Thinking About Getting Into: Conscious Unproductivity

This is not a letter about productivity, but I need you to know that when I read 63 books last year, that was my utmost aim. It was also my aim when I started, shocking even myself, finally going to fitness classes in my second month of newly ended unemployment.

It was not my aim, however, when I logged nearly 70 hours playing a farming RPG game as a new Nintendo DS owner in January of this year. Nor was it when I gave in and got the Sims 4 (on-sale, OK?) as a solace to enjoy after submitting job applications.

This is a newsletter—if I may be so adamantly Gwyneth about it all—about something I've taken to calling, in my own defensive moods, conscious unproductivity. Sounds totally fake right? That's because it is totally fake! Get into it.

The other day, in a book or show or movie (some sort of media, alas, that I can't remember), I recalled hearing a character receive an accusation: you always felt invisible so you feel like you have to make yourself useful. The words felt sharp against my ears, and though I've forgotten the source, I still hold it close as a personal attack.

I've had dreams of productivity for almost as long as I can remember. Fresh notebooks, sharp pencils—that kind of thing, but something more sinister as well. There was a time when that insane Business Insider day-in-the-life would have caused me to crawl into a veritable pit of self-loathing at my own comparatively scant productivity. There are so many things I've missed out on because I felt they would push me back further and further on a trajectory that I had, at least, thought I had mapped out to relative precision.

I'm hard-pressed to deduce where history lands in the case of human value's correlation to output. Capitalism sides firmly with that correlation but what about oligarchy? Bureaucracy? Feudal, monarchist, Calvinistic, Puritan—there have been so many modes of society that have prioritized humans as a means to capital or sustenance or labor. Of course, then, it's easy to take work personally, and seriously.

For a long time I made the excuse that I didn't exercise because I wanted to use that time to do something else. Surely, most realistically, that time got allocated to sleep, but instead, and especially when I started reading more, I saw time in the gym or a boutique studio as time that I wouldn't have to clock my reading goals. Reading was the one capital-P Productive thing I knew I was good at. It didn't take much effort to glide though books as I added them rapidly to my must-read pile. And then I started having a hard time reading. And then I felt like I could do nothing at all.

It's interesting, really what an empty calendar and a sudden change of identity can do to you. Jobless, I presumed my world immediately open for the book I would write, the body I would attain, and the number of books so great I would surely double my count from the previous year. Until I found it hard to sleep—my mind constantly flicking through things said in interviews and things I could have done differently and worst-assumptions about what strangers really thought of me. Until my days, equal in time, felt simultaneously long and short. I spent them largely in my room (coffee shops cost money, friends, and I don't trust strangers to watch my stuff while I use the bathroom), filling out applications when appropriate, but mostly, I waited.

With an expanse of free time that seemed so painfully long—painfully, you must remember, because I had never wanted that free time to exist in the first place—I felt paralyzed. Books that normally would have taken me two days to speed through took two weeks. After finishing my required work (freelance projects and application materials) I struggled to tackle anything else of note. And so I decided to be unproductive.

Over the course of two long months, I started and completed two seasons of Terrace House. If you are unfamiliar with the show, I'll summarize here: it's a Japanese reality show, kind of like Big Brother, but also not. Essentially, six contestants—three girls, three guys—live in a house (the titular house, if you will), and that's it. They are literally just roommates and they go about their daily lives at school, work, and more. But! Most people join Terrace House because they are looking for love, and so romantic tensions abound. Also, a panel of commentators pop into view every 15 minutes or so just to trash talk (or sometimes praise!) the people who have been earnestly (and not always wholly honestly) living out their lives in a house with bunk beds, a very nice kitchen, and cameras nearly everywhere. It is my favorite thing in this terrible world.

Here's another thing about Terrace House, which maybe you've assumed already: it's in Japanese (with English subtitles on Netflix), so it requires your full attention at all times (if you don't speak Japanese), lest you fall behind on some petty drama or a wholesome love plot.

I'm not sure if I would have gotten so deeply into the show if I hadn't needed a steady distraction. I watch plenty of TV, but if you recommend that I watch a show that has more than four seasons out already, I will most likely put it off for a very, very long time. Let me also clarify another thing about Terrace House: its first season on Netflix has 46 episodes, all amounting to approximately 30 minutes each. That's 23 hours of Terrace House. Plus the 16 hours I consumed of the latest season, still currently filming in quaint Karuizawa, Japan.

My point is, this show—this delightful, delightful show—forced me to grow attached to the people I found on my screen, enjoy their successes, and experience real sadness with their struggles and failures. More than once, I guarantee you, I cried when something finally went their way.

Maybe this is how all TV is supposed to make you feel: like you're a part of something and that you're really in on their world. But I rarely allowed myself the luxury of focusing my total attention on this kind of show, much less for more than a handful of episodes at a time.

The more time I allowed myself to simply sit and enjoy one of the few things that brought me joy during a hard time, the more I started to feel capable of doing other things again. I pushed myself through the books I was putting off, and though my reading time was slower than usual, I finished and enjoyed them. I signed up for a ClassPass free trial, and found myself going to yoga and barre classes, first because it forced me to leave my apartment, and later because I found myself starting to finally enjoy it.

When you think of yourself in a vacuum, it's easy to map out your schedule to such a ridiculous degree that every single hour is accounted for with some activity that will benefit your work or your productivity—but that's the kind of thinking that forced me to spiral in the first place. When I lost my job, I lost the central thing that had been helping me to balance all the other things that mattered to me in different regards.

On one hand, I juggled my social life. On another hand, I maneuvered the things I found to be enriching—reading, writing, running my Etsy shop and several for-fun Instagram accounts. My job was the unicycle that I balanced on, and my true free time—my then-unconscious productivity—was my spotting point that helped me to stay where I needed to be without feeling a ton of pressure. But by the time I fell off, I tried to get on a new, different unicycle with no sense of balance—until I realized that I need to cut myself some slack in order to stop the wheel from really wobbling.

The point is that you need to take some time for yourself—not for any kind of commodified self-care that feels like something you put on your calendar or a social engagement that you wouldn't think twice about attending. All I'm saying is that enjoying a show or even a video game isn't so bad after all. In fact, it might just be what you need to keep yourself afloat.