A huge assumption made by governments, corporations, and individuals captured by the main philosophical axioms embedded in the frontier meta-narrative is that productivity is inherently a good thing. It’s an assumption that piggybacks onto something everyone knows is true: the satisfaction of creating something new, or of doing a job well. Both of these characteristics lead to the type of work referred to in Buddhism as “right livelihood”.
Right livelihood is one of life’s great joys. But when satisfying work is co-opted by a) producing huge volumes of something that is widely desired by lots of people, b) doing so as fast as possible, and c) standardizing the process by which it all takes place, a not-so-subtle transformation takes place: the transformation of qualities that accentuate the things that are most joyful about work into something that funnels the creative spirit down the road of consumption. And while consumption is a satisfying end point to the creative process, it is only that: the end point of a long process, sometimes involving numerous people, springing initially from an original idea.
So what, exactly, is going on when satisfying work becomes subservient to productivity?
After the glow of satisfaction for the recognition that what they’ve created is desired by others fades away, most people will say that that when productivity trumps creativity, they have to “push” themselves in order to sustain their motivation. They have to work to fend off boredom, to meet demand and, most importantly: move their focus from an inward realm into an external one.
This last shift, from internal to external, sheds light on the threshold that gets crossed when satisfying work becomes tedious productivity. It’s a threshold that varies from person to person: one person's ending point can be another person's beginning inspiration. One example of this from the psychological world is Carl Jung. Jung was in his element when he created a typology of personality dimensions that articulated how human beings have attitudinal orientations to the world(introversion/extraversion) which, in combination with perceiving functions (sensing/intuition) and judging functions (thinking/feeling), provide insight into why people do things the way they do. At that point, he was content to stop and use this information in his work with his clients. Jung’s stopping point, however, was the starting point for Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, who advanced Jung’s typology and created the Myers Briggs, currently the world’s most widely used personality assessment instrument.
A person needs to know when he’s reached his stopping point if he’s to fend off the “productivity plague”. That’s the condition that can result when an appetite for external approval of what he's created beats back the creative impulse itself. It does this by replacing the silent, reflective, incubating space necessary for original ideas to emerge with incessant, efficient, driven activity.
External approval is not the only factor in play here, of course. Sometimes, productivity is simply the recognition that a certain degree of success is essential to survive. Productivity is undertaken because it is believed that generating enough success will allow a person the freedom to return to the creative environs so satisfying in the first place. Sometimes that turns out to be true. Too many times, however, a person crosses the productivity threshold and can’t find his way back to the creative side of the equation.
When that happens, it reflects an underlying psychological need for approval that can never be fulfilled externally. It can only be addressed through the hard work of discovering identity through risk-taking, experimentation, and feedback - all of these are the ways a person builds up enough confidence in his own inner compass to be able to fend off the pressures of external demands, the allure of fame, and the self-deceptive voices that can drive him towards the productivity end of the spectrum because he doesn’t have enough confidence in his own creativity yet.
Do you know where that threshold is in yourself? It’s not easy to get it right consistently, and a case can be made that most of the world is getting it wrong most of the time because we’re madly producing things at a cost not just to our own sense of right livelihood, but to the planetary resources necessary to sustain us all. We are, in far too many instances, eating our own tail.
Putting a halt to the productivity plague is both an individual and a social undertaking. It's one way the false allure of the frontier meta-narrative can be rebuffed, and the space for a new way of fostering the joy of work can take root.