Productivity Is Not The Solution To Your Problems
By: The Wishful Thinker
Tags: Consciousness, Psychology, Productivity, Purpose, Self Improvement

Photo by Valentin Lacoste on Unsplash

So, you don’t feel good about yourself. You’re moping around, staying in your bed, you can’t stop watching videos on your phone, you can’t focus on anything that you should be doing, and feel like the light in you has been extinguished. You’re not depressed, though you wish you were, because then you would have an excuse to be doing nothing. But, if you keep wishing you were, you will be soon enough.

As you are scrolling through your phone, you find a video on Youtube (or a book on amazon) that is titled: “The 5 Things You’re Doing Wrong In Your Life: How To Start A New Path Success”.

Finally, you think to yourself, a convenient solution! This is just what I needed.

After downing the first video or book, you go for two more. Eventually you have a list of 283 things you are doing wrong with your life that, if you could simply fix them all, would make your life absolutely perfect.

How dumb of me to not have seen these 283 things before. How simple! Things will be turning around for me for sure.

You set off on the small task of completely rebuilding your life, starting with the 283 things you need to fix, add, or otherwise improve. As you blast through the first 10 — including morning and night meditation, keeping a journal, and ending your showers with a cold splash of water — you feel the exhilaration of unchained improvement and know that your life is really turning around this time.

Then you start off on the next 10 feeling, admittedly, a little less motivated, but still excited to see further improvements. You power through #11 and #12, #13 (meal prepping for 5 days of the week) is a little tougher and, by the time you get to #14 — reading a classic a week — you crash.

You don’t know what hit you. Just a few days ago you felt the flame in you growing brighter and brighter and then, all this sudden, it’s gone just like it was a week before.

So, you mope around, stay in your bed, watch videos all day on your phone, and can’t focus on anything that you “should” be doing. Then one day you find this new video (or book) titled: “How Productivity Will Save Your Life”. You start watching it, and wonder why you couldn’t have been more productive this whole time.

Finally, you think to yourself, it’s about damn time I found a real solution! This time it’s going to turn around for me for sure.

It won’t.

It’s a lie.

What Are You Chasing?

This is my story, and I’m sure it is some of yours too. When I really started to pay attention to what I was looking for when trying to be more “productive”, I found that I was looking for the answer that would solve everything.

I thought maximum productivity would take away my angst, my fear, my anger, my sadness, my instability . . . you name it. Yet, while it didn’t give me many of those things, I still don’t feel like there is anything wrong with looking for the answer. It all depends upon where you look, and why you are looking in the first place. I was looking in the wrong place, for the wrong reason.

Most of us have been taught to chase something. A dream. A career. A life. A spouse. These things, we are told, will make us happy. These things are the road to fulfillment. But do we look at the lives of the people who told us these things, or led us to believe them? Most of the people who tell us these things — and most people in general — are not particularly happy or at peace. We wonder why. And we ought to wonder why.

Maybe they didn’t chase hard enough, maybe they didn’t achieve enough, or maybe they were cut down by some misfortune that we hope does not find us too. Or maybe, they were looking for life in the wrong places.

Maybe moving towards a great dream, career, spouse, or opportunity is only a piece of life. These pieces can give us happiness, but happiness comes and goes. Where can we find the source of life that doesn’t fizzle out and make us feel empty inside?

The Religion Of Productivity

Most of us have come to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that we are happiest when we are productive. There is some truth to this in the fact that when we are engaged, and time slips by, we know we have found something good. This is not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the drive that forces us to always be on the go, anxiously flying from task to task, and prospect to prospect, without any deeper consideration or . . . conviction about what we are doing. The emptiness we feel is satiated during this flight — and we even feel elated at the rush of busy action. Temporarily.

Hyper-productivity is what we use to temporarily fill the holes within us. If we can just do a little more, push a little harder, and search a little deeper, we can finally fill the hole, we think to ourselves. These actions of doing more and pushing harder and searching deeper give us the feeling that Yes!, we are finally filling this hole. But, in reality, we are pouring water into a leaky bucket. We are seeking an external solution for an internal problem.

What is this internal problem? We are searching for a permanent solution in an impermanent world.

We’ve known this for a millennium, but still you and I press on as if it wasn’t the case.

Our paychecks, our hours clocked, the number of baskets we scored, the amount of measurable progress we made, the number of kills in the recent Call Of Duty match (speaking to myself here), or whatever number or amount that we measure, it will not satisfy.

We are convinced that the future — the elusive goal we are chasing — will hold our satisfaction and happiness if only we can just . . . reach it. When will we reach it? When will enough be enough where we can finally find peace? The future always remains out of our grasp, and when it passes through the present, we will always find it unsatisfactory if we are looking for the answer from it.

The pan of freshly roasted chicken is great. And then it is gone. And then we will need it again. This cycle is fine, and even beautiful, because it is life and reality. But so many of us are trying to find the chicken that will last forever. It won’t. It never has.

