In 2021, I wrote an article about the “sinister networks of struggles” I experienced during my first year in college. A realization that I have only come to acquire after the habits were upended by that long summer back in 2020. I still hold the same critiques I had before, with perhaps a greater acuity as a proof of lengthy pondering on the subject and most of the time exposure to its reconfigurations in different contexts. In this case, the pandemic.
When I think about productivity, I think about scheduling, organizing, time blocks, and the like. That minimalist, color-coordinated aesthetic is curated exactly for an audience. The obsession with controlling time and ticking off boxes on to-do lists. The quick rush of satisfaction that comes with finishing a task is immediately replaced with the burden of doing another. And another. And another. The whole day, week, or month is organized into these neat, color-coded Google calendars. Time management is akin to a god-like power: the ability to see through the future.
When I think about productivity, I think about the phrase "invest in yourself." Invest—a language of business. The self is subsumed into the logic of the market. The self becomes a venture in which there needs to be a return of investment in recognizable forms we have come to label as rewards.
When I think about productivity, I think about the term "self-care." It is often contradictory in nature. In this context, caring (whatever that may be) is a requirement to be able to get back to work again.
It would be a lie to say that I have never experienced some, if not all of these. I have had my fair share of experiences when it comes to to-do lists, calendar organization, and self-care. But over the years, a kind of sickness came to me in which these productive hacks (e.g., self-care) were unable to renew the passion and dedication that being productive requires and perhaps revealed the more intrinsically insidious machinations of this cult of productivity.
During our second semester in college, I had the terrible experience of being late for a class. The professor required us to personally hand in our assignment as she called our names. Strictly. No one can pass their paper unless it is theirs. No substitution. Bawal makisuyo. On this rare day, the train I was on happened to be more sluggish than usual—if you ride the PNR, you know what this means. As it neared Sta. Mesa station, I had an increasing foreboding about not making it in time at all, which manifested in frenetic hand movements and constant checking of the class group chat.
To cut the story short, I got a few names after mine was called. Sweaty after running and catching my breath, I still remember the silence that came along with entering. A moment of silence for the classmate who was not able to pass his assignment. A silence I presumed was consolation. First-year students then shared an understanding of how crucial these tasks are. There were few talks about it over lunch, but I resisted the effort of appealing, immediately presenting to me the futility of it all.
There is obviously something to be said about the absurdity of the professor’s pedagogy (if one could call it a pedagogy at all), the imposition of discipline devoid of understanding of social conditions that are not even latent but actually manifest, and the increasing emphasis on output-based education. But after that incident, I practiced always taking the earliest train schedule. The “logical” thing to do. Always anticipate everything on the road. I started to carve out time in which little is allotted for rest, just in case situations like the one above happen again. Which also means I was always preoccupied with time.
When the pandemic hit, I was forced to revisit these memories. “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality,” wrote Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy. During that summer, I was seized by a longing for mobility and a distaste for its twin, exhaustion. It felt like a choice to me back then: one or the other. A year later, I realized that I did not need to choose. We can imagine a better world than before. The pandemic is indeed a portal to the next world, as Roy said. And what it also revealed to me was the idea of completely shedding the productivity tied to the belief in meritocracy, abandoning conventions of knowledge acquisition, and finding better avenues to learn. The political realities of our times trump the hacks that the productivity-industrial complex could offer.
One could color-code their Google calendar in the foreseeable future, but there is no way you could skirt around our chronic transportation issues that ultimately make a dent in your daily lifestyle.
𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳
In his article in The New Yorker, famed self-help author Cal Newport, author of the book "Deep Work," which is pretty well-known in this circlejerk of productivity hustlers, wrote about “the growing distaste for the many implications and exhortations that had become associated with productivity culture,” which originated from a reader who complained about how productivity language became an impediment to appreciating his book.
One of the core mantras of productivity is to invest in yourself. A cursory search of the phrase in Google will yield something along these lines. According to Indeed, a famous job application site, "if you invest in yourself, you can become a more experienced person and a more qualified job candidate." Investing in yourself is valuable for self-development. Additionally, Scuderi from Lifehack stated that learning to invest in yourself may be the most profitable investment you ever make. It yields not only future returns but often a current payoff as well. Meanwhile, Mint (2022) from Intuit Mint Life claimed that investing in yourself is more than just acquiring stocks and bonds. When you make conscious decisions to invest in your financial well-being, health, career, and interests, you set yourself up for success in the future.
These statements, at first glance, seem logical. To some, this is even right. In these statements, we see the buzzwords: self-development, profit, future returns, payoff, and success. Who would not want these? In the context of productivity, the investments here are not associated with risks. You have nothing to lose.
