Episode 48 - Productivity

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Pena-Guzman,

Ellie: 0:08

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:12

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, you and I are known among mutual friends for being quite productive. And I've looked up to you as a model of productivity since grad school, when I was a chronic procrastinator, because you could always really get shit done. Like we would go to a coffee shop and you would just be cranking it out and then you wrote a kick ass dissertation in a short amount of time. And so just a little, just a little David praise on the productivity side.

David: 1:00

And I've heard this before from other people to be honest, and it has never sat super well with me because I don't think of myself as that productive, but now I'm wondering whether that's just because I've deeply, deeply internalized the publish or perish mentality of academia, where what you do is never enough. So maybe I just unconsciously set the bar really high, where if I'm not working and producing a ton, then I must not be a very good academic. I don't know.

Ellie: 1:30

Yeah. I also don't think of myself as productive either, but I kind of feel like the first rule of being productive is that you don't think you're productive. Like nobody actually thinks they're productive cuz either they're not productive and they don't think they're productive, or they're productive, but they don't think they're productive. I, I think part of the reason though, that I think of you as really productive is that you have a good work life balance. Like, I don't tend to think of people as particularly productive who have a lot of output, but who are working constantly, right? Like I think of people as productive when they are able to really bust it out, to go into what I call beast mode in undergrad, and then kind of come out of it and focus on other things, right.

David: 2:17

Well, I mean, I think I do go into beast mode and that's not a brag. I actually think it's kind of a scary thing because it means that I compartmentalize my life psychically with very sharp boundaries. And in fact, my partner has pointed out that it's a little scary. Uh-

Ellie: 2:35

And those sharp boundaries are the boundaries between your torso and your now hairy centaur legs.

David: 2:42

What?

Ellie: 2:44

Cause you're in beast mode.

David: 2:45

Oh, yes, I'm in beast mode, which apparently I'm a Chimera with body parts from different animals. That's how I write my papers. Um, but my partner has told to me a few times that it's really unsettling to watch me when there is like a 15 minute break in our day. And just like from one second to another disassociate from the world and dive into whatever Word document happened to be open in my computer at the time, and then bust out like two or three paragraphs and then just close it as if nothing happened with no transition in and out of that state. And so I do think it's a compartmentalization that may not be the most healthy.

Ellie: 3:24

So you're for sure productive. And I also think it says something about where we'll be going, that you associate that productivity with a lack of health, right? Uh, cause I, I hear you in feeling like it's never enough. I think in academia, where we're coming from, there's this perception from people outside of it that it's this ivory tower where people just can like go and read books in their library with a ladder. I have a legit ladder in my office. It's, it's so amazing. But at the same time, I, I think academia, despite my, my office with a ladder, is just as determined by the dictates of capitalist productivity as any other job.

David: 4:03

Yeah, but that image though of academia is this idyllic almost, uh, paradise, like place for the development of the mind, you know, I don't know anything about fashion and I don't really care about fashion. I'm not fashion forward.

Ellie: 4:18

I just think that's wrong. You're productive and fashionable, even though you deny both.

David: 4:22

No, I just happened to look good in everything. So it just, it's my burden. Um, no, but there is this fashion trend that I recently heard about and then got obsessed with, which is dark academia.

Ellie: 4:37

If you've recently heard about it, that means it's at least a couple of years old I will give, give you that. And that is true with this one, but it's a great aesthetic. So keep, keep telling me.

David: 4:45

Yes. So dark academia, for people who may have never heard of it is just this trend, especially among Gen Zers, although also some millennials, of presenting yourself as an intellectual who is drawn to books and taking selfies of you, like in, in a little nook with your old journal that is bound in a beautiful cover, holding a pen, like an old school pen with like a, an ink bottle. Yeah. Is that what it's called? A Quill. Okay. And just pursuing the life of the mind. And there's this article that I read in the magazine Jacobin called The Dark Academia Subculture Offers a Fantasy Alternative to the Neoliberal University."

Ellie: 5:33

Mmm.

David: 5:33

The author, Amelia Horgan, argues that this fantasy actually tells us something about the status quo, namely how unachievable that fantasy is, because professors are not really having this lovely experience. There are these disassociated compartmentalized subjects who are constantly panicking about publishing or parishing.

Ellie: 5:58

Yeah, I don't think I've ever actually used the bookshelf ladder in my office because I go into my office. I open my computer. It's like email, email, email. Great, great, great, blah. And then I leave.