We have misappropriated what productivity is, and what it is not. We have prescribed external solutions for an internal diagnosis. We are always on the chase, but what we are chasing eludes us. We are the donkey, and we are being led by the carrot. We do not see where the carriage is taking us. We have put ourselves in a maze with no exit, except out the front door.

Productivity Is A Byproduct

The reason for this maze lies in the fact that most of us have put the quest for “being productive” at the center of our life. Productivity, we think, is in the middle as the root and the seed of the motor that powers us. We think it is the fuel.

But productivity is not the motor, the engine, the fuel, or anything of the sort. It is instead the fish, but not the fishing pool. It is the fruit, but not the fruit tree. It is the distance travelled that is powered by the engine and the fuel, but it itself is neither the engine or the fuel itself.

Productivity is a byproduct, not the source.

Imagine a garden for a moment. This garden had been newly laid with wheelbarrow-fulls of soil that had just been dropped into it. There are no green things yet. No flowers, no trees, just rich, black soil. A few days later one single little green speck starts to pop up in the bed of soil. That speck will grow and mature only if it is watered, gets the sun it needs, and — most importantly — if the soil remains and continues to be nurtured.

Productivity — accomplishments, achievements, the number and amount of things we do — is the little green speck in the garden. It is fueled by the soil and, without the soil, the green speck will die.

What Is The Soil?

Productivity is amazing. There would be no great books written, no breathtaking pieces of art painted, no larger-than-life statues sculpted, no cities built, no families had, no money made, no exercise done, and certainly no love being made, without the seed of productivity.

But all of the results of even our most productive days add up to only a few pieces of a puzzle. This puzzle lacks a center piece. What is Iron Man without his core powering device?

True power comes from something deeper than the circumstances surrounding us, or the goal we are chasing. True power comes from within.

“The world can only change from within” — Tolle

The soil is not made of willpower — because even willpower is fickle. The soil is not accessed through a motivational pep talk that get your juices flowing. The soil is not some elixir or “magic potion” that can fix you and power up your insides.

The soil — our fuel, engine, and life force — is, instead, the result of how deeply rooted we are in our identity and purpose, with conscious awareness bringing us more deeply to the well that we can forever drink from.

Identity & Purpose

Identity and purpose are closely linked. The first tells us who we are, the second tells us why we are. It is from the deep wells of self knowledge that a life-sustaining force is found. Of course, the quest for self knowledge is an endless one, as it will ultimately lead to something beyond our individual body or soul.

The reason that “The unexamined life is not worth living” is because the unexamined life is a life detached from its fuel source. It is a life running of fumes. This is where “productivity” becomes completing mindless tasks, checking off non-essential things from a list, busying ourselves with unimportant work instead of the work that the contours of our soul was built for.

How do you find what your soul was built for? This is a personal journey that I can’t answer for you. All I can say is that what has worked for me, and continues to work for me, is simply getting to know myself.

For me, the most effective entrypoint has been personality theory — the Enneagram and Jungian psychology for starters — because studying our own personality wakes us from a slumber we did not know we are in. Most of us simply do not know who we are. But there are other ways to get in touch with ourselves too.

Maybe it is some type of therapy, a dream journal, painting, writing, or any amalgam of practices that bring us in tune with ourselves. Whatever it is, we need an entrypoint. But there is perhaps no faster or better way to grow attune with ourselves than through personal expression.

The study of our tendencies, root motivations, as well as the practice of expressing the deepest, truest parts of ourselves sets us on a course for making the best damn soil we possibly can. It is from this place of knowing who we are, and why we are, that we can begin to be in a way that we never have before.

Conscious Awareness

Most of us are asleep. We walk through life without zooming out beyond our daily cycle of living, dreaming unfulfilled dreams, and wishing we were somewhere else. We don’t ask ourselves important questions. We don’t question why we do things, what we are driven by, or why we are doing something in the first place.

There is no more effective tool to self understanding than conscious awareness. As we began the article saying that most of us are chasing things, but we don’t really know why, this is the solution to that problem. Knowing why turns on a light in a dark room.

Oh, I really am trying to find my sense of identity from my job.

Oh, I really do associate my whole value based on how I perform.

Oh, that is why I feel shattered when someone says something bad about me.

Oh, that is why I feel anxious while around my boss.

Oh, that is why I am tirelessly chasing achievement.

This list of “aha’s” and “oh’s” can go on forever and ever. But we just need one. We just need a moment of real insight, of honest introspection, and the light of the fire of consciousness will spread.

Purposeful Productivity

True productivity is meaningful interaction with the world. Physiologically, our bodies know when we are meaningfully engaged. It’s called flow. But don’t make flow a religion.

When things aren’t easy or effortless it doesn’t mean we are doing the wrong thing. But, where flow is frequent, it is probably telling us something about the path we are on — indicating that we are, or are very close to, the one we were meant to be on.