Productivity
The cult of "productivity" has deluded us that our work is only in the work we produce. This runs counter to the Good News, which says that our worth is because God loves us. (Photo courtesy of Jason Valendy)
May 14, 2020
There is a fantastic article called “Productivity is not Working” by Laurie Penny. Take time to read it here.
Penny suggests that so many of us are addicted to the treadmill of our work lives, not because it takes us anywhere but only because it is comfortable and known:
This is how most of my peers have experienced the modern economy. We were told that if we worked hard, we would be safe, and well, and looked after, and the less this was true, the harder we worked.
The idea that hustling can save you from calamity is an article of faith, not fact—and the Covid-19 pandemic is starting to shake the collective faith in individual striving. The doctrine of “workism” places the blame for global catastrophe squarely on the individual: If you can’t get a job because jobs aren’t there, you must be lazy, or not hustling hard enough. That’s the story that young and young-ish people tell themselves, even as we’ve spent the whole of our brief, broke working lives paying for the mistakes of the old, rich, and stupid. We internalized the collective failures of the ruling class as personal failings that could be fixed by working smarter, or harder, or both—because that, at least, meant that we might be able to fix them ourselves.
Penny comes to the obvious conclusion that “the cult of productivity doesn’t have an answer for this crisis. Self-optimizing will not save us this time…”
Really, you should read the article.
While Penny’s article ends with a word of hope, I would like to offer what might be the Good News hidden in the title.
There are several ways to read this title (“Productivity is not Working"). One way is to say that being productive in the traditional economic sense is not helping right now. There may be a day in the future when we can all be “productive” again, but today is not that day. To put it another way, it is saying that “productivity isn’t working”. Like the refrigerator that isn’t working, in time we can fix it and it will work again.
Another way to read the title is that is productivity equals (is) not working. But how can this be? How can productivity BE not working? This is the mystery of grace in the world. If we want to gain our life, we have to lose it. The only way that God can produce fruit (be productive) in our lives is when we are not working. When we step aside and realize that we cannot save the world. When we submit to the reality that all our works can never fill the deep desires of our hearts and souls. That we will be “restless until we rest in thee.”
You may be tempted to think that this suggests that the Good News is to live a lazy life of not doing anything. This is the false choice given to us by the soul-sucking economy – we either are working or we are lazy. We are either striving or we are abdicating. We are either growing or we are dying. These are all false choices because there is another way to life – not by working and not by being lazy but by receiving.
We have such a cult of productivity that even today some of the “best” leaders of our time are encouraging us to use this time to think through how we can be better and more productive in the future. These liturgical sermons from the priests of productivity are not new. We have heard them before. And for many of us, we build our lives around their gospel. As Penny says, “There is nothing counterrevolutionary about keeping busy.” There is something that is counterrevolutionary and that is by receiving the Gospel that productivity is not working.
Which can only mean that God is.