David: 6:09

In the article, I like the term that the author uses to talk about the fantasy of dark academia, which is as a kind of ersatz romanticism. It, it's romanticizing an academic life that maybe was, maybe never even in the first place, precisely at a time when material conditions make that life entirely unthinkable and unrealizable, not just for educators, but also for students.

Ellie: 6:36

And I, I think, especially in the pandemic, right? That's something that the author mentions as well, is that it's no surprise that dark academia really comes to the fore when a lot of people don't have these separate spaces of libraries to go and enjoy. But I think too, it speaks as you're, as you're saying, to this resistance to productivity culture that we've really seen on the rise in the past couple of years, where people are starting to recognize that the girl boss fantasy of beast mode is not a great ideal.

David: 7:08

It's not enriching. And one thing that really stuck out for me from this particular article about dark academia, which again is about larger trends in our relationship to productivity, is that this fantasy is taking over, not just at a time when people are stuck in their houses because of the pandemic. But at a time in which academia is being entirely business-ified, uh, or bureaucratized. So that even for those people who are in academic spaces, it's not likely that they're going to have a romantic, organic connection to it. Rather they're gonna have an alienating relationship to it, where the institution kind of crushes you and extracts all your labor power. Today we are talking about productivity.

Ellie: 7:58

Americans have a reputation for constantly working themselves to the bone.

David: 8:02

Why are we so obsessed with being productive?

Ellie: 8:06

Does the discourse of relaxation and self care challenge this obsession?

David: 8:10

Or might there be more promising solutions to this illness of capital? We are without doubt measured by our productivity. And the way this expresses itself is by making us work long hours, even though at some point we obviously stop being productive.

Ellie: 8:31

Yeah, I think it's interesting the way that the discourse of productivity is wrapped up in the discourse of constantly working, of overwork, right? Because in fact, they're not correlated one to one. So there was a 2014 Stanford University study, for instance, showing that productivity plummets after you work more than 50 hours a week. And this means that if productivity is our main goal, right, if we wanna produce, we shouldn't be working more than that. And one suggestion was actually that 35 hours is the optimal work time before productivity begins to decline.

David: 9:07

And 35 hours sounds so little, I think, to American ears because we are trained again to wear our burnout almost as a badge of honor to show how much we work, how productive we work, how ideal of a worker we are. But in other countries, especially in Europe, the 35 hour mark for the work week has already been implemented. So for example, in France, the work week is 35 hours, and they are considering lowering it to 32 hours per week as the maximum amount of time that you should work.

Ellie: 9:41

Yeah, that sounds amazing. And a similar thing has been proposed in California, actually our home state, where the Congressman Mark Takano has introduced the 32 Hour Work Week Act. So he's trying to get 32 hours to be the norm in California.

David: 9:58

And that makes so much sense because Americans are being overworked. We are being way more productive than ever before. And at the same time, we are not being comparatively compensated. Wages have stagnated, even as productivity has risen. So productivity and compensation used to grow along very similar lines, but in the 1980s, they split. And productivity continued to increase, but wages just stayed the same. And the reasons for this include a significant drop in labor regulations, lack of union protection, lower taxes, lack of social programs that help families make ends meet and so on and so forth. A lot of which happen, during the Reagan era, the era of neoliberalization in the late 20th century.

Ellie: 10:49

Okay. So if you are making, uh, so let's say within eight hours a day, four pairs of shoes, and then you start making five pairs of shoes within eight hours a day because we're, you know, more productive than ever, right. We're moving harder, better, faster, stronger, right? The idea would be that you would probably get compensated more, right? Because you're creating more value for the company, because you're creating five pairs of shoes instead of four. But because of the stagnation of wages, a ton of workers are creating whatever their equivalent of five pairs of shoes is in eight hours, but they haven't been compensated for that change.

David: 11:25

Yeah. And I think part of the problem, especially in the case of manual labor, is that what gets factored into the equation for the wages is just the time rather than the productivity itself. So even as workers are being put through a squeeze where they are, being pushed to work faster and faster, the amount of time remains the same. So all that profit difference just goes into the pockets of the capitalists.

Ellie: 11:51

Yeah, like you work for me, I set the terms. And then, and then meanwhile, we totally pathologize not being productive. And so people don't benefit financially from their productivity, but we also have this really strong social discourse of you must be productive, right. And we think that if you're not productive in American society, you must have something fundamentally wrong with you. I think this is part of where some narratives come in that stigmatize mental illness, right? Or mental health crises like, oh, your brain is broken, or at least your relationship to your own willpower is broken, right. Um, you have a problem of chronic procrastination and we need to try and trace this to a medical diagnosis. So diagnoses such as ADD, ADHD, and anxiety are often considered in terms of problems with productivity.

