Member-only story
How To Be Unproductive
For the past fifty years, American productivity has skyrocketed while wages have stayed relatively flat. As a result, Americans are working harder than ever, and we’ve been incentivized to squeeze as much economic value out of every ounce of time we have in order to make up for the lack of real wage growth.
40-hour work weeks have become 80-hour work weeks, hobbies have become side hustles, and our leisure activities have become content. When doing your whole job and nothing more is considered “quiet quitting,” what hope do we have for a moment to ourselves that isn’t tied to what we can produce for our bosses, our families, or the world at-large?
“Everything is copy,” Norah Ephron once said. Now, everything is content. Have a fun hobby like, say, bullet journaling? How soon can you monetize it? How can you build a brand around it? Make sure every entry you make is picture-perfect for your Instagram account. Start a website, an Etsy, and an Instagram.
Want to learn a new skill? Be sure to document your journey for your blog. People like to see growth so why not learn it as a 30-Day challenge?
Going out with friends? make sure to get a few selfies so everyone online knows you’re living your best life. Oh look, you’ve got new followers. Maybe you should write a poetry collection?
The 21st-century creative economy has made everything a money-making endeavor and this, compounded with the need to work more than ever, has skewed our value system to the point that we measure everything by how it ties into improving our work performance.
It’s gotten to the point where we now justify non-economic activities in terms of how they improve our economic capacity.
There’s so much pressure to somehow monetize every moment possible that we’ve forgotten how to just be people, how to simply enjoy our lives without any consideration of the economic value of our actions.
As Jenny Odell, Author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy says:
“If you no longer have a work self and a friend self and a family self, it stands to…
