lives, they also have more time for family, volunteering, hobbies and paying attention to the world around them. Out in their community they meet neighbours with different backgrounds and perspectives and politics. This fosters empathy. It’s hard to dehumanise someone who coaches your kid’s football team even if they do have weird views about the moon landing. It’s easy to dehumanise people if you’re working too hard, feel in competition with everyone for resources and keep encountering caricatures on social media instead of actual people.
Individual striving isn’t going to fix this. Personal development isn’t going to fix this. The top 10 habits of highly successful people aren’t going to fix this. Only collective action can. In the meantime, we need to deprogram ourselves. Once again, the youngsters have got it right. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Generation Z invented “quiet quitting”, which is actually an old idea: doing the job you were paid for, no more and no less (nobody bats an eye when companies do this, just when employees do so).
I’m not saying we shouldn’t “strive”. I’m saying we should strive for the things that are important, the things that we believe in – family, community, political change, actually providing a useful service for people, making stuff. We shouldn’t strive far beyond the hours we’re paid for if we can help it (I know this is easier said than done, for many of us) and we should pace ourselves. Striving for striving’s sake leads to busywork, pointless meetings, presenteeism, inventions that don’t make life better, PowerPoint presentations, businesses that are just big grifts, more carbon in the atmosphere. Having aspirations is cool if they’re your own aspirations and not ones devised by some Silicon Valley sociopath because his kids won’t talk to him.
As for me, I’m learning. I had the idea for this essay ages ago but I didn’t suggest it to my editor lest she actually commission it. I’m only writing it now because I couldn’t be arsed doing another piece I’ve been meaning to write (“Do it later” is another chapter in my unwritten self-help book). My counsellor might call this low energy creativity a “breakthrough”. I wish similar breakthroughs for you and all of your family. Let’s all have an averagely productive December.
