Free Time Series (#1)
Being productive is a kind of obsession. A lot of conferences, tutorials and non-fiction books are all about time elasticity, making time and not taking time, how we’ve been wrong thinking we had to sleep 8 hours a night, and or how successful people never waste time chilling on their sofa. As a Gen Y lazy (not that) young woman, and as a French person (aka professional protestor), this paradigm always seems ridiculous to me. What’re you gonna do, if I spend the day chilling on the sofa?
All my dreams and projects will never be achieved. I’ll never become this best-sellers author, or this great humanitarian researcher, I’ll never change anyone’s life, and will not win a Nobel Prize.
But the chance that I win a Nobel Prize are pretty low. As productive as I can be, most of my dreams may never be fulfilled, because other very productive people have the same common dreams as mine, and they have more resources than me to achieve their goals.
My point is not to show how jealous and resentful I am with successful people. But, in my opinion, success has more to do with creativity than productivity. Giving a lot of effort in the minimum of time, or working a lot more for less money is, at first, a significant part of capitalism way of thinking.
But what is life without producing anything? Let’s imagine opposite of the sacrosanct productivity everybody longs for. If I choose to spend to whole day in my bed, doing the very least I can do and wasting as much time as possible doing nothing meaningful, my first reaction will probably be guilt. All those seconds of my limited life are, for ever, lost in the unstoppable race of time. If I choose to spend my whole life chilling and doing nothing at all, and if I die tomorrow, I’ll probably have regrets.
Because, even if you think capitalism is hell, and you’re minimalist AF, I’m sure that deep inside, you wish you were more motivated and more productive. What about this article you wanted to write? What about this bucket list you made three years ago and never had a look at again? Producing is like justifying our existence. What we create is a chance to leave a trace after we give our final breathe in this world. And no one wants to be forgotten. Humans are probably (maybe not?) the only species that master time that well. I never heard of History classes for Mice, but maybe I missed something. And because we are conscious of time, we don’t want it to disappear like sand between our fingers. We want to cherish it, to embrace this only universal resource.
Time is the only resource that makes us free. Mastering time and increasing the number of achieved tasks per hour give the illusion that we are in control of our own cosmos and we are in advance in the race of life.