maybe we were better off as primordial goo
trying to release myself from the chokehold of productivity & optimization culture--thinking about their chokehold on how we work and live.
CW: Explicit descriptions of factory farming and industrial animal husbandry.
Dear friend—
Is it any surprise to any of y’all that I’m a Disney kid?
It was an absolute privilege to visit Walt Disney World as many times as I did when I was younger, but I bring it up to tell you that on one trip, the prized souvenir I returned home with (at around age 8) was a planner. It was Tinker-bell themed, ring-bound, huge, and came with stickers. I freaking loved it.
Growing up through middle and high school, I always had immaculate planners. I color-coded for my classes and added all my extracurriculars and itemized every single homework assignment. I was breaking it all down into subtasks before I knew the word “subtask.”
In college, I found bullet journalling, which combines planning and journaling and sometimes art, but at its core is just a big running to-do list. Two facing bullet journal pages with a single purpose is called a “spread.” There are weekly spreads, monthly spreads, yearly spreads, expense-tracking spreads, book-tracking spreads, movies-to-watch spreads, meal planning spreads, etc. etc., ad infinitum.
And then, in graduate school, I discovered second-brain softwares. The idea behind second brain systems is essentially note-taking: how to note-take as an adult who wants to remember things you learn and perhaps use them later (in, say, a blog post like this one). There’s Notion, Joplin, OneNote, Roam Research, Obsidian, Mem, Evernote, etc. etc., ad infinitum.
All this to say, a lot of my brain space is taken up by not only reading and writing, but by planning and tracking and thinking about how I read and write.
This is guided by the twin anxieties that (1) I’ll forget something that may be useful down the line, and (2) that I’m using my time on this earth unwisely.
There are so many things to read and watch and listen to right now. How do I make sure that of what I can grasp, I’m grasping thoroughly and in ways that allow me to reference and remember it?
And those two anxieties in turn are guided by productivity culture, which I will say is bound up with quantification culture, which in turn compels us to count and note and create graphs of everything we do (see: habit trackers, fitness trackers, time trackers, etc., ad infinitum).
This is a rarefied experience. “Productivity” as an individual pursuit seems relevant to a small sliver of the human population: Type A knowledge workers and creatives who perhaps have too much time on their hands. Or harried Type A knowledge workers and creatives who feel constantly rushed or stressed and are desperately searching for the system or tool that allows them some peace.
I’m thinking about all this for several reasons. For one, because of a tweet thread from writer Brandon Taylor:
“Something I find funny is watching people who would otherwise identify as secular try to fix the issues of arid secular life by borrowing from theology but then try to sell it to other people as a way to live a meaningful life. 💀… I spend a lot of time watching Productivity YouTube and it is so funny watching them slowly reinvent parochial school.”
I agree—productivity culture feels like the latest installment of the religious/spiritual/philosophical quest for a “good life,” one full of study and contemplation, order and peace. The kind of life that, in a certain imagination, seems most at home amongst monks and abbeys, meditation and dinner bells and uniform brown robes (I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the minimalists on YouTube have their own uniform of plain neutral t-shirt and jeans).
As society becomes increasingly secular, it feels like a certain corner of the internet is rediscovering the value of ritual and simplicity, the sort that has been preached for millennia in nearly every religion; the call to detach yourself from the sins of the material world and return to some higher power that can grant you more fulfillment.
In previous times, that was the Christian God or Allah, or trying to deliver yourself from the cycle of Samsara into the bliss of Nirvana. In productivity culture, that higher power is the well-organized, ritualistic, productive life, based in consuming and creating as much or as intentionally as you can (reading writing watching filming singing listening etc., ad nauseam, ad infinitum).
I don’t think this is inherently a bad thing. But I think I, at least, risk missing the forest for the trees. Especially when the how becomes more important than the what or the why.
I think productivity culture as I see it now (commodified, the stuff of YouTube videos and blog posts on Medium) risks losing what is most meaningful about creative or “intellectual” work. Perhaps the brightest joys in that work can’t, shouldn’t be tabulated, classified, drawn so close to the chest in tables/charts/databases.
I’ve written about this before, but I suffer from the ailment of counting the books I read. And sometimes it feels like I love the look of my book repository on Notion, all the notes I’ve taken and the lovely grid of book covers, as much as I love the books themselves. I’ve taken it on as part of my identity, in the way that the physical shelves of a personal library can be part of your identity.
That’s part of Brandon Taylor’s point, too—that these productivity practices, like curating your bookshelf or morning routine or bullet journal, have become a part of our identity signifiers in the same ways religious symbols and rituals once were.
Of course, nowadays, my peers and I are reading for school, reading online, reading library books, can’t be arsed to keep books around because they’re a terror to move every year when the lease is up—God knows my bookshelf at the moment is a curious mishmash that I wouldn’t dare define myself by. Anyway. I digress.
At its best, productivity culture encourages focus, intentionality, a healthier relationship to work and life. At its worst, it is simply a vehicle for optimization (getting more done, in better ways).
There are a few ways I feel I’ve tried to optimize my relationship to reading, even unintentional. For one, I always have a book on me, because I have an e-reading app. I can fit reading into all the little empty corners and crevices of my life, with a few swipes on my screen.
But sometimes I think this mode of reading is worse for me. I remember less because, chances are, I am reading while counting down to the event I am waiting for, or I am reading in a crowded space where my concentration is shot.
In trying to optimize my reading practice in this way, I am perhaps worsening it—or missing the whole point of picking up a book in the first place. But I do it anyway, because I want to finish the book and get on to the next one.
