Let's make 2024 the year of saying no to productivity culture
Why we need to learn the importance of lying fallow
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Many of us struggle with not having enough time to do basic human things like rest, spend time with friends and family, or connect with our communities. When we choose rest or relaxation over work or crossing things off our never-ending to-do list, it can feel uncomfortable, almost immoral.
It can seem like we are being “lazy.”
We did not come up with this drive to be constantly productive on our own. In fact, it’s against our nature, in a million hideous ways. It's an idea that American culture has sold us, and it's one that we have to make a conscious decision to reject if we are ever to be fully ourselves.
This is not an easy feat because we routinely receive messages that normalize and even glamorize compulsive business amidst a dearth of free time. "Busy" people who (allegedly) need little rest or sleep are cast as important, even virtuous—and if you aren't grinding it out like they are, there are productivity hacks aplenty to get you with the program.
A perfect example is a "6-Day Energy Challenge" the New York Times rolled out to kick off 2024. They promised to "share evidence-based tips and inspiration so you can feel more awake throughout the day."
You can do this, they note, by "taking microbreaks — small pauses under five minutes — throughout the day can help keep us feeling energized. Even 10 seconds of rest, one study found, can improve our ability to learn."
Yes, they said ten seconds of rest.
They said microbreaks.
When someone says they are going to "rest," most people envision a period that is not measured in seconds. Even the idea that five-minute microbreaks are restorative feels crazy-making.
Then there is the fact that the ten seconds of "rest" promises to "improve our ability to learn,” or put another way: be more productive.
The Times is not alone in selling everyday human things ("resting" and "having energy") as the path to productivity.
It's everywhere.
I shared a post I saw on Instagram a few weeks ago that purported to encourage rest but was riddled with problematic productivity culture lingo.
The post explained that experts say one “lazy day” per week is good for us:
This essentially means not doing anything that is on your to-do-list, not checking work related emails, not responding to work calls, being in your pyjamas all day, taking a nap, doing things that you really like - gardening, watching your favourite movie or show, some art and craft activity, eating good food without worrying about calories and enjoying all the simple pleasures of life.
It used to be considered just normal behavior to not work on the weekend. Now, not checking work-related emails or responding to work calls (also known as not working on your day off) is in the same category as staying in your pajamas all day.
The rest experts also say, "Having a lazy day gives your brain a break and your body a chance to recover. It also reduces stress, which could help make you more productive on your non-lazy days. It is also an easy way to prevent burnout and being susceptible to chronic diseases." (Italics/bold in quotes in this essay added for emphasis).
This is all true, but the point of rest is not to make you a better worker bee. Just the idea that you need a full day in your pajamas once a week to stave off chronic illness and to “recover” from the week is itself an indictment of our culture.
I came across another article promising to help us learn how to rest because "even though it seems counterintuitive, time spent resting actually makes you more productive."
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, explained:
Rest is not this optional leftover activity. Work and rest are actually partners. They are like different parts of a wave. You can't have the high without the low. The better you are at resting, the better you will be at working.
I haven't had a chance to read Pang’s book, but the premise as laid out in the book description rings true for me until the word “productivity” is mentioned.
In Rest, Pang "combines rigorous scientific research with a rich array of examples of writers, painters, and thinkers—from Darwin to Stephen King—to challenge our tendency to see work and relaxation as antithetical. [D]eliberate rest is the true key to productivity and will give us more energy, sharper ideas, and a better life."
While it's true that many successful writers, painters, and thinkers in previous generations worked less and spent more time relaxing and resting than almost anyone in America does today, they didn't do it so they would be productive—at least not in the way we think of that word today in the United States.
They did it because it used to just be considered normal behavior to have hobbies, friends, and even to just do nothing. FDR had enough free time to have a stamp collection while he was president of the United States, for crying out loud.
As recently as the 1970s and early 1980s, when I was growing up, resting was not stigmatized. People did not feel the need to justify their downtime or to constantly achieve and improve themselves the way they do today. Compulsive busyness and burnout were rare, whereas today, they are pretty typical experiences.
I think the people advocating for rest as a productivity hack probably have their hearts in the right place but realized that the only way to make rest sexy today is to tie it to getting more done.
Though, who really knows. So many of us have drunk the productivity Kool-Aid, for all I know they are true believers in the cause, the way I used to be.
In my early thirties, during the late 1990s tech boom, I was Vice President of International Communications for a major US company. This meant I spent a fair amount of time in other countries—from France to Argentina to Australia—that did not suffer from the American productivity fetish. When the day ended, so did their work. When the weekend came, they left the office even if we had a significant launch that Monday that we were not ready for.
I can't believe how lazy they are, I would think, as I toiled late into the evening or through the weekend alone in the office. I would express shock when they left the office for hours-long lunches instead of eating at their desks or just working through lunch as I often did.
Now I wonder—what must they have thought of me?
I imagine they pitied me. They would have been right to do so.
Yes, I had a fancy title and became a millionaire at age 30 because of this all-consuming job. But I also had no life or sense of what was actually important.