David: 12:42

Well, and along that pathologization, we should consider the moralization of productivity where we end up performing it, right. We end up being hyper productive and on top of that, we end up showcasing how productive we are. So we end up talking more about our productivity than necessarily only engaging in the act of production itself. Because again, we wear that badge of exhaustion and burnout and tiredness almost as if it shows our strong work ethic and our moral fiber.

Ellie: 13:17

Yeah, totally. And I think there's a, there's a weird way where we can outright brag about how much time we've spent working. Like, oh my God, I'm so tired because there's a moral quality to that. But then we have to humble brag about our actual productivity, right. What we created. Oh, in this time I produced X, Y, Z. We still are expected to do that and to self promote, but we have to sort of hide it, you know, or at least like qualify it.

David: 13:45

Yeah, well, so we have to perform a combination of humility about our achievements, but an exorbitance about our effort.

Ellie: 13:53

Yes exactly. I am haunted by these Instagram posts of friends of mine who will wake up,

say at 4: 13:59

00 AM to, to write and then post a photo of their computer open in the dark in the middle of winter. Oh my God.

David: 14:08

It's it's the private sector version of dark academia. It's like, I'm just here in the darkness with my open laptop and my cup of coffee, um.

Ellie: 14:17

Totally, but it can't, it couldn't be further from dark academia because it's like, oh, I'm cranking out this book right now.

David: 14:23

You know, and when we think about the patholization and the moralization of productivity in the 21st century, I think we should consider it as the modern version of previous condemnations of non productivity that were also moral, but sometimes even religious in nature. So for instance, I think you see pathologization slash moralization in religious discourse around laziness and leash. Uh, it makes me think about that idiom that, what is it like idle hands are the devil's workshop or, or playground, is it workshop?

Ellie: 15:01

Yeah, it's not playground. The devil's playground is something

David: 15:04

Okay.

Ellie: 15:05

I think it's idle hands are the devil's work.

David: 15:07

Okay. So, you know, the idiom.

Ellie: 15:09

Either way it's a Protestant work ethic bullshit.

David: 15:13

And it basically means that if you're not working, you are likely sinning because that's when the devil sees an opening and takes it. And, the devil's opening.

Ellie: 15:26

You're scrolling your phone right now. I am I'm.

David: 15:30

Um, and in his book, History of Madness, Foucault talks about this. He says that in the 17th century, there were these houses of confinement that popped up all over Europe. So think about like general hospitals. There were these large institutions that were presented as if they were medical spaces for taking care of the sick and those deemed mad at the time. But Foucault says, if you look really closely at the historical archive of who was going in and out, mostly in, because many people didn't come out of them, at least not alive, you realize that these houses of confinement were actually sites for the moralization and pathologization of what he calls idleness. So the houses of confinement house, not only the sick and not only those deemed mad, but also vagabonds, students who didn't have jobs, and the recently unemployed. So-

Ellie: 16:29

Whoa.

David: 16:29

it brought under the same umbrella really disparate groups of people. And it's because they had a major moral and economic concern with idleness. So all the people who are idle, i.e. not economically productive, had to be literally confined.

Ellie: 16:48

Wow. And I think that is so interesting because it speaks to what we think of as fundamental to being human. So a lot of definitions of human in the history of philosophy, a lot of them have to do with us as rational animals or political animals, but also a lot of them have to do with us as productive beings, as laboring beings, as beings who create the world, as beings who shape material, you see that in Hegel and Marx for instance, although of course, a lot of our rejection of productivity discourse is rooted in Marx in this episode. So it's a kind of more complicated question there. But I think for me, when I was growing up, one of the biggest indictments, if I was being lazy, was that I was vegging out. Vegging out was an occasional reward for hard work. But what does vegging out mean? It means to be a vegetable, the presumption being you are not human, right? You are a veggie.

David: 17:41

Yeah, you're not even animal, you know, you're not, you're not even a pig or a donkey. You're just like an onion.

Ellie: 17:48

A cucumber.

David: 17:49

I wanted to avoid any of the sexually coded, um, vegetables from-

Ellie: 17:54

I wanted to avoid one that's actually a fruit, but like a cucumber is probably actually a fruit too, but you know, there's like those different categories. I, I can never keep straight what's a vegetable and what's not. So anyway.

