Productivity Has Become So Closely Tied to Self-Worth
The societal structure that we all are living under has been conditioned by corporations and has successfully coupled and connected peoples’ individual sense of self-worth and happiness to work, labor, or to doing in general.
This is why “productivity” and “optimization” are so highly valued and glorified in our society. We are conditioned to constantly do and work.
When Doing Nothing Starts to Feel Wrong
If we are not doing or working, we can pretty quickly start feeling inadequate, restless, sad, worthless, and like we’re not doing what we’ve accepted that we’re supposed to be doing. It is the experience of many people of feeling basically useless, empty, restless, and sad when they are idle and not doing anything in particular in the name of advancing their career or financial goals in the service of their “future success”.
The Trap of Becoming Your Own Productivity Police
This conditioning is ingrained into people so much so that they feel a strong urge to continue to do and to perform tasks – ideally for a corporation. This conditioning is not something that we are naturally born with; we were conditioned to be this way by the governing corporations, on purpose.
If we were conditioned this way on purpose, why and for what purpose?
It is set up this way so that we, as lower and middle-class citizens, feel a strong urge and obligation to work for corporations and companies indefinitely.
Why? It’s simple – because their success and maintaining their upper class status solely relies and depends on people performing meticulous and very often pretty monotonous tasks where meaning is often hard to find – for decades on end. Why? To keep these organizations thriving financially, their stocks high, and their CEOs rich.
“The Burnout Society” and the Internalized Demand to Perform
It is therefore imperative for the upper class to condition the entire working class this way so that each individual surely feels unbearably bad when they are not producing, performing, or doing tasks. Thus, citizens’ predicament is that they become strongly internally motivated to keep working for corporations because if they don’t – they start to feel mentally unwell. To quote Byung-Chul Han in his book The Burnout Society, people become both their own prisoner and their own prison guard by the hands of modern culture.
The Culture of “More”: Work More, Earn More, Consume More
Unfortunately, the predicament is that societal structures have also set it up so that its citizens’ survival as in terms of shelter, food, and the basics very much depends on performing such tasks, day in and day out.
“More” Never Seems to Be Enough
The working class are also bombarded with messages through media and advertising that they need more products and services of all kinds and that their wellbeing and happiness depends on consuming such products.
When Consumption Becomes Part of the Definition of Happiness
Whether it’s junk food (mostly junk food is advertised), the latest gadgets, fancy clothing, newest car models, unnecessary health products, legal drugs like alcohol, TV shows, or subscriptions, we are constantly fed the idea that we are lacking as we are, lacking in where we are in our lives, lacking in the level of our lifestyles, that we don’t have enough, and always need to be going after more in order to feel secure, fulfilled, and essentially – well.
From Childhood Onward, We Learn to Measure Ourselves
The conditioning started very early on for most people, which is why it seems so normal, ingrained, hard to understand, let go of, and see the truth about. We are conditioned and pressured since grade school to do, work, and are even then, at a very early age, subjected to evaluation through tests and exams.
Evaluation, achievement, focus on grades, performance, and tying all of this to one’s purpose, meaning, and worth is normalized early on. It is this way as part of the deliberate training to get young people to eventually work for corporations for their entire adult lives, performing duties that they were trained on and evaluating themselves continually to the highest standard for the primary purpose of the elite maintaining and securing their upper class status. People are taught to believe that being in this harsh conundrum is primarily for the benefit of their wellbeing, self-worth, and happiness as opposed to corporations’ finances and stocks.
“Imagine this – you’re a salesman at a corporate firm. You’ve just come off a 10-minute phone call with a client and closed a deal, making the company’s CEO 40 000 dollars. Personally, you’ve made a whopping 10 bucks in that time frame if you’re lucky to receive a senior company salary. Your manager calls you into his office to talk over the sale, which he praised but also sternly urged you to do even better. The feeling you get as you walk out of his office is that you’re expected to successfully close these kinds of deals again and again until you are 65. But next time – do it with more enthusiasm!”
Do You Really Need to Earn More to Live a Better Life?
Yes – you do need an income to survive and pay for shelter, food, and clothing. But – do you really need a massive annual salary that is beyond your fundamental needs doing something stressful that you would rather not do and be in an environment that you would rather not be in just so you can afford a “luxurious lifestyle” that basically consists of slightly better versions of things?
How Much Is Enough?
Or, can you settle for being frugal, minimalistic, adjust your spending habits, find more affordable shelter, get out of the consumerist mindset, and be able to work less hours or do work that you deeply resonate with and can actually see yourself doing, tolerating, or even enjoying for years?
Work Can Be Meaningful—Without Being Your Measure of Worth
Ideally, work is fun, exciting, interesting, and it actually should be that way. This is often only a possibility if the work is a natural expression of you and your natural talents, not something that you do to justify your self-worth or “gain happiness” through the finances the job provides. Aligned work is something you do because you’d rather be doing it over nothing, anyway; it’s something you naturally find fun, exciting, and interesting, often losing the sense of time while being immersed in the process – the “flow” state.
