
Against Productivity - bmmayer1
https://medium.com/message/against-productivity-b19f56b67da6
======
charlespwd
Fantastic piece.

I believe in similar things. Here, where I currently live, we spend so much
time working and being productive that we forget to ask questions. "Why am I
doing this?" "What is the meaning of it?" "What is _really_ important?" Then
we end up lost, depressed and what not. Not all of us do, but some? Certainly.
We do it because others do it. Because we believe that pursuing a different
venue is not realistic. Others have that? Hell, I should have it too.

"I should totally run a startup."

Anyways, it happened to me. Went to SEA for four months. Dreamed. Life is
amazing. I can do whatever I want. I don't need money to live. yadi. yada.
Then you come back, and no one understands you. You are a hippy. I'm not.

In periods of doubt, I write things down. Then I remember what I believe. Then
I remember I'm going back soon. That it is what I should be doing.

Being productive is ok. It's fun. But, in the end, it's not important. People
are. At least, that's the conclusion I came to.

I guess I'm just rambling. Carry on.

Note: when I write "We", I mostly mean "I".

~~~
jokoon
Sometime I wonder about the "meaning of life", but the real question is "what
is the purpose of civilization?".

Cynics could argue that civilization is like a cancer, thus we should make
sure civilization grows as fast and as big as possible to survive a cataclysm
or to make sure one's country wins a future war.

That's the only argument to have higher standards and incentives to be
productive, just so that society can be fatter and faster. There is no
incentive to be happier at all when you want to be the strongest. Modern,
developed capitalistic societies is just about scoring money. You just can't
be happy in a society like this, because everything, to economical policies to
the customs, are now made towards bigger faster stronger.

Sometimes it seems that the poverty and the crisis of the 30s scared one
generation, and set a whole mentality of never being poor and unproductive
ever again. Economics and scoring are now the highest priority. We're not
individuals, we're just scores.

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
There used to be multiple civilizations. There still are, but there are less
of them. Connecting the world is turning us into a monoculture, and as
biologists know, monocultures are extremely vulnerable to diseases wiping them
out.

I think we should encourage localized micro-civilizations, if only to keep the
species safe. For example, capitalism has become the system that the world
runs on. Pretty much all of us exchange currency for goods. But there are lots
of failure modes for this system. To keep ourselves safe, we should encourage
enclaves with alternative economic systems like bartering and collectivism.

Unfortunately, in the US at least, if someone suggests that capitalism might
not be the best for everybody, they get labeled as a "socialist" and shunned.

~~~
jokoon
Do you think communism, in some way, was a different form of civilization, and
that the fall of the berlin wall increased this phenomenon of "monoculture" ?

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
Yeah, I think so. I'm not a fan of communism as it was practiced by the USSR,
but I think in smaller communities that collectively agreed to it, it would
work.

------
ggreer
This post is full of mistakes and unclear thinking. I can't figure out what
the author is arguing against or for. Is she against quantifying wealth? I'm
not sure. Is she against working hard? Maybe. Does she think it impossible to
quantify happiness and well-being? I get the impression she does.

First, the author made a _huge_ mistake when talking about GDP. Her comparison
used absolute instead of per-capita values. India and Canada may produce the
same amount of wealth, but India has 35 times more people. Of course per-
capita GDP doesn't fully capture quality of life, but it's easy to measure and
hard to fake. That's why it's used.

Most people make mistakes when it comes to balancing work and leisure, but to
claim such mistakes are killing us is preposterous. People in developed
countries live the longest, healthiest lives in the history of humanity. The
nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so
disparaged by the author!

 _Many people, especially in technology, say their productivity is changing
the world, and this is irrefutable. But no one seems to know what they’re
changing it into, because no one can measure the world. When no one can
measure the world, how much can it really exist?_

This really irks me. Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to
optimizing it. Maybe a lot of people are measuring the wrong things. Maybe
they're missing or underweighting a factor. Maybe they just have different
preferences than the author. But to suggest that the entire enterprise is bunk
is to disregard centuries of progress across a dozen fields of study.