David: 18:04

Yeah, I, I don't know the answer there, but you know, when, when thinking about that accusation, you're just a vegetable, the question is how do you get somebody out of that and reforge them into being productive? And it seems as if like just forced labor is the answer, because Foucault talks about how in these houses of confinement in the 17th century, which again, they had a medical mission on the surface, how interesting is it that one of the cures that became super popular in those spaces was literally work. So you would have all these people that were confined and they were made to do labor, often for like what amounts to private companies. And the idea was that because of the moral and pathological dimensions of idleness, the cure for that condition would be to just make you produce profit for somebody else.

Ellie: 18:57

Whoa, how do you be productive? You just be productive.

David: 19:01

Just be productive. Yeah. Like if, how do you not be slothful or, or idle, or vagrant? Just work.

Ellie: 19:09

Yeah. And I think right, didn't prisons evolve out of houses of confinement.

David: 19:14

Yeah, I, I think there's a story there to be told about the evolution of prisons in, um, the 18th and 19th centuries out of these earlier houses of confinement. And indeed some of the earliest prisons were called penitentiaries precisely because they, they conflated these different categories of the mad, the criminal, and the sinner, which is why the idea is that you go to them in order to perform penitence, to pay a debt that is not just legal, but also moral. And again, we know that even nowadays, one of the major controversies, one of them, in, uh, the prison industrial complex is the exploitation of prisoners who are made to work, again, often for private companies, under the presumption that the act of working will somehow reform those prisoners morally, spiritually, and psychologically.

Ellie: 20:11

And I think we're very much still stuck in this mentality, but I feel like there's been a rising tide recently of people questioning it. And especially since COVID, we've had to really pause and reflect upon our adoration of productivity in an unprecedented manner, both on an individual level and on a collective level.

David: 20:32

Yeah. And to make this somewhat personal, I think during the pandemic, especially in 2020, I experienced both. I experienced a very intense demand by my super ego that I'd be productive, you know, like I'm not- like I'm confined I'm in my house, you know, the modern house of confinement. And so it's the perfect time to be hyper productive. And at the same time, I had this inner voice in me fighting for the opposite message, which was get your life priorities in order, you're killing yourself, maybe for an institution that sees you as nothing more than an expendable worker. So I, I went back and forth, uh, between those two poles.

Ellie: 21:14

Totally. I mean, cuz the question is who are we working for, right. Who are we producing for? And I think COVID has taught a lot of people that most of us are producing for others, right. And others who may not have the best intentions. I think this is in part why we saw a really different relationship to work come to the fore and people quitting en masse. Although I did hear that might have been sort of a misconception, what's been called the Great Resignation, but in any case, I think what and who are we working ourselves to the bone for is a really live question. And during the beginning of COVID, I'm thinking just like the first couple weeks in March 2020, there was this moment, this cultural moment, where people were like, Oh, wow. We have all of this freedom to actually work for ourselves. And everyone was like, be like Newton, who invented calculus while in quarantine during the bubonic plague. And then people were like, oh, and wait, Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in isolation during a plague outbreak. And so, you know, there was like this sense, oh, now we can finally be productive and fulfill our creative projects. And then almost immediately afterward, there was a longer, much more sustained and much more intense backlash to that, where people were saying, this is like such a messed up discourse to say that you should be productive during a pandemic. And so there were articles, just a, just a list, a few titles. These were literally articles that came out. "Stop Trying to be Productive." "It's Okay if You're Not Productive." "Against Productivity in a Pandemic." And these articles really licensed terrified and anxious Americans to prioritize their mental health over demands to produce. And they actually became so plentiful that reductress, the feminist satire website wrote an article satirizing this, which is entitled "Woman Now Only Reading Articles About How it's Okay Not to be Productive."

David: 23:09

That and, and you're like, I feel personally attacked this, this is you.

Ellie: 23:13

No, it's actually not for reasons that we'll talk about in a moment, because I think this backlash is itself problematic. It's really hot right now to talk about the benefits of not being productive. For instance, the darling of many critical theory circles, Bifo, or Franco Berardi, has written the following. "We must abandon the point of view of productivity, the expectation of acquisition and of control. We must assume instead, the point of view of laziness and self care." What do you think David?

David: 24:07

Uh, so I think I'm down with the first part, that we have to figure out a different way to think about human life and the value and purpose of human existence other than productivity, but I'm not sure I would necessarily go to laziness and self care as he does for my alternative to productivity, because for me, self-care discourse is super wrapped up actually in the discourse of being hyper productive because often people engage in self-care practices only as a way of becoming better workers, right. It becomes kind of like a hashtag life hack in the life of the worker, where you take care of yourself only so that you can render better service to, you know, our economic overlords.