The Difference Between Meaningful Work and Productivity for Productivity’s Sake
If this type of inspired work aligns with a job description or a career for a typical corporation, that is great and is truly a rare blessing. All too often, however, corporations have people doing work and tasks that are anything but inspiring.
They’re usually monotonous, stressful, repetitive and robotic. There is often little agency over the work, not much fulfilling creativity is usually involved, and its fruits and results aren’t enjoyed by or even made known to the workers that produced them but by the higher up execs in the company.
Your Self-Worth Doesn’t Have to Depend on What You Do
So, if you are still evaluating your self-worth based on the parameters of productivity and “success” defined by culture, this is your call to reexamine such assumptions.
Learning to Be Without Constantly Doing
Your happiness and wellbeing don’t have to be dependent and outsourced to how well you perform labor, tasks, jobs, careers, and how much “success” you’ve accomplished or stuff you’ve accumulated. It’s possible to develop true inner contentedness, ease, and joy from within by simply being, practicing mindfulness and simplicity, and living a more contemplative and simpler lifestyle doing work that you can tolerate than the one you were told you’re better off doing.
When You Need Less, You Become Less Dependent on More
If you’re not reliant on as much material success for your happiness, your joys become simpler and less expensive, your needs decrease, your ability to be content increases, and this allows you to gradually downsize your expenses and move towards living a life without the conventional measuring stick of success and more that obligates you to work impossible hours at soulless jobs for decades.
“What Do You Do?”—Why We Judge Ourselves and Others by Status
The scary thing is that we are also conditioned to evaluate each other on productivity parameters to keep each other in line with society’s expectations. Have you ever met someone and one of the first things they ask you is – “So, what do you do?”
Subconsciously, based on your response, they are looking to decide based on that miniscule piece of information you provide about what they think is your identity whether they want to have any kind of relationship with you, or whether to deem you basically “not good enough” and shun you from their lives, and on a larger scale, from society itself.
The Pressure to Keep Playing “Life’s Game”
We are conditioned to compare, contrast, and judge each other’s social status and how well we all seem to be adjusted to this social structure so that we are motivated through our resulting perception of inadequacy and fear to keep participating in the competition of the illusory mental structure created by this society – “Life’s Game”.
Culture Sacrifices The Positive Aspects of Humanity
Through the parameters of what is considered “winning”, “losing”, and “success” by our society, we are subtly or often not so subtly encouraged to give way of our natural God-given human altruistic qualities and talents like kindness, reflection, creativity, and humbleness to values that are in line with “succeeding” in the corporate world like “winning”, “getting ahead”, unrelenting productivity, competition, and consumerism that are so often lacking in humanism, balance, kindness, gentleness, and compassion.
What Happens When You Stop Playing by the Rules?
Those who are shunned from society because they’re either unwilling to work for corporations, aren’t able to work for whatever reason, couldn’t measure up to the ever-increasing performance standards of these corporations, or simply no longer buy into this game and see through it are left out and have to readjust their spending and roles and find alternative or more tolerable work and affordable means of survival in terms of shelter, food, and clothing.
What they are usually told is simply to “try harder” or “think positive”.
Those who are destined to wake up out of this societal matrix and its conditioning often go through a very difficult but inevitable process which involves shedding the conditioning that they were brought up into and replacing it with something more true to their inner self and inner guidance. They may go through depression, self-worth issues, fear, doubt, shame, disillusionment, disenchantment, anxiety, and other experiences as they purge the conditioning of the “game” of society.
It is actually an inevitable process.
When Society Calls You a “Failure”
They usually will be labeled with some kind of label, whether it’s a mental health related label or simply something like “loser”, and if they are not careful, they will believe this label completely, keeping them pulled back in. Although there is a lot to be acknowledged about the validity of mental health disorders in terms neurodivergency, alterations in brain chemistry and functioning and its resulting increased suffering as well as the mental disorders’ respective treatments, modern culture and its relentless pressures on people are themselves often the initial cause behind the mental struggles, burnout, and diagnoses.
The labels create an identity around struggle. Then a person who has essentially burnt out or can no longer function in society because they can no longer sustain the pressures and narratives are pushed to reintegrate into the system that often caused them the trouble in the first place.
Breaking Free From the Productivity Mindset
Many of such people come to realize that they were lied to and conditioned into the true aims of society. They come to see that on a basic level, their wellbeing, self-worth, or happiness isn’t really dependent on performing tasks for corporations like they were conditioned to believe. And often, they realize that their wellbeing and contentedness or happiness actually depends on not having to perform monotonous tasks for corporations in small cubicles, day after day after day.
Rediscovering Inner Contentment
That’s when many realize that they want out of the game or prefer to be out if they already are out to some degree. Even if frugality, minimalism, taking on less lucrative, less exhausting, less demoralizing, or part-time roles that are more aligned with what they can tolerate or even enjoy doing become an absolute necessity, it can be rightly seen as a small and worthwhile price to pay for their freedom, true power, peace, as well as the more natural, unburdened, and less stressed way of living that comes with such a profound realization.
