When reflecting on spring break, don't fall victim to productivity fetish
[The Pitt News, Mar. 19, 2013]
If you have yet to complete your academic to-do list from spring break, don’t beat yourself up: Distraction can be a beautiful thing.
Everyone from parents to college counselors to our pesky consciences tell us that if we just stay faithful to our personal deadlines, all measures of success and happiness would be achieved. If only we were able to focus more on productivity, we could better pull our dreams into reality.
A subject of adulation by Western society since the great constructions of ancient Rome, productivity has numerous virtues — though they are not all-encompassing. Let’s be clear: Industrial production begets wealth, experimentation begets scientific advancement and essay writing begets college degrees. Without people consciously acting upon the world, we wouldn’t have a history or a future.
So yes, assignment completion in college may correlate to income, power and status later in life. But this is no cause to kick oneself with the arrival of any sign of slowing on the prosperous path, to cry over time “wasted” during mid-semester breaks. For those who think this way, remember not to elevate productivity too far, to place it on a false pedestal. Glamorization of productivity alone indicates blindness of the human condition, and a greater distance from personal happiness.
As human beings, our behavior stems from the balance of two opposing, yet overlapping, psychosocial forces: A will to act upon the world and a will to experience it. The productive will writes essays, starts businesses and conquers enemies; the experiential will tours Italy, bar-hops with friends and peruses Facebook. The productive will is focused and committed, motivated by money, glory, ego, guilt or survival; the experiential will is undifferentiated, motivated by sensual, intellectual or interpersonal pleasures. To get a better sense of this division, think of how it’s dealt with proverbially: work and play, business and pleasure, school and friends.
Everyone trends toward a different balance of wills along a moving spectrum; you could imagine the Type ‘A’s nearing the hyper-productive end and the Type ‘B’s the hyper-experiential end. Even within each person, the balance can change — consider how coming of age could slowly reduce the likelihood of pleasure-reading, or how Adderall-popping could quickly boost the likelihood of staring at class notes.
But for these productive and experiential wills, their inconstancy of degree belies their constancy of presence. Together, both wills constitute the cross-stitches of our humanity. Thus, we cannot completely exterminate one or the other, nor should we try.
One reason is our lack of control: The urges of productivity and experience pass our attention back and forth between them, forever and without our consultation. Choose to seclude yourself for a week to write a thesis, and invariably you find yourself dawdling on Facebook. Choose to relax and watch Netflix for that week instead, and soon enough you’re worrying about how “Breaking Bad” will enhance your competitiveness for grad school. You know when this happens — merely penciling “project” into a calendar doesn’t guarantee that thoughts of your friends won’t capture your attention at that time, just as thoughts of your project could interfere with a social gathering.
One will might take from another, but it gives more than it takes. Extollers of productivity rarely consider the total interdependence at work. Remove the productive or the experiential will, and you get some form of death — either a world without food, shelter or art, or a world in which those things receive no appreciation.
It goes beyond interdependence to mutual enhancement, whatever balance-of-wills you might have. The line from productivity to experience is clear — others’ productions serve as excellent fodder for the experiential will (e.g. the iconic conversation between friends relating Hogwarts to the Cathedral of Learning). The other way around is just as important but often undervalued: The experiential will provides the productive will with perspective and robustness.
In favor of focused industry, people often discount the goal-undirected nature of purely experiential tasks: When we laugh with friends or explore a local creek, we don’t craft our words or steps according to some grand plan. Instead, we let our experiences take us where they please.
Far from a weakness, this freedom from commitment is the experiential will’s greatest asset, because it reduces the inherent fragility of productive exercises. Productivity requires commitment of time, effort and reputation toward a certain goal, and therefore suffers heavily from risk. It’s all too easy to choose the wrong thesis, the wrong project manager or the wrong academic major (think of the fickle job market). And trying to solve this problem with more productivity won’t help: Commitment toward any productive exercise implies biases of attention and confirmation, which together blind productivity from its own flaws.
Wedded to no plan, the experiential will skirts these obstacles. To explore the world for its own pleasure is to let in information — often transformative information — that productivity alone couldn’t gather. Consider the difference between chasing answers to a scavenger hunt through a museum and meandering from exhibit to exhibit, stopping at whatever catches the eye. The former wins you the game, perhaps, but the latter teaches you how to improve it for future players.
This synergistic interdependence between the focused product and the unfocused experience echoes the liberal-arts ideal: Specialization plus broad exposure symbiotically enrich the educated mind. The benefits for a computer-science student of a pleasurable brush with English literature may not surface immediately or measurably, but they will surface.
The productive and experiential wills both, in different ways, prove essential to growth as a human being. These incommensurable benefits ensure the impossibility of ranking one balance over another.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from trying. So if you find yourself biting your teeth at incoming deadlines, cursing the time you stayed away from productivity during the break, remember this: You might have saved yourself just as much “distraction” as you created.
Write Matt at [email protected].
If you have yet to complete your academic to-do list from spring break, don’t beat yourself up: Distraction can be a beautiful thing.
Everyone from parents to college counselors to our pesky consciences tell us that if we just stay faithful to our personal deadlines, all measures of success and happiness would be achieved. If only we were able to focus more on productivity, we could better pull our dreams into reality.
A subject of adulation by Western society since the great constructions of ancient Rome, productivity has numerous virtues — though they are not all-encompassing. Let’s be clear: Industrial production begets wealth, experimentation begets scientific advancement and essay writing begets college degrees. Without people consciously acting upon the world, we wouldn’t have a history or a future.
So yes, assignment completion in college may correlate to income, power and status later in life. But this is no cause to kick oneself with the arrival of any sign of slowing on the prosperous path, to cry over time “wasted” during mid-semester breaks. For those who think this way, remember not to elevate productivity too far, to place it on a false pedestal. Glamorization of productivity alone indicates blindness of the human condition, and a greater distance from personal happiness.
As human beings, our behavior stems from the balance of two opposing, yet overlapping, psychosocial forces: A will to act upon the world and a will to experience it. The productive will writes essays, starts businesses and conquers enemies; the experiential will tours Italy, bar-hops with friends and peruses Facebook. The productive will is focused and committed, motivated by money, glory, ego, guilt or survival; the experiential will is undifferentiated, motivated by sensual, intellectual or interpersonal pleasures. To get a better sense of this division, think of how it’s dealt with proverbially: work and play, business and pleasure, school and friends.
Everyone trends toward a different balance of wills along a moving spectrum; you could imagine the Type ‘A’s nearing the hyper-productive end and the Type ‘B’s the hyper-experiential end. Even within each person, the balance can change — consider how coming of age could slowly reduce the likelihood of pleasure-reading, or how Adderall-popping could quickly boost the likelihood of staring at class notes.
But for these productive and experiential wills, their inconstancy of degree belies their constancy of presence. Together, both wills constitute the cross-stitches of our humanity. Thus, we cannot completely exterminate one or the other, nor should we try.
One reason is our lack of control: The urges of productivity and experience pass our attention back and forth between them, forever and without our consultation. Choose to seclude yourself for a week to write a thesis, and invariably you find yourself dawdling on Facebook. Choose to relax and watch Netflix for that week instead, and soon enough you’re worrying about how “Breaking Bad” will enhance your competitiveness for grad school. You know when this happens — merely penciling “project” into a calendar doesn’t guarantee that thoughts of your friends won’t capture your attention at that time, just as thoughts of your project could interfere with a social gathering.
One will might take from another, but it gives more than it takes. Extollers of productivity rarely consider the total interdependence at work. Remove the productive or the experiential will, and you get some form of death — either a world without food, shelter or art, or a world in which those things receive no appreciation.
It goes beyond interdependence to mutual enhancement, whatever balance-of-wills you might have. The line from productivity to experience is clear — others’ productions serve as excellent fodder for the experiential will (e.g. the iconic conversation between friends relating Hogwarts to the Cathedral of Learning). The other way around is just as important but often undervalued: The experiential will provides the productive will with perspective and robustness.
In favor of focused industry, people often discount the goal-undirected nature of purely experiential tasks: When we laugh with friends or explore a local creek, we don’t craft our words or steps according to some grand plan. Instead, we let our experiences take us where they please.
Far from a weakness, this freedom from commitment is the experiential will’s greatest asset, because it reduces the inherent fragility of productive exercises. Productivity requires commitment of time, effort and reputation toward a certain goal, and therefore suffers heavily from risk. It’s all too easy to choose the wrong thesis, the wrong project manager or the wrong academic major (think of the fickle job market). And trying to solve this problem with more productivity won’t help: Commitment toward any productive exercise implies biases of attention and confirmation, which together blind productivity from its own flaws.
Wedded to no plan, the experiential will skirts these obstacles. To explore the world for its own pleasure is to let in information — often transformative information — that productivity alone couldn’t gather. Consider the difference between chasing answers to a scavenger hunt through a museum and meandering from exhibit to exhibit, stopping at whatever catches the eye. The former wins you the game, perhaps, but the latter teaches you how to improve it for future players.
This synergistic interdependence between the focused product and the unfocused experience echoes the liberal-arts ideal: Specialization plus broad exposure symbiotically enrich the educated mind. The benefits for a computer-science student of a pleasurable brush with English literature may not surface immediately or measurably, but they will surface.
The productive and experiential wills both, in different ways, prove essential to growth as a human being. These incommensurable benefits ensure the impossibility of ranking one balance over another.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from trying. So if you find yourself biting your teeth at incoming deadlines, cursing the time you stayed away from productivity during the break, remember this: You might have saved yourself just as much “distraction” as you created.
Write Matt at [email protected].
