The productivity fraud

Welcome to the Matrix.

“What are you even doing with your life if you don’t have a podcast?”

“Oh, you do.”

“Does it feature a monologue on productivity hacks? Or a Naval clone saying loopy things that don’t make sense except if you think really hard?” 

“Oh, you have whiskey biceps. Great.”

“I am sorry to break it to you but the cool kids have all moved away to Miami now. You don’t qualify for the badge of honor if there’s anything less than a chat with the governor or someone who follows them on Twitter.  

Meanwhile, please consider selling notion templates and an e-book compiling your favorite Twitter threads on bubblegumroad.”

– – – – 

I am not enough

Let’s face it. We’ve all felt like absolute failures and waste of potential whenever we log into Twitter. Or watch a YouTube video that’s not a Ted Talk. 

There’s always someone telling you that most successful young people work their entire weekends. 

Or someone announcing the latest fund-raise for their startup that doesn’t exist beyond a notion document. 

Or someone doing that horrible thing called making threads. Read one article about fintech?

Must make a thread and provide an extremely generic perspective with random data to sound smart. 

– – – – 

Optimizing for imposter syndrome 

How did we get here? How did the goalposts for being cool move so fast that now everyone must be a CEO, an intellectual, networked, funny, rich, modest, have a day job, and a side-hustle involving podcasts or e-books at the same time to be considered functional? 

Yes, that’s the baseline. All of this only makes you seem functional.

To be considered useful, the benchmark is to have raised two rounds of funding and being followed by the who’s who of the ecosystem. We all know the names. Let’s not do that dance of ignorance (it’s unfashionable). 

The trouble actually begins very early into most of our lives. When we are told that the next step will fix everything. We’ve all been duped for almost 3 decades of our life with the promise of well-being and stability that never materialized. There’s enough blame to go around but the effect of this is that most of us now find our self-worth dropping faster than our net worth. 

Sometimes, they are even inversely related.

Why? Because of what I now call the not-enough spiral. Stay with me for a moment. 

You may have a decent job and a good number of people who care about you and hobbies that nurture you but are you doing enough? Do you have a Twitter following or 50+ certifications that you show off on LinkedIn like battle-scars? How are you not investing in cryptocurrency or writing blogs about what you think of Dogecoin?

From a society where stability and well-being were aspirational for most of us, we switched – as fast as our data packs – to a new paradigm where optimizing is a word that you can use in casual conversations with a friend. Hustle is a word that’s so popularly accepted and revered that no one even cares to point out that it used to mean fraud, swindling, and aggressive pushing once upon a time.

– – – – 

Of flywheels and spirals

Being ambitious and working hard to get there is not bad in itself. It’s an admirable trait that takes one closer to their dreams. However, things start going downhill when working hard becomes the dream. It’s a spiral that feeds into one’s insecurities and gives birth to problems like imposter syndrome, burnout, and guilt. 

A culture of working to the bone seems like progress but it’s the wrong kind of progress. 

If you are reading this, you are probably among the richest 1% of this country. And yet, the moment you go back to your social feeds - you’ll feel self-doubt creeping into your bones and making you second guess every single thing that’s going for you. 

There’s a mental health crisis in the making. But more importantly, it’s about to go undiagnosed because who’s got the time when you have 15 tweet threads to create about work-life balance. 

We’ve all read that Languishing piece in NY Times, opined about Zoom fatigue and created support groups for people burning out. Yet, we go back and subscribe to podcasts and hoard audiobooks on productivity. Everyone’s trying to be better.

Always be optimizing. 

– – – – 

Calling out the fraud 

And no one is immune. If you aren’t on Twitter (teach me how!), you will find it in dinner conversations with your friends who will boast about their latest promotion. You will find it on your Amazon recommendations when it tells you to build atomic habits or think fast and slow (preferably at the same time).

You will also find it at your workplace. If you work at a startup, you will spend nights fantasizing about building your own. If you work at a corporate, you will be surrounded by people distributing pamphlets on ‘bias for action’ or building agility. 

The productivity cycle needs to break. Think of the wheel from Game of Thrones.

Daenerys Targaryen : Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell: they're all just spokes on a wheel. This one's on top, then that one's on top, and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.

Tyrion Lannister : It's a beautiful dream, stopping the wheel. You're not the first person who's ever dreamt it.

Daenerys Targaryen : I'm not going to stop the wheel, I'm going to break the wheel.

As long as this intellectual fraud continues, we’ll keep lulling ourselves into a false stupor that is no more than a hallucination that you are on the right track. There’s no right track. No magic pill to make you an overnight success. If there is, certainly podcasts and side-hustles aren’t one of them. 

Those selling this snake oil are likely to be the already rich businessmen who benefit from selling the sauce of ‘passion’. It drives down the cost of operations by turning us all into dopamine-addled zombies. It also helps sell their books, their personal brand, and their companies’ stories when there’s an army of productivity warriors worshipping them. 

An entire ecosystem is being built around this. The productivity seance is their current PR strategy and a formidable career backup plan. Falling for it will make you either successfully miserable or miserably successful when you find an entire generation of clones standing next to you. 5 years from now, every single candidate at a job interview would have a substack, a side hustle, startup experience, and a personal branding pitch they think is clever and unique. 

If you think you will somehow miraculously find yourself at an advantage because your productivity spiel is better than the others, may I request you to go look at the failure rate of startups in this country and invite you to extrapolate your own chances of topping a category that already consists of the top 0.01% ‘hustlers’ of the country? 

You are not playing the game. The game is playing you. 

– – – – 

The trick mirror

This is not to say that we are all doomed. This is to say we are all lost. We have a chronic case of misplaced priorities and instead of upskilling, we are busy building a brand. Instead of using that money to build a life where you don’t need to work, we’re using that work to give us the appearance of life. Instead of adding real value to ourselves, we are now only concerned with how much value others think we add to their lives.

The answer is – not much. 

– – – – 

Keynes was not on Twitter

Keynes argued that technological progress offered the path to a bright future. In the long run, he said, humanity could solve the economic problem of scarcity and do away with the need to work in order to live. That, in turn, implied that we would be free to discard ‘all kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital’. 

- Aeon 

– – – – 

If we are all aiming to be dopamine-addled productivity warriors, we are succeeding. However, the last I checked, living meant much more than being sleep-deprived, self-flagellating, and spending inordinate amounts of time cold emailing to network with people we don’t really like.

It’s seductive to try and prescribe a one-size-fits-all cure for this situation. Wrap it up in numbers. Come up with a trite analogy and sell it as the next best-selling hot-take book. It’s definitely profitable. But, I am trying to break the wheel. 

The fraud has gone on for too long. 

– – – – 

@AZenGuy on Twitter