Submitted by TreatThompson t3_10nn3zp in GetMotivated
When I started a full time job, my life for the first few months became centred around showing up and getting work done.
My days were unremarkable and irrelevant. I couldn’t tell them apart from each other. I wasn't immersed in my life, it was flying by because I was going at such a frantic pace.
That span of time feels like one big blob.
It reminded me of Alexandra Horowitz saying that we have a culture of prioritizing productivity over presence. She called it a form of self-hypnosis. Days turn to years without noticing it.
I could easily see how quickly my life could slip away from me if I didn’t snap out of this pattern.
Horowitz made this good point
>What’s interesting about the productivity dogma is that we live in a culture where we worship work ethic as some sort of this grand virtue. And we define it as showing up, day after day after day. But I often think that that’s the surest way to lull ourselves into a kind of trance of passivity, where we show up but we’re absent from our own lives.
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I share ideas from great thinkers so we can stand on the shoulders of giants, instead of figuring life out alone
TreatThompson OP t1_j69npvl wrote
There’s two other points I think of related to this
Henry Thoreau makes a good point saying most people are active participants in life enough to do physical labor, less are active participants enough to exert themselves intellectually, and very few live actively enough to have a remarkable life.
Maria Popova said something similar adding:
"But in our age of productivity, we spend our days running away from boredom, never mind its creative and spiritual benefits, and toward maximum efficiency."