Embracing Peak Unproductivity

Sometimes you just have to lean into the lazy.

We’ve all been feeling it during this pandemic: the creeping malaise, the ennui, the increasing inability to apply ourselves to even the most basic of tasks with any regularity. Like showering. Anyone else? Maybe you, too, are at a point where you decide to eat another snack because it feels vaguely like getting something done. And you desperately need to get something done in order to feel normal and sane and like a worthy human being.

When regular routines have been lost and uncertainty is at an all-time high, this is what it feels like. It’s both anxiety-producing and boring at the same time. On TV, people caught in pandemics seem more vital, don’t they? They band together, use their ingenuity to secure their daily needs. There’s drama, excitement, danger. Think Walking Dead.

Once I went to see a battle reenactment, and it was eye-opening as to the real nature of war. Lots of sitting and waiting. Lots. That’s what real life is like. And that’s what this pandemic is like. We’re all just sitting around waiting for…something. What, we don’t even know. We’re trying to feel as normal as possible and keep up with routines of work and family, but we are failing. And now with things reopening across the country and the future somehow seeming even more uncertain, well…anyone else find themselves so exhausted by circumstances they just zone out completely?

Embrace it. Seriously. One, you can’t really do anything about it. Your brain and body are reacting this way because when there is intense uncertainty, it’s an evolutionary advantage to slow down and conserve energy. If you find yourself zoning out, it’s because that’s what you need to do right now. Trust the instinct, and trust yourself. Come on, you know you’re not a lazy person, even if you feel like one right now! Which brings us to point two: the reason you feel like a lazy worthless human being right now is because that’s what society wants you to feel. Productivity is the fuel that feeds the fires of capitalism and human progress, right? 

But does productivity feed your fire? Right now perhaps you feel like you’ve lost your vitality. But ask yourself this: what, exactly, was it about your former way of life that made you feel vital? Was it the busyness? The routines? Is making productivity a priority worth it if any time you falter, you feel terrible about yourself? Ask yourself: why are you doing all the things? To get them done, or because they sustain your spirit?

Lean into lazy. I mean it. This is an unprecedented time. Use it to experiment. Instead of trying to get something worthwhile done today or tomorrow, try getting nothing done except what you absolutely have to. And be ruthless about what is necessary. Feed the pets/kids/etc.? Sure. Vacuum up the pet hair that is now practically another pet? Nope. Or do what I do – scrape together the most visible piles with your hands and toss those. There, cleaning done! Then do what you feel like in the moment. Even if it’s just sitting there staring at a wall. Tell yourself that anything you do - anything - has value, it’s worthwhile.

Here’s the thing. Most of the standards we hold ourselves to are completely arbitrary. In fact, most of our standards are really just measurements we use to judge ourselves and others. Think about it. It’s not enough to just make money – how much money matters. It’s not enough to have a house to live in – how clean and well-appointed you keep it is the true measure of your home’s value and by extension your personal value. Giving up those standards, rejecting them, is extremely difficult. Because they are how we understand ourselves as worthy human beings – through judging ourselves on a scale of “how much.”

This is why we are struggling right now. The scale is unbalanced. It’s fallen off its fulcrum. It’s disorienting: this shit is hard! But it’s happening regardless of whether we want it to or not. And I think we all know that when this all ends, things won’t get back to normal. Things are changed forever. How can we be ready for this new world? By being open to examining our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and what life should look like. 

Years ago, on the eve of going abroad to live in China, I was given a little card that read “When nothing is sure, everything is possible” (attributed to M. Drabble). The saying has always made me uncomfortable, because it doesn’t make sense to me. How do you even know what is possible if nothing is sure? We all live within certain constraints; how can everything be possible? But there is something hopeful in the idea that we can remake ourselves, our lives, even if it’s only in small ways. 

What are your possibilities? What will you make out of this time of uncertainty?

How I Learned to Be Unproductive

Creating a spacious life.

Some personalities thrive on busy: time deadlines, packed schedules, multitasking, and to-do lists. You know the type – they’re always just so…well, busy. These are the people who live on the periphery of your life, because you rarely get to see them. They may complain about having so much they need to accomplish every day, but ultimately they have a life like that because they’ve invited that kind of busy into it. Many of the things they “need” to do could be postponed, delegated, or outright left undone.  

I do not have a personality that thrives on busy. Most creatives don’t, because art requires a lot of space around it in order to emerge into being. It’s not that creatives can’t learn to survive a busy life – we can grow adept at fitting creative work into small bits of time – but for many of us our natural preference is toward a slow life. A life that’s more open than closed, loose rather than tight. A life in which our meditative space (mine is long walks) isn’t spoiled by anxious thoughts of the next thing that needs to be done. A spacious life. 

If there is a silver lining to having a severe anxiety disorder, it’s that I become so easily overwhelmed by a packed schedule that I have no choice but to say no to things that “need” to get done. I began creating a spacious life out of necessity, because I was burned out to the point of being unable to do my primary creative and life-giving practice, writing. I whittled my life down to only what was absolutely required. I became a person who accomplished the bare minimum.

At first this felt horrible. My tiny daily accomplishments seemed worthless (I washed the dishes! I shopped for groceries! I paid a bill!). I was socialized to believe that only productive time has value. Think about it: is there any way to say that you did nothing all day that doesn’t sound negative? How do you communicate the value of your time to someone without listing all the things you did during it? It’s harder than you’d think. In the beginning this project of opening up my life caused its own brand of anxiety. I won’t lie – it could be miserable at times. But I felt in my gut that I was doing something important, and that it would eventually pay off.

Here’s what happened. Over time, all those bare minimum tasks began to expand to fill the space I had opened in my life. My little life-sustaining activities began to feel like sacred tasks, part of a daily generative act of living. And I became okay with long stretches of doing…nothing. Wasting time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do more with my time, it’s that during my recovery from burnout, I honestly wasn’t capable of much more. I had to be okay with that before I could move through that part of my healing.

In creating a more spacious life, there are significant sacrifices I’ve had to make along the way. I’ve had to reevaluate my feelings about money, for example, as I began to spend less time trying to chase it down. I learned that my best life is a slow life. The rhythm of a simplified, opened-up way of living allowed space for my creativity to reemerge. 

Eventually I was able start writing again. And through the process of creating a spacious life I realized something important. In order to be creative on a large scale I need to be able to experience the generative creativity of even the small, everyday tasks of my life. If I am only doing things to get them done, check them off a list, and prove my productivity, then I will bring that approach to my writing as well. If I keep focused on opening more space in my life, rather than filling it up with yet more busyness, I will prosper in my writing. Learning to live with slowness is more difficult than you’d think, as it goes against everything our culture outwardly values. It requires a willingness to live with the discomfort that comes from going against what our society explicitly condones as “right” choices. But for creatives like myself, it is essential to our well-being.