PRODUCTIVITY CULTURE
Productivity is Useless Without a Meaningful Goal
A critique of quickness in American capitalism
Usually, people talk about productivity in isolation from all other dreams or ambitions someone might have. This is for a reason — people want their ideas about how to do things to apply to as many people as humanly possible, be they a copywriter or a hunter/gatherer in some uncontacted tribe in South America (who probably can’t access their ideas about productivity, but should, nevertheless). And that really is what productivity is: to do things, perhaps at a higher velocity than average.
A productive murderer, after all, is a mass murderer. A productive rapist? A serial rapist. A productive politician might get a lot of bills passed, but the quality and usefulness of those bills is, by that statement alone, undetermined. And so, as everyone knows, productivity is a relative virtue.
Nevertheless, I wonder if seeing the word “productivity” in isolation, again and again, worms into anyone’s head, so that they start to believe that productivity in itself is a coherent and laudable goal. I imagine someone getting out of bed in the morning, and thinking, blearily, prior to their coffee-flavored productivity juice, “I want to be productive today. Yesterday wasn’t productive. It…