Ellie: 24:59

Yeah, totally. I, I think I fully agree with that. I mean, this is my problem with the laziness and self-care discourse, is that it's often presented as just a kind of shallow binary opposition to the productivity discourse without really critically thinking about other alternatives that might be on the table. So it's just like, oh, well, instead of being productive, let's just do nothing. And I actually think this is really dangerous from the perspective of mental health and a genuine form of self-care, because I think it often encourages people to let sort of bad habits and tendencies come to the fore. I mean, that are ultimately not full filling to them. So we might not wanna present laziness as the solution to productivity. This cycle of burning out and so then going into a depressive mode of binge watching Netflix, I love watching Netflix. I'm not gonna lie, but there's a difference between me really enjoying a show that I'm watching and me being so worn out at the end of the day, that all I feel I can do is binge watch Netflix while scrolling my phone. Like that's not my best self, if I'm gonna put it in that, in that way. And my worry is that laziness often means consumption here, especially a really passive consumption. And so it still leaves us trapped, in the production and consumption dyad. So capitalism makes it seem like our lives have to be organized around either producing or consuming and that we have no other options. And so when we're binge watching Netflix and scrolling our phones, mindlessly, that I think is a really shallow form of consumption that doesn't make people happy. It's just a shallow hedonism. And I know I'm like on a soapbox here about this, but there there's this meme that was going around, uh, there there's a certain brand of new agey, pseudo feminist influencer that I have issues with. We've talked about, about her a little bit in the Body Positivity and Fat Feminism episode. We've talked about her a little, the Astrology episode And certainly, oh, Living Your Truth episode for sure.

David: 27:06

You're obsessed. You're obsessed.

Ellie: 27:08

Yeah. I just think it's interesting cuz this comes up, cuz the Instagram algorithm thinks that like this is my niche and it's just not. So I see these posts and one that I saw running around the internet was this quote that was reposted by a lot of these types, um, with like sexy selfies and the quote is I just wanna be on the beach with my tits out, eating some fresh fruit. And that model of the good life. I mean, come on. I love the beach. I love hanging out on the beach. But I think this meme is like the 21st century version of Gauguin's primitivist paintings, where the only alternative that we're imagining to our hyper-productive American culture is to just like, be lying naked on the beach. It's like a very exoticizing and I find super problematic life goal.

David: 28:01

I know. Well, okay. So even though I do dream about being with my tits out, eating fruit on the beach, uh, yeah, I think you're right that it, it fetishizes the tropics in a really dangerous way. And here I wanna now metaphorically head it from the tropics a little bit up north to Frankfurt, Germany, because the 20th century of philosophers from the Frankfurt School were deeply concerned about the way in which capitalism advances itself precisely by giving us only those two options. Either work ie. produce, or have leisure time i.e. consume and one philosopher from this school, Herbert Marcuse developed the concept of repressive desublimation, which sounds really fancy, and it is, but it's also a relatively straightforward idea.

Ellie: 28:54

Wait, wait, David, before we talk about repressive desublimation, we can't mention the iconic photo of Theodor Adorno, perhaps the most serious of the members of the Frankfurt School, sitting on a beach shirtless.

David: 29:08

Oh my God. Yes. With, well, he was not shirtless. He had a onesie, one of those, like unitards.

Ellie: 29:14

Oh, you're right. You're right. He did. He had a one piece swimsuit and then also dude was legit afraid of tits. So he wouldn't have liked to see the tits out with fruit on the beach. Cuz there was that story of the, the young women raising their tops to him as like a, Hey, you think you're so intense and serious? Well, LOL, we're gonna scare you with some boobs while he was lecturing.

David: 29:35

Yes. Yeah. He had a, a group of women protest one of his lectures and actually in his book, The Critique of Cynical Reason, the critical theorist Peter Sloterdijk writes about this scene, uh, about the way in which these women just kinda like threw him off his game, because for all his coolness, he was actually really awkward, uh, when it came to bodies.

Ellie: 29:56

Oh, Yeah.

David: 29:57

and organs.

Ellie: 29:58

And so, so he was like sitting on the beach, just like feeling awkward about all the tits out while he is in his, in his one, onesie.

