The Price We Pay For Being Excessively Productive

In Praise of Procrastination

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Writers are always looking for the nearest fire escape when people ask about their process, and the Italian novelist Umberto Eco is not an exception. In a 2015 interview¹, when Tonny Vorm asked Eco how he wrote his first novel, The Name of The Rose, he replied:

“It happens when you feel that you have to piss, and you have to run to the toilet.”

And added that:

“I cannot understand those novelists that [publish] a book every year. They lose this pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to prepare a story.”

But our economy doesn’t give writers the luxury of marinating ideas today. In College, courses allow very little time for writing essays. In the publishing industry, magazines operate on tight timelines. Consistency becomes the key metric for evaluating online writers, and the writing economy encourages us, using Eco’s toilet analogy, to piss before we have the urge.

Writing turns into a tradable commodity instead of the result of deliberate contemplation. And given the conditions, it’s time to call out this “fetishized productivity” and re-cultivate the pleasure of preparing ideas patiently.

A Generation of Pre-crastinators

When I studied under full load during my B.A., I prided myself in completing assignments a week early. But in retrospect, when I read my old essays after graduation, most had typos and citation errors. Instead of a procrastinator, I was a pre-crastinator par excellence, and my work suffered from my productivity addiction.

For the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, this addiction is a symptom in the larger context of what he called an Achievement Society. In an Achievement Society, no one forces us to do anything. In other words, no negative power tells us what we should and shouldn’t do. Instead, the unlimited Can [becomes] the positive modal verb (8). In Han’s book The Burnout Society², he wrote beautifully:

“Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation (9).”

This is why the motivation section in your local Barnes & Noble gets fatter every year. And when people talk about improving their lives, increasing their motivation to complete projects seems to be a key motif. In an Achievement Society, maximizing production no longer takes the form of forcing people to work. Instead, we become self-regulating (self-motivating) individuals with our own work ethic.

And the term: work ethic is not an accident. Ethics usually come with a system of moral codes that transcends our everyday concerns. Sometimes, a person has to get out of their way to fulfil ethical obligations, and those who fall short of this morality are silently judged, guilted and ostracized. But in the context of an Achievement Society, instead of calling those who fall short of their work ethic madmen and criminals (9), we call them depressives and losers (9). Under this logic, we can say that we’ve turned our society into a labour camp [where] one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator (19) while we exploit ourselves.

The Price We Pay for Being Overly Productive