Sometimes I sit and think about how one of the highest paying companies in the world sells unproductivity as a service. There's free options for entertainment like YouTube too.
There's nothing wrong with being unproductive. We should totally rest and enjoy life once we've covered our needs for the day. This thing about productivity being a goal of society is stupid. Who says being productive leads to happiness?
I actually like to be productive, and I suspect you do too. But if people don't, that's fine too. I do wonder if we might be addicted to productivity, though.
HN is a site where you hear people unironically talk about how they listen to audiobooks and podcasts at higher speed to optimize how many they can take in.
Thinking about what that implies about how these people engage with art is kind of wild. It's like speedwalking through an art gallery to see more paintings per hour. There's something about that optimization/productivity mindset that seems strangely pathological. Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.
I don't know where this compulsion starts, but it's a little disturbing.
> Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.
That is actually a thing and perhaps a growing industry called "meal replacements".
It's not surprising given that meals for many people are already just plastic wrapped matter heated in a microwave and slurped up from their laps on the couch.
Part of it is politicians who seem insistent on treating productivity as a primary goal. If we were struggling to produce enough food then, sure, productivity would be a big problem. But we produce an excess of food. So much so that obesity and diabetes are a problem now. This goes for everything: I can't think of a single thing in life where I think "if only we were more productive I'd be happier". At some point we really have to learn to just be happy.
The other part is the tendency of people to focus on simple metrics and neglect anything with nuance. Things like number of books you've read this year, how many people you manage, how much money you earn. All simple numbers, all essentially meaningless outside of a much broader context, but all pursued with laser focus for no particular reason.
At this point in my life I earn more money than ever, I have more stuff and, yes, I'm more productive. But am I happier now than when I got my first cheap car (that I could now buy every month without even sacrificing anything)? Am I happier than when I first had sex? Am I happier than that day I cooked a splendid boeuf bourguignon for my student house? Of course not.
The "meal replacement" industry is exactly what I am thinking about. I know some of them are marketed as essentially premade low-caloric meals, that theoretically make it easy to do calorie-counting. At least that has some kind of niche application that I get the use-case for.
But those other ones, are freaky - the ones that are designed to be allround [food] for humans, in the same way that a dog can eat exclusively a specific type of dogfood indefinitely. Why the need/desire to do this? It's like something out of classic dystopian sci-fi, only it's chosen voluntarily by people with access to real(ish) food, and they pay a premium for it.
I think you're correct about this effort to cram more 'stuff' into life instead of taking our time to engage with less in a deeper way, being counterproductive to the things that make us happy. Maybe some internalized mindset of productivity for its own sake, completely unmoored from the managerial context? Some kind of cargo-cult type performance to attract what - prosperity? Happiness?
I don't really have a good answer for why this happens, but it's certainly interesting.
I'm definitely a niche, but as someone who has never been a super big eater and has lost most of my sense of taste, this kind of product seems great.
That said, for me it has nothing to do with productivity. I just want a single meal I could repeatably consume to maintain a healthy diet. (Ideally, with as little effort as possible on my part because it all taste the same to me)