David: 30:05

You know how I knew that he had a onesie is because in grad school I blew up that picture and printed it. And it was the poster in front of my desk for two years. So for two years, I would just like look up from my computer and there is like tiny Adorno sitting sideway with his legs curled up in this onesie at the beach, black and white.

Ellie: 30:30

Please get me that for my birthday.

David: 30:34

The onesie or the picture?

Ellie: 30:36

The picture, the picture. I've, I've got enough bathing suits, but I would definitely- we're all, this is also like gonna be the, the social media for this, for this episode, for sure. But okay. Back to repressive desublimation, this concept that comes up in Herbert Marcuse. So it starts with the idea of sublimation, which is a term from Freud. And Freud conceives of sublimation as what we do when we take our repressed energies and channel them into creative outlets so they don't bubble up in our unconscious and turn pathological. We need an outlet for these energies. So instead of letting your repressed impulses turn into a neurosis, you can use them to create great works like paintings, books, memes about having fruit on the beach.

David: 31:22

You're, you're tatas out. Although maybe Freud would've loved that, who knows, you know,

Ellie: 31:28

I know, right. Um, he would've had a lot to say I'm sure, but, but so for him, sublimation is a liberatory act.

David: 31:35

Yes. So liberatory power is important here, and it's something that really appeals to Marcuse who would've been down with the meme of, you know, being at the beach, uh, semi nude, because he was the darling of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Now, either way. Marcuse takes this concept of sublimation from Freud and tries to give it a political twist. And he says the problem with modern day capitalism, and again, he's already seeing this at work in the 1960s, is that it prevents us from sublimating our energies into creative act. So it blocks the possibility of that kind of Freudian liberation and instead convinces us to channel our energies into further consumption, right? Like going to the movies, uh, going to the mall, buying clothes for three hours on Etsy, uh, binge watching the latest Netflix series, which I've been guilty of recently. And so Marcuse notices that we end up looking for some kind of release or some kind of pleasure precisely in the logic of production and consumption that ultimately is the origin of our very repression.

Ellie: 32:53

Oh, oh, I feel this so hard. Oh my God. Because I really think sublimation, at least from Marcuse, and I, I think I buy this, is not privy to the logic of the market. It takes us out of the production and consumption binary and takes us into what we might wanna talk about later, David, which is this mode of creation and creativity. And I think the idea that I'm just gonna scroll my phone, looking on Etsy. Oh, you, you really cut me to the core with that one, David, you-

David: 33:23

The Etsy.

Ellie: 33:24

Yeah. I'm just like looking at stuff on Etsy instead of actually doing an art project, no!

David: 33:35

You know I derive a lot of gratification from taking other people down in a very subtle way. And I really like the term that you used earlier, when you were talking about binge watching a Netflix series, you said that we become depressed. And I like that image of depression, or even deflation, you know, like the air going out of a balloon. And I think it captures the notion of desublimation as Marcuse understands it because instead of producing works that maybe critique the status quo, we just deflate, right? Like the air just goes out of us, that the energy goes out of us, and we end up hurling ourselves into only the pleasures that the status quo itself offers because they support the status quo itself. So it's a kind of depressive hedonism where you just go for pleasures that ultimately make you feel like shit afterwards.

Ellie: 34:32

Totally. And this is why I think it's so important to resist the logic of anti productivity that runs rampant today because it not only is depressing, right, it doesn't help us live up to our potential as holistic human beings, but it also ends up reproducing the market logic that keeps us down to begin with, right. It's it's not a resistant or rebellious act. And I think this is why like the meme culture on the internet around just like doing whatever you want and relaxing if you need to is very well meaning I think, but ultimately politically dangerous because it is not using a, a really robust conception of, uh, resistance and, and rebellion to capitalism. It without realizing it plays into the very logic of consumption. And so anti productivity to me is not a valid response to the productivity discourse because it leaves us captured within its terms.

David: 35:32

Yeah. And so we dislike Bifo's suggestion that you should be lazy and engage in acts of self-care.

Ellie: 35:39

Yeah, I think it's a total false dichotomy to say that laziness is the alternative to productivity. And it doesn't question, right, the very productivity- laziness, binary that is fundamentally capitalist in nature because it reflects the production consumption binary. And I really like the way that our friend Adorno puts this in his, uh, book Minima Moralia. This, this quote had a huge impact on me, which is "Work while you work. Play while you play." Okay. Seems nice. Right? I'm cutting, cutting out of the quote. And that seems great, work while you work, play while you play. But here's the second half of the quote. This is a basic rule of repressive self discipline.

