On Being Derailed
Photo @carlheyerdahl
Productivity has generated a sort of cult-like following over the past few decades. Productivity advocates, champions, and gurus speak about it as if the perfect, most efficient morning routine optimized for maximum output is the noblest aspiration and highest form of achievement known to man. It's venerated. Worshipped. Discussed ad nauseam.
And, don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't strive to be as productive as possible sometimes... how could I not? It's such a big part of the zeitgeist. Some people can barely understand their own existence except for by a measure of their own productivity. It's wholly unavoidable. Productivity is measurable and reliable and an essential part of our daily working lives as we all hustle to meet our KPIs or get better metrics or whatever. It’s impossible not to consider from time to time.
But I've always hated thinking of what I do, of my creative output, in those terms. It feels cheap, somehow. Slutty.
And worse than that, productivity entirely misses the point of being alive. After all, you're not a product. You're not a machine making a product. You're a person. And you're meant to experience things. Hopefully, as fully as you can, with harm to noone.
The OED has assigned this meaning to the word, which I find greatly offensive. How have we allowed ourselves to be lumped in and measured in such terms? Don't answer that, I know the answer already, and it provides no comfort.
Productivity has been on my mind because this year it has been so glaringly absent from my life. It's been a tumultuous 18 months...health issues with the kids, divorce, moving, a new job, a short but promising bout of alcoholism, and the joyfully troublesome work of trying to find yourself again after years of not listening to your own needs... a lot has been going on for me… and yet, throughout all of those very big things, I found myself feeling an immense amount of guilt at not being more productive.
Not sticking to my schedules, not hitting my goals, and not producing work on a personal level even though I was still knocking it out on a professional level. I felt guilty and like a failure instead of allowing myself the time to process and heal that I very obviously needed. More than that, I was actively denying my pain and my humanity with a "keep on trucking" attitude and a very cavalier "I'm fine, staying busy" when anyone asked. And I know I'm not alone in this. Everyone else I've ever known to be going through difficult times generally spits out some variation of the same line.
"I'm fine, staying busy."
What the fuck is wrong with us?
Why are we not allowed to not be fine? To not be busy? To not be productive, even at the hardest moments of our lives?
Maybe it was the way I was raised or early socialization, but from the outside looking in... I don't miss a beat no matter what I'm dealing with. I had a job interview on the day my ex announced he was leaving. Nailed it. It was the first of three, but I ended up getting the job. The bills get paid, the house stays clean, and the kids are fed. Everything keeps running, tickety boo. Part of that is because I was basically a married, single mother... so little difference did the divorce make. Part is because there is no stopping in this society, because stopping means loss of income and loss of income means you can no longer afford to exist. We have to pay to be alive, every second, without pause. And that’s the part that feeds into the sick devotion to the cult of productivity. Gotta stay busy!
The protestant work ethic, maybe? Industry being the enemy of melancholy and all that.
The drive to be productive makes a certain amount of sense until it doesn't. Until you realize that you're just a hamster on a wheel, like all the other hamsters on wheels, keeping the great engines of commerce going. It's pointless, yet it’s the central point of focus of our entire lives. Work. Productivity. What we do for a living is so often what we do instead of living. Modern life, in so many ways, is just a prison of our own making.
My life had been derailed, and I'll I wanted to do was lay on the floor practicing corpse pose and cry and drink for about three months.
What would life look like if we were allowed, and if we allowed ourselves, the time we needed to grieve, to mourn, to languish, to rejoice, to pause, to relish, to devour, to linger?
What would it look like if being derailed was normal and accepted and came with some paid vacation time?
What if we saw it as an incredibly important moment in life, one where you were forced to redirect and reevaluate and were allowed the time to indulge yourself in the reflection necessary to learn from the experience and come out stronger because of it?
I think about this a lot, and I'm not holding my breath for the universal adoption of an encouraging practice of societal mental self-care. But I think that, in part, you can build your own life around moments of pause... by living simply, quietly, on less, for less, with less. Small communities. Thrifting. Sharing. Growing things. Scraping by. That's not to romanticize poverty at all. I know the pains of not having enough to live on all too well. I’m talking about an intentionally slow life that gives you more time freedom and less devotion to work and productivity—and that kind of life comes at the cost of everything shiny and attractive about modern life. All its conveniences, all its newness, all of its technology and up-to-the-minuteness. All the bells and whistles.
Being derailed made me wonder how many bells and whistles we really need. If we had food and a home and love and laughter, wouldn't that be enough? If we had each other?
New quest unlocked.
Everyone who feels called to should figure out how to get off this track so that we never have to feel derailed from our own true sense of self and purpose and wonder.
I think it starts by finding the others. The ones who think like you, dream like you and share your vision.
They're out there, somewhere…