If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it
right.[1]

1\.
[http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20&%20WILSON%...](http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20&%20WILSON%20\(2011\).pdf)

Edit: Pronouns fixed. Apologies, I thought Quinn was a male name.

~~~
calinet6
If you're attempting to find a productive rhetorical truth in a piece about
shedding productivity as a focus, you're missing the point.

In fact, you're arguing that she should 1) be able to quantify happiness, 2)
consider life-expectancy as a proxy for life quality, and 3) pursue optimizing
life by quantifying and measuring it. I think you're missing many points.

The whole idea—the wisdom, if you will—is that you lose an extremely precious
thing by focusing on measurement and optimization and increasing quantity and
productivity. She has an extremely clear and valid point, which lucidly
carries _so much truth_ in it, and is not particularly hindered by slight
rhetorical mistakes or lack of clarity. It's _that_ true.

In fact, the clarity and style and beauty of this piece remarkably matches
almost exactly how it feels. It's so confusing and seemingly contradictory and
paradoxical, yet we know it's true. Even so, no one knows what, exactly, to do
with it; so we call it unproductive and go on trying to live our highly
productive lives. It's so much bigger than we are, this thing, and resistance
seems futile.

And this is when you begin looking into Zen, and things become clearer and
muddier at the same time, but you have a fleeting chance, at least, of
converging on the ability to hold a thing in your head that's both true and
false at the same time, and come just a bit closer, thereby, to the reality of
things.

~~~
wyager
> and is not particularly hindered by slight rhetorical mistakes or lack of
> clarity. It's _that_ true.

Clearly it _is_ hindered by bad writing and rhetoric, because here we are not
agreeing with it.

>It's so confusing and seemingly contradictory and paradoxical, yet we know
it's true.

Speak for yourself.

>converging on the ability to hold a thing in your head that's both true and
false at the same time

That's not impressive. It's called "being inconsistent" and sometimes "being
an idiot". A more impressive ability is being able to simulate multiple
outcomes in your head without necessarily believing in them, and that has
nothing to do with whatever religious dogma you're preaching.

Do you reject the Principle of Excluded Middle?

~~~
aleh
Schrodinger's cat hates the Principle of Excluded Middle.

~~~
wyager
You've touched on a trend I've noticed. A lot of Zen preachers on HN abuse
their misunderstanding of QM to attack the PEM and other principles. I've
heard "light is both a particle and a wave! Zen:1 Logic:0" quite a few times.

------
johnloeber
Even though some valuable ideas are expressed in this piece, there's a lot of
_conflation_ of highly distinct social phenomena that goes on. The author
looks at the notion of "productivity", judges that people blindly rush from
birth straight to the grave in the pursuit of being "productive", somehow lops
that in with GDPs (not per capita, not at PPP?) and the weird way in which we
have industrialized pleasure, and concludes... what, exactly?

Regardless, the author expresses a valuable point that suffers from her
conflating topics.

I think that point is that there's a certain industrial culture -- a focus on
productivity and structure -- that dominates our lives, whether in work or in
leisure (see e.g. tourism). I don't think this is necessarily bad, but it's
important to be aware of it.

Some people do indeed wear blinders as they race through life, being as
productive as they can -- not for themselves, but maybe for society. Or for
their boss. Or for someone else, whose interests are not necessarily aligned
with their own. Maybe that's a good reminder to carefully define productivity
for yourself, however you see fit. The idea here is to have a notion of
productivity to strive for that is well-aligned with doing things that make
you _feel good_ for the time invested. And then we're right back down to those
age-old platitudes, so obvious and ubiquitous that we forget their truth:
"spend your time wisely."

~~~
perfunctory
"and concludes... what, exactly?"

Use your own imagination.

~~~
mcdougle
I don't really know why you're getting downvoted. That's a great answer to the
question.

