Why Our Obsession with Productivity Is Slowly Killing Us

Our optimise-and-be-productive culture is slowly killing us.

We’ve got high-profile podcasters, coaches, and authors taking about endless improvement. 

Improve by 1% every day, they tell us. Optimise your habits, your health, your work. Be productive! Try these life-hacks! Make every 15 minutes count!

Meanwhile, our chronic levels of stress are killing us: 840,000 deaths are attributed every year to overworking. We’re losing 45 million years of healthy human life every year due to overworking. And burnout’s a constant topic of conversation. Companies have even been built to sell us pills to solve our anxiety. As if taking a few supplements a week while still working 50+hours and putting optimisation on a pedestal will help us. 

But why is this rhetoric so damn pervasive? It’s a long, stinking hangover from the industrial revolution: set up a streamlined system and we can get more products made and make more money. 

Improve every day, and you can do more and be more. More. Because right here, right now, you and everything in your reality isn’t enough.

As if existence as it stands is never enough. As if this magical you — birthed from the universe, alive in a mysterious and miraculous way, finite and more wonderful for it — isn’t enough.

Let’s not forget that some of the best art, books, and inventions have been created from idleness. Agatha Christie wrote in the bath. Darwin napped constantly. And Bertrand Russell told us that it’s in leisure, not work, that humanity best expresses itself.

Despite this, we only rest when the work’s done (and it never is). We struggle to relax on expensive holidays. A mate of mine even got hate mail for his promotion of a 4-day work week.

It’s time to stop prioritising productivity and optimisation and to ask how we can prioritise rest and idle time instead. Nothing to improve, nothing to make count, just the art of being human. 

Let’s read novels. Play music. Go for long, rambling walks. Let’s never underestimate the power of our downtime for solving problems, creating brilliance, and healing our wounds.

Rest — not spreadsheet-perfecting, not eating while we work, not hustling to improve anything — is how we remember we’re alive.

---

Get my writing delivered straight to your inbox: