My good friend P is a trust-fund kid. That is to say, they inherited a bunch of money that they didn’t expressly desire, and as a consequence they never have to do any work for financial reasons. Let it be known that P does do work that is either for the greater good and/or they enjoy, has committed to giving all their moola away, almost exclusively wears clothing from thrift stores, purchases second-hand electronics, and, until recently, lived in their van. Granted, they have expensive tastes in vegan ice-cream, but they have always been generous in their redistribution of it, just as they are with their inherited wealth.
P imprinted a part of themselves on me once when I was speaking to them on the phone. I asked them how their week had been, and they described it as “productive”. Knowing that they don’t have a consistent 9-5 gig they can project some semblance of ‘productivity’ on with arbitrary metrics such as hours worked, code updates committed or reports written, I enquired as to what ‘productive’ meant for them. They went on to describe multiple occasions of quality time they had enjoyed with people the love. Huh. I had never attributed the word ‘productive’ to play-time, quality-time, happy-time. That was not the meaning I learned from context, but I will gayly update this definition. One of the secondary messages of George Orwell’s 1984 is that constraining our internal language constrains the thoughts we can think. Conversely, by expanding our language, we can liberate our minds.
So I build up, from scratch, what ‘productive’ means to me.
Productivity is quality time: giving my undivided attention to people I love.
Productivity is mastery: getting lost in the practise of a skill that interests me, like coding or guitar.
Productivity is intensity: touching the apex of pleasure and pain through running or intimacy.
Productivity is play: freely fooling around in a silly and shameless fashion by playing the comedian or ‘that crazy friend’ (one doesn’t need to be inebriated to achieve this status – as the silly and sober friend I am testament to this).
How do you define productivity?
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