1: “The world is watching,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals.
The late Matthew Perry is playing a producer in the television drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He’s been hired to “rescue and relaunch a national weekly comedy show, based transparently on Saturday Night Live,” Oliver notes.
The stakes are high.
“Throughout the episode, anxiety builds visibly while a huge digital clock on the control room wall counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the moment the live broadcast must begin. Last-minute conflicts threaten to derail the whole thing.
“But against the odds, as the digits tick down to zero, they manage it. On air. The opening song is a knockout. The audience goes wild.
“The scene cuts to Matthew Perry,” Oliver writes, “watching from the back; for the first time, he looks relaxed.
“For a second or two. Then a troubling thought strikes him, and the camera follows his gaze to the clock on the wall, which now shows. . .
“6 days, 23 hours, 57 minutes and 53 seconds. . .
“The countdown to next week’s broadcast.
“His reward for paying off his debt so spectacularly,” Oliver observes, “is that how he’s got to do it, just as impressively, all over again.”
2: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.
Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.
On Fridays, we explore some of the life lessons captured by author Oliver Burkeman in his wonderful book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
Oliver writes: “Many people these days report the feeling that they begin each morning in a kind of ‘productivity debt,’ which they must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, in hopes of returning to a zero balance by the time evening comes.
“If they fail—or worse, don’t even try—it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet.”
Underneath our compulsion to get things done is often a feeling of inadequacy.
“For example,” he observes, “maybe we believe that we’ll have earned our right to exist only when we attain a certain level of social standing, or income, or academic qualifications.
“Or perhaps,” Oliver writes, “we’ve tethered our self-esteem to the most crazy-making standard of all, ‘realizing our potential’-which means we’ll never get to rest, because how can we ever be sure there’s not a little more potential left to realize?”
When we adopt this mindset, we take on “a cosmic debt we’ve somehow incurred in exchange for being alive,” he notes. “Our frenetic activity is often an effort to shore up a sense of ourselves as minimally acceptable members of society.”
It’s as if, as Taoist writer Jason Gregory explains, “we fall into the error of believing that we somehow don’t belong to the world, and must therefore spend our lives trying to earn back the right to belong.”
So, where do these feelings of inadequacy come from?
Likely sources include:
First, the Protestant work ethic: “The ideology that took root in early modern Europe,” he writes, “whereby Calvinist Christians came to believe that unflagging hard work might demonstrate their suitability for entering heaven after they died.”
Second, our parents. Who may have raised us as children to feel noticed and valued only when we’re achieving great things.
And third, consumerism: “Which has an obvious vested interest,” Oliver notes, “in keeping people feeling inadequate, so we might be relied upon to purchase goods and services that promise to make the feelings go away.”
Whatever the source, however, living life as “a productivity debtor is no fun at all. It’s anxiety-inducing, and exhausting,” he observes, “and it probably also contributes to the modern epidemic of social isolation, since a tunnel-vision focus on paying off our debts makes it much less appealing to prioritize apparently unproductive activities like hanging out with friends.”
As Matthew Perry experienced above, the reward for each achievement is the expectation that we will achieve even greater success the next time around.
3: So, is there a way out? Can we escape the hell that is productivity debt?
Fortunately, we can.
Option one is faith: “If we believe in a god who bestows grace—who loves us and delights in us, in other words,” Oliver writes, “regardless of how hard we strive to justify our existence by means of our productivity, goodness, or anything else.”
Another option, Oliver explains, is to keep a “done list.” Which is the polar opposite of a “to do list.”
We “create a record not of the tasks we plan to carry out,” he notes, “but of the ones we’ve completed so far today—which makes it the rare kind of list that’s actually supposed to get longer as the day goes on.”
If we are already using a task-management system, it may be as simple as not deleting tasks once we’ve completed them.
Instead, we move them to our “done list,” where we can watch with delight as the list grows longer.
“A done list isn’t solely a way to feel better about ourselves, though,” Oliver writes. “When we start to view each day not as a matter of paying off a debt, but as an opportunity to move a small-but-meaningful number of items over to our done list, we’ll find ourselves making better choices about what to focus on; and we’ll make more progress on them, too, since we’ll be wasting less energy stressing about all the other tasks we’re (inevitably) neglecting.”
Not only that: “And while I’m not going to pretend it happens all the time,” he notes, we “might even experience a few of those transcendent moments in which taking action on a project we care about—now that it’s no longer serving the hidden agenda of making us feel better about ourselves by helping us repay an imaginary debt—becomes utterly effortless and joyful.”
Because “actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans,” Oliver observes.
“Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.”
More next week!
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Reflection: Am I measuring my worth by what I accomplish each day, or can I find satisfaction in simply being alive?
Action: Start a “done list” today—record each completed task, big or small, and notice how it shifts my mindset from anxiety and inadequacy to appreciation and progress.
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