If You're Weary of Productivity Porn, You're in Excellent Company. Here's Why

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that the taskmasters aren't going away. The good news is that there is a rising tide of rebellion.

A good friend of mine posted a piece of an article on Linked In the other day which  focused on how every eighty years or thereabouts we go through some massive upheaval. There is a book behind that thinking, which has been pushed hard by Steve Bannon (which for my part immediately undermines its authority). Those who love to take vague ideas and bandy them about as gospel love this kind of book. As with so many of us, you can gather all kinds of facts and stats to prove a point, while selectively ignoring anything that doesn't. It's what we do.

What bothered me about the article, which I can't track down at the moment, was that the author focused almost exclusively on just how much more productive we will all be.

Oy. Okay.

The Great Altar of Productivity, if you will, at which too many of us worship, at terrible cost to our personal lives and happiness. The greatest insult to those of us working our butts off is that wages haven't kept up, except if you happen to be in the upper CEO echelons, even those where the CEOs have proven to be people unworthy of our admiration and most particularly not the kind of obscene money they are paid.

To that, let's look at the money:

From the article:

From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation).

A closer look at the trend lines reveals another important piece of information. After 1979, productivity grew at a significantly slower pace relative to previous decades. But because pay growth for typical workers decelerated even more markedly, a large wedge between productivity and pay emerged. The growing gap amid slowing productivity growth tells us that the same set of policies that suppressed pay growth for the vast majority of workers over the last 40 years were also associated with a slowdown in overall economic growth. In short, economic growth became both slower and more radically unequal.

Sound about right? Yep. We feel it. Those at the top want more more more more more, while the oligarchy acts as parasites, buying up all the real estate and water rights into perpetuity, ensuring that few can actually afford a decent home, and sucking more work out of more people for lower wages. I'm hardly the first or the last to write about this but I am trying to bundle some points together.

Let's start with the cancer at the top:

Some of those CEOs and leaders need to be jailed, not hailed. Exhibit #1: Boeing. Exhibit #2: Amazon. Exhibit #3: BP (can anyone say Deepwater Horizon disaster?) How much do I need to go on here? These uber-rich, morally-incompetent, shareholder-worshipping subhumans who care nothing about people and everything about profit and the size of the next ten yachts for their fleets?

The Jack Welch School of mis-Management spat out a great many managers, a goodly number of whom went on to ruin otherwise well-run companies. For example:

From that article:

Every attempt to divine how Boeing’s culture went from exemplary to execrable tends to lead to a man who never laid his hands on Boeing, Jack Welch, the infamously bottom-line hatchet man, known as “Neutron Jack” for his ability to vaporize thousands of jobs at General Electric while its CEO from 1981 to 2001 before leaving with a $417 million exit payment. His leadership style, once hailed as a master class in squeezing as much money as possible out of any business, became posthumously toxic. Nonetheless, managers schooled by Welch fanned out to work their magic at other companies deemed in need of it.

Magic indeed. For whom, pray tell?

GE's awful tumble after Welch gutted what used to be on of the America's great blue chip corporations should have been a stark lesson in what was to come. But no, we lionized the leaders who sucked the life out of innovation, and a great many people paid with their careers. And, sadly, their lives.

But that's a side show. Let's go back to a quote from the EPI article above:

The growing wedge between productivity and typical workers’ pay is income going everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers. If it didn’t end up in paychecks of typical workers, where did all the income growth implied by the rising productivity line go? Two places, basically. It went into the salaries of highly paid corporate and professional employees. And it went into higher profits (i.e., toward returns to shareholders and other wealth owners). This concentration of wage income at the top (growing wage inequality) and the shift of income from labor overall and toward capital owners (the loss in labor’s share of income) are two of the key drivers of economic inequality overall since the late 1970s. (author bolded)

This is the one-two punch into the face of American workers, driven by the almighty profit, and pushing productivity at all costs, especially the cost of any kind of life. Or customer safety, see list above.