This next step, optimization culture, comes from a scarcity mindset that I don’t think is particularly healthy, especially for things or people that don’t actually face a scarcity problem. Moreover, scarcity mindsets are inherently future-focused. You cannot enjoy the thing you have in the present because you are always worried about how you will get a similar thing in the future.
This strikes me as inherently uncharitable to anything you are working on or contemplating at the moment, whether that be a household chore or a great work of art. On a personal level, I worry about how optimization culture is affecting the way that I bear witness to art and knowledge and how I live my life.
Moreover, it seems to me that optimization culture is about infinite improvement. Every improvement is soon replaced by the pursuit of the next improvement, the next efficiency.
Ironically, rather than deliver its adherents to some higher bliss, it keeps them in the constant cycle of striving, the goalposts moving ever further and further away. E.g., we read books faster, and yet more books spring up for us to read ever faster.
Now, zooming out: while the current wave of productivity and optimization culture seems confined to internet creatives and knowledge workers, it is a symptom of a wider mode that runs our whole economy. Optimization culture is indicative of the way we produce and use and consume things, which has dire material effects on the planet and on ourselves.
In an essay in Blockchain Chicken Farm, Xiaowei Wang explores China’s pork industry, one of the largest in the world.
The demand for China’s pork is rising, and technology companies are stepping in to help farmers meet that demand. They’re offering new tools to make production more efficient; for example, artificial intelligence that recommends improvements on how pigs are raised.
Modern industrial agriculture, especially in the United States, is already highly optimized. Much science has been devoted to getting feed recipes perfectly balanced between cheap and fattening; to optimizing the amount of antibiotics fed to ensure animals don’t get sick, while keeping costs down; to packing pens with so many hogs that not a single square inch is wasted—but they can’t be packed too tightly, as claustrophobic, stressed piglets bite each other’s tails off, risking infection.
Over the decades, industrialized animal husbandry has devoted a lot of study to find and hit a “goldilocks” spot across dozens of factors (of course, “goldilocks” for money-making, not for the animals).
But optimization has unintended consequences. As Wang finds, the industrial swill that is so cheap and fattening for pigs became a vector for swine flu, which tore through China’s pork industry before the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the same time, the liberal use of antibiotics—while keeping sickness at bay in the short-term—is propelling us toward a future of antibiotic resistance in which an evolved superbug could come for us all.
And right now, we are facing a similar problem with soaring egg prices. Prices are rising because of crunched supply, and the supply has crunched because growers are killing millions of birds to try and contain avian influenza.
Conventionally raised chickens—those on factory farms—are packed so tightly together that disease spreads like wildfire. Moreover, they are so genetically similar (all bred to live in X conditions and lay Y amount of eggs of Z quality) that a strain of disease that kills one bird will almost surely kill every one of the flock.
Some argue that we only have our current level of quality of life because of optimization. Industrialized production has made protein cheaper and more accessible; it has allowed more people than ever to access potable water and internet and life-saving drugs; it has allowed us to build houses at unprecedented rates.
But there are two strains of thought that I have (wholly unoriginal and cobbled together from various readings and listenings over the years) in response to this line of thinking:
THOUGHT #1
Perhaps optimization is something that should be used more thoughtfully, intentionally. Yes, it is good that we can feed more people and provide more people with medicine. But maybe we don’t need to optimize for two-day shipping so that well-off folks can receive their knick knacks and gadgets faster? Perhaps we don’t need to optimize the manufacturing of trendy furniture and consumer electronics and the planet’s thirty billionth polyester cardigan?
Perhaps, contrary to what some economists might have us believe, it is not justice to work toward a world where everyone can purchase an iPhone? I say this as a person who indeed owns an iPhone and whose life is made much easier by said iPhone; I say this as a person who has benefited greatly from all the optimization that came before me.
But I am still moving in this direction—Perhaps our (Eurocentric, Global North, high-income country, industrialized) ideas about quality of life are deeply skewed, and there are other ways of conceiving value and bettering society?
THOUGHT #2
When do we know when to stop? When does it stop being worth it? And perhaps we will not know until it’s too late. From bird flu to climate change, our drive for optimization, efficiency, wringing more and more from less — it’s all great until it’s not. Until it invites some great natural force to smack us down and remind humanity of its place, and suddenly we are all in another pandemic or drowning in forest fires.
Because optimization is an inherently hubristic act. As Wang writes:
The hubris of optimizing life assumes levers of control: you can optimize for something if you think you know the outcome, if you’ve convinced yourself that you have managed to quantify all the variables. But in an uncertain, irrational world, nothing is guaranteed.
Optimization depends on predicting all variables and controlling those variables. And control is one of the many things in life that I’m finding is all about balance.
There are things that we should absolutely have control over. There are many instances in which control is a privilege, wielded by the few at the detriment of the many. There are many instances in which people need more control—over their individual fates/choices as well as collective fates/choices—if we are to have a more just world.
But optimization culture on its own doesn’t consider the advantages and disadvantages of control in different contexts. It demands more tabulation, more quantification, more record-keeping, in order to give us more control—control over our thoughts, our time, our activities, manufacturing processes, the economy, other living things, the planet.
And then optimization culture compels us to use all that we control to wring more and more and more from less and less and less—without considering, what do we need more for?
Thanks for reading, chat soon,
—mia xx
Some v. super cool writing that drove me toward this post:
The Rise of the Tabulated Self, by Sophie Haigney for The Cut