Productivity

 My sister has recently been telling me about the idea of the "laziness myth"—that is, the argument that, in the ultimate scheme of things, there is no such thing as "laziness"—and I think I'm starting to see the point. 

Now, admittedly, I have made my feelings plain on this blog before about the emergent cult of "doing nothing"—the new movement that seeks to bust what is known as "productivity culture"—as promulgated in New York Times op-eds and think pieces over the past two years, and as shared over a thousand Teams and Slack channels by colleagues whom one fears may have already taken its lessons too much to heart. 

To put it simply, I'm against it. And not just for knee-jerk cultural reactionary reasons (though these no doubt play a role)—but more seriously because it seems to be at odds with what we know about the psychology of human happiness, which consists—at least in part—in setting oneself achievable goals and meeting them on a daily basis; not just in lounging about and doing whatever one wants all the time. 

But as my sister explained more about what people mean by the "laziness myth," I started to see that perhaps—like most keenly-insisted-upon insights into the human condition—this one was not so much incorrect as a partial truth; and that my own reasons for opposing it were therefore no doubt only partial truths as well. So what could be got out of this idea and a good-faith effort to engage with it?

Well, one of the partial truths I put forward above was that happiness consists in part in setting and fulfilling achievable goals; and perhaps what the "laziness myth" idea is telling us is simply to put the emphasis in that sentence on the word achievable. As my sister sums up the insight: "Everyone is already doing about as well as they can." 

What, then, about the people who seem to be considerably more productive than the rest of us? The Mozarts or the Dorothy Richardsons or whoever? "Many of these people pay the price in health and wellbeing for working themselves so hard; and also a lot of what appears to be higher productivity is really just a reflection of prior privilege/advantage."

In other words, to extrapolate from that last insight, perhaps people who appear to work especially hard are really just doing things that are achievable for them; that come naturally to them; and therefore that do not require the same superhuman effort that we imagine it must have taken, when we think of trying to do the same things ourselves. 

I'm reminded of a scene in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, when the good-natured titular protagonist is talking to a friend in graduate studies in mathematics. Augie encounters him drunk and sacked-out on the evening before a major test. "Shouldn't you be studying?" Augie asks, or something to that effect. "Nah," says his friend; "either this stuff comes easily or it doesn't come at all." 

I was reminded too of one of the most helpful things a coworker ever said to me. I was complaining to her that a lot of what we know how to do best at our organization is undercounted and unappreciated, precisely because we already know how to do it. She agreed this was a problem. "I always say," she said, citing a book on "emergent strategy" I had not read: "If it's easy, it's sustainable."

This was a scales-falling-from-the-eyes moment for me. "If it's easy, it's sustainable!" How radical! How outrageous and unseemly! And yet how liberating!

All my life, I had been used to completing the thought "If it's easy..." with something like: "then it's not worth doing." But here was the suggestion that the exact opposite is the case. We should not in fact fear that what we are good at is not good enough; we should be seeking out what we are good at, what comes easily to us, and do more of it, because that is what is sustainable. 

Most of us go through life feeling insecure about what we are able to achieve (as Orwell once put it: "any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats"). This is because we always focus on what other people are good at; we notice that they can do so much more of it than we can; and we conclude from this that we must be lazy and unproductive by comparison. 

What we should be thinking is: "good for them for finding and doing a lot of the thing that they find easy; what is similarly easy for me, and how can I do more of it?" Instead of thinking: "why are they better than me at that?" we should ask: "what am I better at than them?" As J.G. Farrell writes in his novel The Siege of Krishnapur: "nobody is superior to anyone else, he only may be better at doing a specific thing."

This is the sense in which truly "everyone is already doing as well as they can." It's not that we literally can't do better. I don't think I'm accomplishing everything I could; I don't think my workplace is as productive as it ideally could be. But the idea that we need to mimic other people's successes, and that our failure to do so is attributable to "laziness," is indeed a "myth" and a hindrance to real productivity. 

Far from these invidious comparisons to others' achievements goading us to work harder and attain more, as we imagine they will be, they distract and derail us from time that could be spent on the things that come easily to us; and that we therefore can do well. 

I was thinking of this too during a recent conversation with a friend, who had been tested for attention-related disorders at some point in his early twenties. One thing the evaluation showed, he said, was that he appeared to have trouble taking in information from large chunks of print text, because whenever he was faced with reading matter in this format, he always had to create a visual representation of it to remember it. 

Seldom have I been confronted with a clearer example of something that has been presented by society as a deficiency, but is actually an asset. Because of course I don't have the kind of strong visual sense that would enable me to do what my friend does; I am not capable of representing ideas graphically and by free hand and almost instantaneously. What he saw in himself—and what others told him to see—as a reading disorder, strikes me as a cognitive gift. 

To be sure, I do think we all can stand to resist the allure of self-complacency; and in this sense, the attempt to pop the "productivity culture" bubble continues to strike me as unhelpful. But we can perhaps achieve more by doing that which is already easy, not attempting what is hard. 

Too many of us tend to pooh-pooh the easy. If we know how to do it, we treat it with contempt. We see it as not worth doing. 

We should remember, in place of this self-sabotaging idea, the ancient wisdom of Sun Tzu. True success, the master strategist observes, consists not just in winning, but in "winning with ease." (Giles translation). 

Take a minute to contemplate that one. The ancient general, whom one might have gone to expecting advice about undertaking uphill battles and facing incredibly hard fights, actually offers the opposite: only fight when you know already that you are going to win, he tells us; only undertake a battle when you have the clear advantage; don't just win, win with minimal effort. If it's hard, you're doing something wrong. 

This is the sense in which the myths of productivity culture really do need to be punctured. Real achievement, real winning, comes from what we already do best; and in a real sense therefore, we have already won. This is what it means when we say: "everyone is already doing as well as they can."

There is a profound self-acceptance implied in this that I confess does not come easily to me. I was reading Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums earlier this week, for instance, in order to get into the mindset for traveling and working remotely out west on my own for a few weeks, and I found its proto-Sixties emphasis on merely "being" to be a hard one to swallow. 

The book is full of the attitude to life that William James would characterize, half-contemptuously, as "healthy-minded religion," after all. "I accept the universe," as Margaret Fuller said, in the quintessential expression of what James had in mind; and so too we find Kerouac here summarizing his chief spiritual insight as: "Everything is alright forever and ever." 

It's hard not to see that as a kind of complacency. Shouldn't things be improved? Shouldn't I still improve? But, read at a more sophisticated level, what Kerouac is saying is in keeping with another Jamesian insight—one that, in James' telling, is fundamentally Lutheran in origin. In describing his experience of approximating nirvana, Kerouac says he suddenly realized that he "didn't have to do anything."

One is reminded of James' summation of Martin Luther's core theological insight: "You are saved already, if only you will believe it."

And this, too, is perhaps the truth within the "laziness myth" idea. You are already doing as well as you can. You have already achieved, already won, if you would but know it.