If you are unlucky enough to be female, and worse, Brown or Black and female, especially older, your earnings lag even more, especially as you may well be a single mom and head of household with kids, if not also grandkids, to feed, clothe and educate. To say nothing of how our educators are being paid less and doing more parenting, because the parents are out there being productive.

The American dream is that if you work hard you get the benefit. This is a lie. Better writers than I have called this out regularly. I know way too many folks who have put in eighty to ninety-hour work weeks and who still can't afford what the so-called Dream dangles in front of us. As a nation we've slid backwards rapidly while still spouting the benefits of life-killing productivity.

Benefits? Where? Name one, other than to the upper echelons.

There is no dream, if toxic productivity is the path to said dream. Ahead lies only more of a nightmare. Those selling productivity are people making money off our skewed belief that productivity pays off. We're paying them for tips that simply make us more miserable because those tips don't work for exhausted, over-burdened, overworked and underappreciated workers. We're too tired to try harder.

So to that, and because I like to curate relevant articles to save you some time, here is a selection of pieces that I've found which are getting in the face of that appalling lie of "just work hard, " or the idiot's bible, "Think and Grow Rich."As a Boomer, that was as much my generation's mantra as it was my parents', whose generation was gifted with the Great Depression.

Productivity porn kills. It has to change, because little trickles to us from our extreme efforts. To that then:

From her article:

A skilled machinist, talking to Shaiken in 1985, said the experience of operating a computerized machine tool made him feel like a “rat in a cage.” Another worker, tasked with operating a robotic welding system, said “You don’t have time to light a cigarette. I’d take my old job hand welding any day.” An employee forced to monitor a numerical control (NC) system, said “I’m a worker, not a sitter. I like to be kept busy. My day goes by faster, my mind is more active. You get a little weak-minded on the NC.”

Fans of the movie and the book Seabiscuit might recall that the introduction about Ford's Model T was that the innovation was the assembly line, not the car. In a heartbeat, seamstresses became button sewers, the narrator intoned, and creativity died overnight. And with the assembly line also came the urge to make tons and tons and TONS of stupid junk and bad food which have eaten up the rest of the planet with great voraciousness for what? Accumulating stuff that we don't have time to play with because, productivity? Ultra-processed food that is also killing us even faster than productivity porn?

Then there's this from my buddy Yael, over at Medium.com, a personal statement of freedom which I have myself echoed:

She writes for so many of us:

I realized, as silly as this might sound, that I had PTSD from my last job.

I’ve always worked extremely hard for very little money. That tends to be a trend with people who have spent any time in education, which is where I worked for most of my life as a highly trained, but extremely low-paid teacher. The expectation for long hours and cutting-edge expertise in exchange for wages that barely pay the bills is so normalized in that industry that those who work in it don’t often think about it. We just focus on what we love — the kids.

So it wasn’t that big of a leap for me to do the same when I started working at a nonprofit. I tried to focus on the kids, and not the fact that I was being run into the ground. Once again, that mentality of working until your fingers bleed (symbolically speaking, in my case) was normalized. And in fact, if you didn’t comply, you were criticized and shamed. (author bolded)

Yael's journey is much like mine, in that the deep compulsion to work for a non- existent hero button was killing her. Killing all of us. It's a suicidal culture, she points out. She's right.

Don't think so? Here's a rather vivid example.

This is a public comment from Matthew Linden on Linked In:

Early on in my career, I asked an HR manager during a phone screen what hours their employees typically worked.

The HR Manager said, "This is a very ambitious team and a very high-performing company."

I knew that phrase. I thought I knew what it meant.

I had watched my mom work like crazy all my life as she rose to Vice President at a prominent consulting firm and raked in 7-figure salaries. She took conference calls from our family vacations, which were elaborate and expensive. She got up at 4am to fly to San Francisco for meetings and then flew back that same night. She drove a BMW and wore designer clothes from the best brands. When I flew home from college during breaks, she would have a Lincoln towncar sent to pick me up at the airport because she was too busy at work to do it herself.