The article is about how we over-analyze and over-optimize and look for a
distinctly obvious _purpose_ in everything in an effort to ensure
productivity. I think it's funny that most of the comments here are _doing
exactly that_ with the article -- trying to analyze it, refute it, and
determine the exact conclusion the author is trying to state. Should we stop
being over-productive? Be less productive? Try to find balance? Maybe we
should simply continue to pursue productivity, but at least _understand_ what
we're doing, rather than pursuing it blindly?

Honestly, it's probably some combination of the above -- and it's probably
subjective and dependent on the reader. The author doesn't simply state the
conclusion -- because there is no obvious conclusion to the article. It's just
a bunch of observations that allow the reader to reach a conclusion
him/herself.

------
sgentle
I liked this essay, but it's also important to point out that GDP is very
strongly correlated with health outcomes like life expectancy. It might be
that we are starving our souls, but let's not forget about the fairly serious
consequences of starving our bodies.

I don't mean to say that I disagree with the conclusion, just that I think the
historical context is missing something. We didn't become productive out of
greed, we became productive out of hunger. That attitude has run its course,
absolutely, and we need to ask: we're not hungry anymore, so what now?

But let's not denigrate how we got here on the assumption that it was never a
good idea. We might have climbed past the lowest rungs of the ladder, but that
doesn't mean we didn't need them. Indeed, there are many who still do.

~~~
6t6t6
Then how you explain the fact that USA has one of the lowest life expectancy
among the developed world?

I think that what the author tries to explain is that, in some places,
societies have gone too far in the seek of productiveness and, ironically,
people there is less happy and healthy.

I guess finding the good balance is more important than trying to be the
number one.

~~~
quonn
Why is this downvoted? Given that the US is as economically powerful as it is,
why _is_ life expectancy lower [0], compared to other _developed_ nations?
Check out Canada, Australia, Japan and West-Europe on the map.

[0]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Life_Exp...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Life_Expectancy_2011_CIA_World_Factbook.png)

~~~
runj__
The US is a big country, it's incredibly diverse. Comparing the US as a whole
to other countries is not really fair.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_life_exp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_life_expectancy)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_capita)

But we can of course all pick our own statistics to fit our standpoint. But
it's important to keep in mind that the US can be a bit of an edge case.

------
hliyan
"Above all we become interesting [sic] in measuring ourselves. Word count/day,
lines of code/day, hamburgers served/hour, steps taken/day, test
questions/100, money earned/field’s average salary. We got quarterly reviews,
job evaluations, and tested certifications."

I've a dilemma:

I've come to believe that this really _is_ a bad thing, not just because we're
suboptimizing output at the expense of quality of life, but also because _you
get what you measure_ : you can totally get more LOC/day without actually
getting anything useful.

BUT, what's the alternative? People need to be rewarded for output; different
individuals' outputs are different; still, should we reward them the same? Or
should we make it dependent on output (therefore, reward merit, not need)? If
so, should the measure be subjective or objective? Can you make it objective
without turning it into what the author is talking about? Can you make it
subjective while keeping it fair? No matter how much I try, when I try to be
fair in rewards/compensation, I find metrics raising their ugly head.

~~~
calinet6
Just remove the individual metric. We know they don't work.

Incentivize the entire company for the success of the company. Pay people
fairly in an uncomplicated way. Align all the incentives and don't reward
anything that is not directly connected to the clear and well-communicated
success of the company.

~~~
nindalf
So even if I do the bare minimum at work, I should be rewarded the same as
someone who worked his pants off? Sure, that's fine. Just one thing, that guy
who was working his pants off no longer has the incentive to work hard because
his reward is tied to how the company as a whole does. He will begin to do the
bare minimum, and the company suffers.

He will eventually become jaded with this and leave to some place that will
recognise and reward his extra output.

~~~
calinet6
It turns out what you say is not true in reality, but it persists as the myth
of individualism in the corporate workforce. It is simply false; it doesn't
happen.

When you align the incentives, uncomplicate rewards, clearly guide people in
the same direction toward clear and logical goals, and enable them to do good
work they can be proud of, all of that individual infighting and politics goes
away.

