I almost slept in, but when I got up to turn off my alarm and cancel my appointment, well, at that point I was up, and I might as well make some coffee, and scratch some pages, and do the thing that I said I was going to do.
I think a lot, and hear a lot, about softening the edges of the grasp that productivity culture holds over us. The admonition to soften those edges strikes me as wise, especially as a corrective to the too-muchness of all of the capitalism that’s run amok, that’s running the world and making a mess.
But when I read a book or an article or a poem about not needing to be quite as productive as all that, I think about how whoever wrote the piece did manage to get up yesterday morning and make some coffee and go to yoga and sit at their desk and write something.
I feel two things about the matter. I have two thoughts.
My first is that, yes, pretty much everybody is trying too hard. Hustling too much. Pretty much everybody deserves a nap. Naps are subversive and powerful. The earth welcomes us at the angle of repose. There is wisdom in letting a field lie fallow. In practicing unplug. In observing sabbath. In being enough. In being a human being not just a human doing. In letting the day suffice. In honoring the labor of nurture. In activating pleasure, following whims, the peace of wild things. In letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
The second thought is that I’m made of muscle and creative genius. So are you. So are we each. And I relish some struggle. I like to work, to produce, to create, to make. I stand tall in the presence of the pull of gravity. I have edges and I find life, feel life, taste life, give life when I press into them.
Of course, the best critiques of productivity culture are not a dismissal of the creative spirit, but rather, protective of it. The end goal of productivity culture is the accrual of passive income. The end goal of creativity is the active production of life.
I like a world where we’re all free from unnecessary struggle, free to make the creative contributions that we’re here to make.
How many of us are unnecessarily struggling through our days in order to produce things that aren’t quite aligned with our creative edges?
I drift toward utopian thinking when I start walking with such questions.
I suppose, though, at the end of the day, when well-applied, utopian thinking can be a very creative, even productive, use of our time and imagination.
PS—This post pairs well with Kirsten Powers creative contributions on Changing the Channel.
PPS—And also with this conversation between John Dickerson and Brad Stulberg…
