The Good Read: Why do we worship at the altar of productivity?
Friends, based on your feedback, I’m trying shorter, more frequent posts. This is a follow up to this week’s post on autumn’s wisdom of letting go — e.g., of our unhealthy late-stage capitalism work culture that over-couples work with our worth! If you didn’t catch it, you can read it here. Much love, M.
Mailbag: “How do we break this cycle?”
This week’s post prompted reader K. from LA to write,
“I want to heal from burnout, but I never feel like I can rest because I’m always thinking: ‘What’s next?’ American work culture is broken — we’re perpetuating perpetual motion. How do we break out of this cycle?”
My answer? It helps to look at why we don’t feel like we can rest as a starting point. And that’s what this week’s Reading & Watch List explores…
Melissa’s Reading & Watch List
Work as identity, Burnout as lifestyle
This was a *fantastic* exploration of “what happens when work becomes an identity, capitalism becomes a religion, and productivity becomes the way we measure human value?”
TL;DR: It’s a dialogue between the authors of 2 viral essays:
Derek Thompson of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable (The Atlantic, 13 min)
His core idea?
Work has morphed into a religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver. …because a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.
His suggestion? Reframe work to make it less central:
On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time.
And Anne Helen Petersen who wrote How Millennials became the Burnout Generation (BuzzFeed, 34 min) — one of the best pieces of explanatory journalism I’ve read in a long time.
Her main idea?
“Risk management used to be a business practice. Now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.”
Millennials were honed into machines of self-optimization in an age of precariousness:
“Efficiency was supposed to give us more job security, more pay, perhaps even more leisure. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated …the dominant millennial condition: burnout.
Her suggestion?
Individual action isn’t enough. …[We] need paradigm-shifting change.
I don’t have a plan of action, other than to be more honest with myself about what I am and am not doing and why…. This isn’t a task to complete... It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it.
Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work.
PS, As an example of this, she’s written insightfully about “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”:
It’s a symptom of workism and the burnout that accompanies it... it’s also what our souls do when we refuse to nourish them. They sabotage our most perfect intentions for sleep, because sleep is not the same as leisure.
Mic drop!
What’s making me laugh?
Nic & Tac sum up the daily impact of late stage capitalism in 9 seconds (TikTok)
And in case you missed it…
A piece I wrote last winter on how we already have the creative seeds of genuine social renewal in us.
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