You can still compensate people fairly for their contributions as measured
simply and clearly as "contribution to the success of the company," there's
absolutely no reason not to; you just remove the complex measurement and
competition that results in the opposite of the desired goal. Simplify.

This is well-understood stuff. It is not new. It resulted quite directly in
the success of the Japanese economy after WWII, driven by the teachings of
statistician W. Edwards Deming.

We, as Americans, ignore it because of the persistence of myths like the one
you mention. Because of our fixation on individual gain and protection, and on
a pervasive belief in the incompetence and dishonesty of our fellow man. We
fail to see the truth: that the failures around us are a result not of poor
individuals, but of systems which surround them and stop anyone except a few
unicorns from being able to be effective.

Start with W. Edwards Deming: here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming)
and here: [http://blog.deming.org/](http://blog.deming.org/)

------
lovemenot
The article states that Karoshi is death by productivity. This is generally
not correct. Karoshi is death from over-work.

The distinction concerns quantity of output. Many Japanese will work long
hours with little impact on output. Such people are therefore hard-working yet
unproductive.

Japanese business culture tends to respect effort more than result.

------
shoover
_What really devastated my generation was the spiritual malaise inherent in
Taylorism 's perfectly mechanized human labor. But Taylor had never seen a
robot or a computer perfect his methods of being human. By the 1980s, we had.
In the age of robots we reinvented the idea of being robots ourselves. We
wanted to program our minds and bodies and have them obey clocks and routines.
In this age of the human robot, of the materialist mind, being efficient took
the pre-eminent spot, beyond goodness or power or wisdom or even cruel greed._

Ouch.

 _We are productive without price. Not because people aren 't dying, they
surely are, uncounted lives and families are smothered with despair. There is
no price because there's no measure to quantify what we are losing._

This makes me wonder how history will look on our mental health issues, as we
look back on alcoholism in early 20th century America.

For those sympathetic to the views of the article, I can't recommend enough
Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft for a fuller and prescriptive
discussion of the history and philosophy of these issues of work and meaning
and mental health.

------
lifeisstillgood
Increased Pareto is a better thing to aim for than increased productivity.

Doing the one very important thing, the one thing with huge returns or
leverage will outweigh all the other probably also important things that
really hard working and productive people can do in a day

It however takes wisdom to know what is important and courage to trust your
wisdom.

------
Xcelerate
Why am I productive? No other reason than I dislike boredom. I had the unusual
situation growing up of having completely free summers (including college). To
do absolutely and whatever I wanted. Well, long story short, I basically
wasted them and didn't get anything accomplished. And I definitely wasn't
happy with that much useless free time.

So now I do things because I find them interesting. I "measure myself" and try
to improve at things because it's a fun game for me. The results don't really
matter in the end, but it keeps me entertained.

------
simonh
America is also the country that gave us 'stick it to the man', 'tune in, turn
on, drop out', 'make love, not war'. America is a big country, big enough to
find a space somewhere to l9ive your life almost any way you like and pobably
find others who want to do the same too. In fact I'm hard pressed for think of
any other nation on the entire planet that is more diverse. Anyone care to
name one?

I speak as an outsider (a Brit) that's visited the US several times and has
many friends and acquaintances there.

------
barbudorojo
Trying to summarize the post: Free time can increase your wisdom and is
necessary sometimes for higher order thinking. Too much productivity, that is
not having time for your mind wandering, produces a bad effect in society. To
compose that post has taken the author four months.

I think that every great writer has been many times in his life waiting for
inspiration. But inspiration only occurs when you are inviting inspiration to
come by working a lot, your mind has to be struggling with the problem, at
least in a subconscious level, and then, suddenly, inspiration comes to your
rescue.

