There's a weird fixation on productivity that gets drilled into our heads at a young age. It's beyond okay to not be running 100% all the time, regardless of what the paradigm espouses as value.
The problem I see is that the delivery system has evolved in many companies / tech in general to be JIT, but for human resources.
While at FAANG, I was at capacity every week. So a 'normal' week (which was actually quite rare), I expected to spend 35-45 hours in work + meetings.
But 75% of those weeks, some urgent issue would come up. Then you have an extra 15-25 hours of attending to the urgency, falling behind 5-15 hours on planned work, and then you spend all evening thinking about how to solve the Very Urgent Problem.
Even if you are good at compartmentalizing, you'll be confounded by redundant messages from middle managers asking you about the status of the Very Urgent Problem.
Taking a break / vacation means twice as much work for 1-3 weeks before the vacation, and 1-3 weeks after, as you must prepare for coverage for while you are out of office, and then catch up on what happened while you were gone.
Add in the death of a loved one, medical issue or even a string of minor problems and you're completely subjugate to external circumstances. This will lead to burnout, at a minimum.
As a younger person, this kind of environment made me feel important and necessary. Later I began to realize this is the opposite of the truth. Important and necessary people have the power to set their own terms.
I am not sure why things have evolved this way. I recently watched Koyaanisqatsi ('life out of balance') a film from the 80s about modernity and technology and found it as relevant as ever. However the busyness that used to be outwardly visible has now migrated into our minds and seems to be causing mass unhappiness and mental health issues.
I think it has to do with reifying things that hadn't ought to be rigid. A 0001 deadline is arbitrary, being one minute over is not really consequential from a logical perspective until you've negotiated and inked a contract that makes fees contingent on having X done prior to 0001, and once that contract is signed and made into company custom...
> This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
This has been a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing!
I will add that I recommend the whole "In Praise of Idleness" book from Russell, it's a collection of essays and lots of them are interesting 70-80 years later.
A personal favourite of mine is "The Ancestry of Fascism", delineating social movements in history through the perspective of a constant pendulum pushing/pulling from opposite directions for any kind of social movement (political, artistic, etc.).