However, the critique of being productive is not really to critique how we are being productive but more so on why. Investing in yourself is indicative of how capitalism has invaded the individual's agency. It manifests in the language we use. We have come to treat ourselves as exploitable cyborgs in the service of building capital, succumbing to the idea that the self is endlessly optimizable; every moment can be monetized or fashioned into cultural capital. A machine is always due for an upgrade. What are we to make of the world where every instance of life is devoted to the pursuit of opportunities for optimization?
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮 𝗼𝗳 #𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲
I have been wrestling with the idea of self-care for quite some time now. Partly because, in the same vein as you cannot productivity hack your way out of systemic issues, you also cannot self-care your way out of, again, systemic issues. You cannot spend your time in your house and enjoy a nice evening on your day off if you are spending a large part of your day on the road, which ultimately takes away time for yourself.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” wrote Audre Lorde. Perhaps one of the earliest articulations of the value of self-care. But the sense of radical politics embedded in Lorde’s statement is what ultimately lacks in our current notion of self-care. Here, Lorde addressed the self in relation to the collective. But it is pretty interesting how capitalism has co-opted the idea of self-care.
Self-care is now a marketing tactic. We see it in skincare, bath towels, and personal hygiene advertisements. An identification with a brand, a performance, if not aesthetic, or a business venture. “Human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed,” wrote Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle. “A general shift from having to appearing—all "having" must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.” There could not be a more scathing critique handed towards influencers.
Productivity gurus (who, in a sense, are also influencers) are masters of this phenomenon. A hard day at work means content for self-care, but upon closer scrutiny, these types of content production are oftentimes exhausting (which is another work in itself), which we can only take to mean that the capability of doing so relies on the fact that these influencers came from already affluent backgrounds that allow them to do these things.
There is an interesting article by Jordan Kisner from The New Yorker that historicizes the use of self-care. He cited Michel Foucault tracing the history of self-care in Plato’s "Apology." Here, Socrates claims that men need to “concern themselves not with their riches, not with their honor, but with themselves and with their souls." He also cited the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who argues that the “grand narrative of American individualism” is shaped by the individual’s ability to care for his individual self. Kisner also explores the repercussions of this brand of self-care, which served as justification for the racial subjugation of minorities. In America, the performance of self-care in society is a great indicator of the self-governing individual. Self-care, here, is ultimately individualistic.
The promise of self-care is that it ultimately gives relief to an otherwise harsh world. If you see it, there is latent politics in these “self-care” advertisements. The dirt in the city that sticks to your pores; the harsh sunlight due to a lack of shade like trees or public infrastructure; the wrinkles produced by being exhausted from waiting in traffic; the dark eyes produced by the lack of sleep because of the continuous demand of work; and the list goes on. Are these not the body’s responses to our harsh environment? If not the origin, then definitely these reasons exacerbate these bodily responses.
Moreover, is self-care really self-care if it only becomes a precursor to work? A limbo where it nudges you to do it because a few moments later you will be back to work again. There is this looming burden that is essentially a perpetual quest for free time. A wrestling toward the truest relaxation unbothered by work. A moment of stasis is so often desired and so often eludes us.
I believe in Audre Lorde’s statement about self-care, which takes into account the welfare of the community and society at large. Kathleen Newman-Bremang wrote an insightful article about reclaiming Lorde’s oft-misquoted phrase. “As ‘new age self-care’ focuses on the individual instead of the collective, it reinforces the very structures Audre Lorde devoted her life to dismantling,” she writes.
I agree that true self-care is not just an individualistic and isolated endeavor. Self-care is a political act that recognizes that caring for oneself is not selfish but, in this case, selfless from within to outside. There is the same pleasure found beyond caring for the community, which I think is ultimately gratifying: the recognition of our shared humanity. A recognition that makes us aware that something needs to change.
𝗥𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆
Recalibrating our current notion of productivity means recognizing that the systems in place are broken and not designed to get the best out of us. To extract from us the labor in ways that continually dampen our critical faculties. But of course, doing away with all these habits is not the solution. It is about turning these habits into something that we can reclaim as truly nourishing for us.
As I have said, the issue of productivity is not how we do it but why we do it. To whom are we being productive, and to what end does this productivity chase?
Rethinking productivity means refusing to succumb to the capitalist seizure of the individual's agency towards an everlasting pursuit of monetization and instead valuing care rooted in our collective existence. To pause for a moment and find ways to subvert the current systems in place. An appreciation of stasis.
In her book "How to Do Nothing," a political take on refusing the attention economy and the imperatives of productivity culture, Jenny Odell wrote, "To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing; escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here."
Graphics: Jeohan Samuel Aquino
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