------
myth_drannon
If you liked the theme of this essay you will like this book: "How to Be Idle"
by Tom Hodgkinson. The book starts similarly and expands the idea of idleness
to trying to bring it into your life.

~~~
hliyan
And more recently, "How Much Is Enough?" by Robert Skidelsky and Edward
Skidelsky

------
esfandia
I may somewhat agree with the author's case against productivity, but I think
it's important not to confuse it with a case against _production_. At the end
of the day (or life) I think you do want to look back and think of _what_
you've produced (rather than consumed), and _how_ you did it. Was it fun?
Satisfying?

I think it's fair to want to rebel against production/time. It's not bad to
think instead of something along the lines of satisfaction/production.

------
MrDosu
This is the major problem when you do things for reasons other then you love
to do it. Stop trying to do whats "hip" and find your passion. A lot of the
thoughts given in the article have the slight taste of the author wanting to
do them because they are intellectual/trendy/response from society. Do what
you love, simple as.

Work will never feel like work again.

~~~
sergiosgc
> Stop trying to do whats "hip" and find your passion.

Don't. Don't go overboard with the passion thing. If your passion is origami,
you are in for a very rough ride trying to live off selling folded paper on
the street.

Find a balance. What's difficult is that life is not black and white, it's in
shades of grey. Find something that the market needs and that you like doing.
Not something that you absolutely love doing and that nobody ever wants, nor
something that the market absolutely wants and that you loathe doing.

Virtue is found in the middle.

------
damon_c
I have always considered productivity to be a measure of production over time
where time is the duration a person works at a task and not a constant.

So a highly productive person gets a lot done in a small amount of time.

People who get a lot done and work all the time aren't really high
productivity people; they just work a lot.

I see nothing wrong with striving for productivity if this is how it is
defined.

------
ondrejzabojnik
You wrote about the time when you weren't beating yourself for not being
productive enough and you described that past experience in a way that seemed
to me like you were happy. What made you want to become productive? What did
you imagine 'productive' looks and feels like? Could you track down your most
internal motives?

------
misiti3780
that radio tower looks like the one from the movie Golden Eye

~~~
smoe
That's because it is the one from Golden Eye ;)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#In_Popular_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#In_Popular_Culture)

------
mchusma
This reminds me of PG's essay -
[http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html)

Basically, I believe Author would be better off making the claim that many
people (himself included) confuse the definition of productivity.

~~~
goldenchrome
the author is a woman

~~~
shaurz
To be fair that Medium website doesn't exactly make it clear who is writing.

------
erikb
Okay we should spend more time wasting more time. But how to pay your bills in
that time? As long as this question is not answered all this discussion is
meaningless in my eyes.

~~~
Cthulhu_
How about a regular 40 hour / week or part-time job for a decent wage? It's
what the vast majority of people do.

~~~
erikb
Maybe I misunderstood the article? I understand that he wants to go to other
countries, walk around, watch the rain and think about life in general. Maybe
you can do that if you are a museum security guard, but in most jobs that's
not possible. And at least I am quite tired after working 40 hours plus taking
care of the basics needs I have (buying grocieries, cooking, cleaning) and my
family has (spending time together, solving problems of other family members).
I'm quite happy if I can manage to squeeze in 7 to 8 hours of sleep.

~~~
kstenerud
Don't you think there's something inherently wrong with that?

------
FD3SA
This is an excellent post because it focuses on a central topic: mankind's
behavioral predispositions.

The world today runs on profit and productivity. Morals, ethics and
philosophies are irrelevant hindrances, as SV and Wall St. have demonstrated
repeatedly. This is all well and good, as the last century apparently
demonstrated that all ideologies and philosophies are the devil incarnate
(Nazism, Leninism, Maoism, etc.)

But I do wonder one thing...did we quit on ideology prematurely? An ideology
which I've always held as my own mission in life is the relentless pursuit of
knowledge through science.

Throughout history, there have been times where mankind has focused intently
on this goal, and the results were incredible. Sadly, most of these periods
were spurred on by major wars.

What I really want to know is this:

Is it possible to built a society whose goal is the advancement of mankind's
knowledge?