I lived in a house with almost no furniture, which didn't matter because most of the time, I was holed up in a hotel in another country, and when I was home, all I ever did there was sleep and shower. I missed birthdays, weddings and lost friends because I was so consumed with my work. My body hurt all the time. I struggled with clinical anxiety.
My entire identity was my work. I was proud of how hard I pushed myself and how productive I was, no matter the pressure I was under. I didn’t need to slow down or rest because I was tough and could do whatever needed to be done.
Until I couldn’t.
When I finally crashed and burned, it was spectacular.
I found out what happens when you don't know how to rest.
I wish I could say I learned my lesson, but I didn't. I would repeat some version of this story over and over until I finally decided to address the core problem: my disordered beliefs around work and productivity.
The Importance of Lying Fallow
We know that if you overwork farmland, it will become less fertile. It may even stop producing for you altogether. This is why farmers will leave land fallow for a year or more. Seeds thrown on overworked land will not yield crops. But toss those same seeds on rested, fertile soil, and life will come forth.
We are no different.
Rest is a natural cycle that is meant to be honored, not hacked.
In Italy, the centrality of rest is captured in the phrase dolce far niente—the sweetness of doing nothing.
Dolce far niente is not just part of life.
For Italians, it is the point of life.
“Dolce far niente is a state of complete idleness or blissful relaxation,” writes Sophie Minchilli. “Italians have figured out a way of being in the moment with such joy and blissfulness that they are not ‘looking forward’ to anything else.”
at Kiss Me on Tulips wrote of visiting a farm in Puglia—the part of southern Italy where my husband and I are buying land—where the farmers shared about how they cared for their olive trees.“We let the trees rest - we don't push them to the limit. We never use herbicides or pesticides. They usually produce olives every second year, and we pick them very gently. But if they don't - we take care of them, we trim them, and let them rest."
I wonder if we can treat ourselves and our need for rest as gently and kindly as this farmer does his olive trees.
Jamie McCallum, the author of Worked Over: How Round-The-Clock-Work Is Killing the American Dream, put it well in a recent article about overwork:
Statistics capture leisure as time, but what we call leisure is typically spent recovering from work in order to return back to work. And even aside from democratic norms, we need time for holidays or enjoying breaks or the great outdoors. You need space and real distance to actually ponder and consider your life. And if all you're doing is thinking about the job you just came from and preparing to go back to it the next day, you don't have time to do it.
McCallum is alluding to the idea that not having ample rest limits our capacity to be fully ourselves. Just as an olive tree cannot be fully an olive tree without its fallow time, we can not be fully human without ours.
In the Art of Lying Fallow,
writes:Bertrand Russell called it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips called it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman called it “loafing.” The Buddhist tradition describes it simply as presence. Whatever we may call it, amid a culture of filling the existential void with cultish productivity and an endless stream of dopamine-laced distractions, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to enact such states of being — states in which our inner voice becomes audible, the voice with which we sing the song of our lives.
Winter Is A Great Time To Be Less Productive
January can feel like the most challenging time of the year to say no to hustle culture. We are all supposed to be "hitting the ground running" and "crushing our goals." But this is just another made-up productivity tale.
writes:Despite all the current productive clucking about January 1 being a fresh start and clean slate, it's still an artificial start time that conflicts violently with our natural biorhythms and the cycles of Nature we're attuned to, whether we're aware of those cycles or not.
Maybe the dead of winter isn’t the ideal time to take on a new challenge or revamp life-long habits. Instead, we could see it as a time of resting, nesting, and hibernating. It's a prime opportunity to lie fallow. For those of us who can’t just clear our calendars and live like an olive tree, we can choose to do less. We can strip life down to the essentials and leave everything else for another season.
Or maybe just take a January pause.
says:For many years now, I've advocated for January to be an in-between month. Not a beginning time, but a rumination time. Extra room for ideas to marinate, to percolate. Remove the pressure for hitting the "start" button.
I’ll leave you with this from
’s essential book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times:Plants and animals don't fight the winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. The perform extra-ordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is the time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that's where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
[S]lowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential.
From the archives:
"American productivity fetish".
Oh, God. My first reaction to moving from America to Germany was sitting at the bottom of the shower stall in full panic because I had no identity other than that which I had created with my job. I was terrified slow learner. It took a long time before I opened myself up and embraced being human.
Kirsten, everything you write here - it's so real and true and so beautifully worded. The analogy with soil. The dolce far niente - I go to my very tiny house in Northern Italy and the first thing that happens is someone asks me over for a coffee or gives me a tomato. Your writing moves me so because it reflects everything I have experienced in 30 years but didn't have the courage to say for a long time for fear of offending those I love, still working hard and diligently for the American Dream.
I come back to your posts again and again, and am very grateful for them. Alla prossima.
I hear what you’re saying but people in their 20s 30s and 40s in many other countries are also building their careers but they still take time to rest and have long vacations. The reason they do this is that they live in a culture that values this and supports this. my ultimate point of my essay is that we need to reject the idea that rust is a luxury or some thing that we earn -- and stop accepting productivity culture as normal.