She was a "high-performer." And as a result, money and adoration absolutely oozed from every corner of our lives. Mom was like Madonna in our city - she knew everyone who was anyone and everyone knew her. "Your mom is just so amazing," people would tell us.

I wanted to be just like her. High-performing.

What I couldn't see at the time was that she was driven by the need to prove she had value - both to others and to herself.

In 2012 mom suffered what is known as a transient global amnesia - her brain short-circuited and basically shut down, then rebooted. Except when she came back she wasn't the same. She couldn't remember conversations we had had just minutes ago. She started getting lost in her high-rise condo building.

She never fully came back. Instead, she got worse.

As COVID ravaged the world in 2021, we finally had to commit mom to a full-time memory care facility. She is diagnosed with early-onset dementia caused by aggressive Alzheimer's.

Mom cannot bathe herself or go to the bathroom by herself. She often hallucinates that there are people in the room that aren't there. She sometimes gets paranoid that the nursing staff are trying to kill her.

She is only 62 years old.

She is locked in a prison in her own mind, and we are all left to watch her, helpless. We can't repair past wounds or hurts, can't rebuild relationships. It is too late.

Mom is still here, but she's already gone.

And for all the "high-performing" earnings, all those 7-figure salaries, all those glowing reviews from her management, her extravagant lifestyle of living up to others' expectations meant that she had barely anything left for us to pay for her care.

When I finally rose to a level in my career she would have been proud of, she couldn't see it or experience it.

A wise and very, very rich ancient Middle Eastern king once said: "Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind."

It took a global pandemic and losing my mom for me to finally understand what he meant.

We all want to be someone important. We all want the nice car, the nice house, the good life. We all want to be "high-performers."

Choose wisely.

Still think you really wanna read all those idiot life hacker folks who tell us to squeeze yet one more drop of "do" before the dew settles onto our corpses? Kindly see this:

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-overcome-productivity-dysmorphia-1848424796?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The author points out with alarming accuracy how productivity is just one more obsessive-compulsive disorder, and calls it, quite rightly, dysmorphia, when we cannot see that we have bloody well DONE ENOUGH.  Lindsey explains how, and I've been there, just as with no matter how thin we are we still see fat, in the same way the toxicity of our productivity porn bleeds over like evil acid into every single aspect of our lives. This is, to me, part of what Yael was addressing.

Affected me, too.

I thought that if I just achieved enough, produced enough, was busy enough, the monsters would stop showing up at my door. They didn't. They got worse. No matter how high I went, how much I did, it was never ever enough.

Taskmasters simply move the bar higher. If you could do that on fumes, do THIS on even less. And by the way, accept fewer benefits along the way.

I call bullshit. Yael called bullshit. Lots of us calling bullshit on the productivity hacks and parasites who feed on our productivity dysmorphia in precisely the same way, lemme say that again, PRECISELY THE SAME WAY, that the diet and exercise industry feeds on our misery about our bodies. Which we abuse by stress eating, because we are so frazzled by life, which is caused in part by this emphasis on squeezing that much more out of us.

There is no question that the Great Resignation is part of the switch-flipping not only by Millennials and Zers.  They are joined by those of us much older who also see where we traded our lives for benefits that never appeared, our health for a life that would never show up, and our time for pay that never improved.

We really are in the middle of a reckoning. It's messy, but change always is.  For some it's too late, and we have to make do with the time we have left to us. Others are caught right in the jaws of that change, and are fighting not only for their survival but the right to have a real life not driven by a bullwhip called DO MORE WITH VASTLY LESS. Others will benefit from what the resigners are forcing right now.

Something has to die before something new can be born. In this case it's a way of thinking and being, not a generation. All but a few suffered from the idiot productivity cult that is American business.

Change can be painful. However I can hardly think of anything more painful than tolerating the suicidal culture that is already killing us off, and not slowly.

As the Linked In commenter said, Choose wisely.