The profit motive and the free market are undoubtedly the best motivators for
mankind, due to our evolutionary predispositions for survival and inherent
need to establish status hierarchies. But could we not harness these energies,
and direct them to positive-sum endavors such as science and engineering
research, rather than a pure profit-driven battle to the death?

Keep in mind, the historical mean society throughout history has been
oligarchy. It appears the last century was a brief respite due to massive wars
and resultant existential threats. We now seem to be heading right back into
the oligarchical paradigm of rich get richer, and poor stay serfs [1].

I can envision a society built around the pursuit of knowledge. The market
exists and is regulated to produce needs and wants efficiently, yet without
negative-sum behavior (regulatory capture, corruption, anti-competitive
conduct, wage fixing, etc.) Education and research are a prime government
mandate in addition to infrastructure, defense, healthcare and a social safety
net. Citizens are incentivized to hone their skills and education continuously
without massive financial downsides (student debt). State sponsored research
institutes exist throughout the country similar to Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, JPL,
etc. and serve to stimulate the economy through constant research projects,
both large and small. The projects provide jobs for low and high skilled
individuals (e.g. ITER, LHC). Those who enjoy pure research have a plethora of
opportunities to move the state of the art forward. Those who don't, have
excellent and rewarding employment.

The challenge in creating this society is a very tough one: humans are not
motivated by knowledge. We are motivated by status, sex, and power, though few
ever understand it or admit to it. But I hope that one day, knowledge of our
inherent weaknesses will become common enough such that we can fight our
destructive natures in an effort to transcend our limitations.

Till that day, I remain a dreamer.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-
First_Cen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-
First_Century)

~~~
frozenport
>>But I do wonder one thing...did we quit on ideology prematurely?

In reality we quit on the idea that society can be engineered, but we
nevertheless retain the notation that individual actors can be engineered. For
example, we reject the notation that the communist party can build a stable
society but we retain social value that you shouldn't judge people solely on
wealth.

>>I can envision a society built around the pursuit of knowledge.

Its hard to say what is and isn't knowledge, I shudder to think of a society
based on research publications.

This goes back to my first point. Its very hard to engineer a society. We can
only hope to make reasonable actors.

------
jdimov
This may be far wiser than almost anything that has ever been posted on HN,
but you can't feed this shit to people who are not ready for it. It is a
lesson which can not be taught. The real truths in life are not something you
can read about. Real knowledge can only ever come from within. You can never
lead someone to knowledge, but you CAN inspire them to seek their own - and
you've done a pretty good job at that. Thank you.

~~~
awt
"A decade in the lab will save you an afternoon in the library."

~~~
jbranchaud
Do you know who this quote is attributed to?

~~~
idlewan
Frank Westheimer seems to be the one who popularized the expression.

[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Westheimer](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Westheimer)

------
saeguaiga
Besides tax contribution topping, and market protection (what's this siphon to
p-shares that trade in microseconds doubling my concern's trade overhead, and
where is it rubbing the walls;) and citizenship (why is there a regulatory
forbidden level where we may want our customers;) it's hard to say there is a
forum; and that you don't rent there. Pretty sure I missed it.

------
chromaton
805 million people on earth don't have enough to eat. 783 million don't have
access to clean water. 1.9 million die of diarrhea every year. 176 million
African adults can't read.

And this guy sits around the first world for a couple years with the back of
his hand nailed to his forehead.

If he can't bring himself to do more than write a couple essays and snap some
photos over a couple years, I would suggest a refreshing visit to Mozambique
or Syria. People there could surely use help with the basic necessities of
life.

~~~
dageshi
Wouldn't you be using your time more productively by not reading HN?

~~~
whytaka
Not if he convinces me that this article is a bit whiny and re-orients me
towards industry for the sake of human good.

One short quip for renewed vigor. That's productivity!

~~~
Bjartr
Clearly then our best path forward is to spend all our time convincing others
to do things.

------
twtwtaway
This is bullshit. Just continue to work 16 hours a day, increase your
productivity and your startup will succeed. After that you'll be happy
forever. And your investor too.

