Jonathan Haycraft Blog Post

We are tricked into thinking we need to be constantly productive in order to be fulfilled with our short lives, but most of us become too obsessed with productivity and rarely or never stop to slow down and take in any of the wonders of the world, make new friends, or enjoy personal hobbies. Many of us feel like our work/school gets too much in the way of my connections.

Speaking from my own experience as a full time college student, part time worker, and boyfriend, I don’t have much time left in my week for seeing friends or writing books after I take into account visiting our families and doing homework. Sometimes, this means I’m forced to procrastinate on my school work in order to sustain my friendships. Finding time for fun and relaxation is very hard for adults, which explains why people say it’s immature to put off work and responsibilities.

For some reason people expect adulthood to be a constant sense of misery and loneliness until you retire, but more and more it looks like retirement will keep becoming more unattainable for our younger generations. This means that time management before retirement is even more important than ever, because now more of us won’t have the luxury of those delightful few years of no more e-mails and corporate meetings.

So what do you do? In a life so full nowadays, something has to give, but in today’s economy where nearly 70% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, it certainly can’t be work. “And why can’t it be?” You may ask? Because we’ve really always had enough time to do whatever we want, we just inherited a really really bad way to spend it all from our poorly educated medieval ancestors. In the times of feudal lords, workers woke up right at the break of day, worked until their backs broke, then went to sleep when the sun set. They did this all for almost no pay or no pay at all.

Sound familiar? It probably does, but if it doesn’t, then basically it just really sucks. And because it’s been beaten into our culture for so long, literally everybody born and raised in the US since its inception has been essentially brainwashed from birth to feel a very real pressure to work as hard as we possibly can for as long as we can until we are old enough to either retire right when we’re about to die or simply just die doing it. It’s evil! (One of) The weird thing(s) about it though is that productivity has been growing while free time has been shrinking. As capitalism developed with the industrial revolution, we saw industrialists become frustrated by the lackadaisical worker.

Paying somebody by the hour means that if someone is sitting around, that is lost money. They heard somebody say “Time is money”, took it literally, and ruined the world because of it! Thank you very much! Time itself has been commoditized, which makes “saving” it of utmost importance. So, now one of the many problems we have now is figuring out where to save time and how we can cut the corners to save it. But the issue arises when you remember how damn important productivity is in modern culture. You would think the purpose of saving time being productive would be to have more time for leisure, but that isn’t how most people treat it.

People save time being productive so that they can be MORE productive, which means they never even actually saved any time while being more stressed doing it. And now because we positively associate that stress we get from needing to be overproductive, we feel guilty or ashamed from being lazy or unproductive. We feel pressured to be as productive as we possibly can all the time. Nobody wants to be called an “underachiever”, yet all of the happiest people I’ve ever met are the ones who can find and enjoy their spare time, and slow down all the time.

I can speak from personal experience that I am incredibly unhappy and stressed out around this time of the semester where I have to write so many different final projects that are so hard to juggle. But when the semester ends and I have so much more free time I’m way happier.

It’s nice to just do literally nothing all day sometimes, but a lot of people would be weirdly judgmental to see somebody sit around and be unproductive. But when I just came back from working all the time for four months, why would I want to keep working all the time during my break? That’s the whole point of breaks and it feels like everybody is trying to do away with that for some reason.

People are starting to use their breaks to squeeze in more hours at work, squeeze in more chores and monotonous tasks. But have any of them stopped to wonder why all the mythical frat boys who go to the beach during spring break and get drunk the whole time seem so much happier than them? Maybe it is worth it to “waste” your time for mindless fun from time to time, instead of trying to force yourself to be so productive all the time that you have barely any positive memories to look back on.

You know all of those hundreds of movies about a dad who never sees his kids because he’s always working? It’s the plot of almost half of every Christmas movie. There’s a reason why so many of those kinds of movies exist, because it sucks! And the ending of those movies is always just “Dad realizes it’s not nice to ignore his kids all the time and it’s actually a lot more fun to focus more on them.” And it’s really sad because there are tons of families like that that have parents who are never around and never have any fun and never actually learn that lesson.

It doesn’t have to be Dads either, anybody could need to learn that lesson. Maybe instead of a kid, it’s your pet that needs more attention, or your hobbies. A life full of only work is not a life at all, and it is a shame for somebody to essentially live as just a piece of machinery.

To finish this off, let me give you all a poignant quote from Nietzsche: “We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life.” Now obviously this quote could be a bit outdated considering Nietzsche grew up in a time where one could buy the average house for less than 10% of its value today, but I still think there is some wisdom in his words here.

Sometimes we don’t always need to work so hard, and while we do have a limited time on this Earth to accomplish all that we want to, sometimes accomplishment isn’t as important as enjoying the limited time we have. “All in good time.”

In the movie "Jingle all the Way", Arnold Schwarzenegger learns the importance of spending time away from work to be a part of his family. 

https://youtu.be/BvGDdV83jnY?si=4_XxQD7B9W3id0c1

Here is a video detailing how horrendous American work culture is, how it took over our lives, and the ramifications it has on our health and social lives.