David: 36:18

Oh.

Ellie: 36:20

Bifo! Adorno rises from the grave in the onesie from the beach, and just like drops that on the head of Bifo.

David: 36:31

Some, sexy zombie Adorno.

Ellie: 36:42

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David: 37:01

Ellie, you and I agree with the Frankfurt School that rejecting productivity in favor of a base form of production or laziness or do nothingness is not necessarily the best solution. So what are some ways that we might think about changing our relationship to work, so that we don't fall back onto this binary choice between producing and just refusing to produce, period.

Ellie: 37:31

So I would like to see us move from a discourse of productivity to a discourse of creativity, because to create something is not necessarily to produce something. So productivity results in a product. Under capitalism, it's usually a product in the form of a commodity, something that we can exchange and or use, whereas creativity really has to do with giving shape or form to something that is currently formless. And I, I just kind of like that shift in emphasis because I think creativity is more about the process than it is about the product, right? Everybody's obsessed with results oriented stuff nowadays, and there's a time and place for that, certainly. But I think having a process based approach to one's life, that actually can really leave a lot of room for relaxation, for genuine self care, to create doesn't mean that you're going, going, going all the time. It means that you're in a fundamentally different way of relating to the world. That is, I think, I wanna say organic, but that's gonna sound so nostalgic and weird.

David: 38:44

Holistic. Gestaltic. Other synonyms.

Ellie: 38:47

Let's say, let's say attuned perhaps. And you know, I, I think in particular about the idea of getting into a flow state, this, this notion of flow that comes from the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the flow state is where we're really letting something take over that's this desire and enjoyment of the process. And we're not, we're not having a top down managerial approach cuz that's really part of the problem of productivity, right, is that we're we're our own slave drivers rather than letting something take over ourselves, which is like a, a deeper, uh, now I gonna say a deeper self, oh God, now I'm gonna be one of those living your truth ladies.

David: 39:25

No, that's fine. That's fine. No, you're, you're a new age spiritualist and proud of it. Proud of it. Um, no, but I, I, I really love the idea of moving away from results oriented methodologies to experience first methodologies or ways of living. Methodologies in itself already sounds too icky. Where, where we focus on processes that bring a kind of enrichment, a kind of spiritual strengthening, going back to the image of the balloon, that inflate us rather than deflate us. That sounds a little weird, but when you mentioned the flow state, it is interesting that most of the phenomena that cognitive scientists and neuro scientists study when they study the flow state are, are precisely processes that bring a lot of joy to people, right? Like when do you go into the flow state? It's when you're doing things like playing music, it's a process where you throw yourself and lose yourself in the activity. It's when you play sports and you're just so enjoying it that you're not even thinking about it. It's when you engage in different forms of play. So foregrounding process over product, I think does give us something of an alternative to the laziness productivity dyad that we've been discussing.

Ellie: 40:44

And I think part of it might be that both productivity and laziness are symptoms of alienation, which is something we've talked about in our episode on alienation, whereas creativity and this process oriented dimension, especially as you just really nicely described it, David suggests an overcoming of alienation.

David: 41:01

Yeah, you become whole with yourself, right? Like you occupy yourself and your place in the world. And the work of the computer science professor, Cal Newport has been gaining a lot of traction recently.

Ellie: 41:13

Oh, yeah, it's always recommended to me. I haven't read. Tell me about it.

David: 41:16

Yeah. And, and he advocates what he calls slow productivity. He published an article in January of this year, in the New Yorker where he says that slow productivity is a reduction in the amount of volume that is assigned to each worker. So essentially just literally producing less. And I think this might be a second alternative to the work yourself to the bone or veg out , um, dichotomy, because according to Newport, the mere number of hours that are assigned to labor aren't necessarily the issue, especially in American corporate work, with its flexibility. You don't have to clock in, you don't have to clock out, even though I guess you're always like on call in principle, especially if you're in a salaried position, but what really makes a difference is just giving each person less to do, because the drive for productivity is overwhelming a lot of workers and cutting out executive function. And paradoxically, it might be that asking workers to achieve less might actually lead them to do things better and more meaningfully and potentially even more productively, but we don't wanna say that you should give them less work so that they ultimately produce more, even though that might actually be the case. Cuz there is less burnout. There is less deflation.

Ellie: 42:42

Yeah, I think that is interesting. And like I said, I've been meaning to read Newport for a while on this, but I have a slight potential worry, which now- I was just in nostalgic and optimistic mode about creativity. And now I'm gonna be a little bit more Scrooge like, but I think, and this isn't a problem with Newport. It's a problem with the way our society might take this up. We are obsessed with being great at everything, right. That's part of the productivity discourse. And so I think we, we not only wanna be the best at working, but we also wanna be the best at relaxing or the best at playing. And so this idea that we're gonna work fewer hours so that we can have other pursuits, I think without a fundamental shift in ideology, is likely to just become like, oh, now I am the most creative and I am the most relaxed person ,right.

David: 43:36

So I, I can see how it could lead to this kind of idealization of a very specific kind of work life balance discourse, where it's like, I have achieved the perfect balance, cuz I only work four and a half hours a day, which leaves me with 19 and a half hours a day for the rest of my life processes.

Ellie: 43:53

Ahem, men who are obsessed with the Sam Harris podcast.

David: 43:56

Yes. Yes, exactly. So understood. I think that's a very fair concern. Although I do think that there is some value in recognizing that work shouldn't be our priority and that it's okay and maybe better to just demand less of workers, right? Like you shouldn't have to produce eight pairs of shoes. Like you said earlier, maybe just produce three. You're still producing more value than you're being paid.

Ellie: 44:28

Yeah, I'm totally down. I'm, I'm fully on board with that.

David: 44:31

Yeah, so a kind of medium level productivity. And, you know, I think that creativity and slow productivity are cool ways to think about this on an individual level, but we might also wanna think about collective solutions because part of the problem with capitalism is that it makes social problems appear as individual ones that can be solved with private choices about your atomic lifestyle.

Ellie: 44:59

Just add in five minutes of meditation a day with your specialized app.

David: 45:03

Yeah. Like I took myself out of capitalism through my individual action, and I think we need to start considering the ways in which we might add meaning and value and significance to, to our life by engaging in forms of human action that have as their goal, not just the liberation of the individual, but the liberation of the collective. And I here don't mean anything more complicated or sophisticated than engaging in forms of activism, engaging in forms of public service that do have a social function, but they also have a psychological function, that they make you connected to a broader sense of what community means.

Ellie: 45:52

Interesting. You ended up going in a different direction than I thought you were going in because when you talk about collective liberation, I thought, I thought you were maybe thinking about it in the terms that I was thinking about of needing a pretty significant overhaul of our ideology. Because I think I'm pessimistic that without such an overhaul, we are going to find ways to use the logic of productivity regardless of what activity we're doing. Yeah. So I'm curious to hear more about how you think activism might help resolve this, especially in an age when so many activists and organizers find them selves really stressed out by being overworked and having to succumb to the logic of capitalist productivity and raising money.

David: 46:35

Yes. So here, the problem is how do we envision that large scale change at the level of ideology that you are alluding to without imagining individuals coming together in order to make it happen, right? So it's a problem of the relationship ontologically between the individual and the collective, where the collective definitely has a kind of objective existence independently of the individuals, but it's not as if the collective changes itself without the collective action of a bunch of individuals coming together in order to, you know, create a crack in the system.

Ellie: 47:14

Yeah.

David: 47:15

And so I, I don't have an answer here because I, I definitely agree with you that we need that large scale reconceptualization of what it means to live together.

Ellie: 47:25

Mm-hmm.

David: 47:26

On a, on a more depressive note. I think it's very difficult to envision what that alternative is. And this is the problem with what the social theorist, Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism. He says the problem that we face nowadays is one of the limits of imagination, that we've been in this system of economic production and for so long that we can no longer even envision what an alternative mode of social organization would look like. And so we don't know what to fight for, which puts us in a really difficult situation, right, where we want to do something to change the system. But we don't know what's on the other side.

Ellie: 48:08

Totally. And I think you see this struggle, which is a struggle of the relationship between ideology and material conditions as something a lot of people are grappling with both in the present day, but then also going back to the origins of, of this way of thinking about things in Marx. I don't think Marx gives us a super clear account of how this is gonna work either. So all of us are just like, where do we go from here?

David: 48:33

Well, and, and to connect it back to Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation, I think that this sense of futility and this inability to imagine a principle that might organize our life choices is the reason why we then throw ourselves into low level pleasures, immediate satisfaction, immediate gratification, in our capacity as consumers, because what else is there to do?

Ellie: 48:58

So it's understandable then that we wanna go tits out with fruit on a beach.

David: 49:10

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Ellie: 49:18

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice.

David: 49:25

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our production assistant Sam Hernandez.

Ellie: 49:35

Samuel PK Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.