Productivity

“Without productivity, life is worthless and unbearable.” This is Friedrich Nietzsche, who, remember, went completely mad (I’m reading A Philosophical Biography of Friedrich Nietzsche by Julian Young). He did get to live in posterity, both worshipped and maligned, but I wonder how things might have turned out for him if he’d spent a little less time trying to figure out the meaning of life (to be fair, he was also trying to figure out how to have a peaceful and pleasant life).

My partner Mark used to tell me that my “productivity” intimidated him. I’m not sure he meant productivity in the sense of “producing” things, like novels and magazine articles or gourmet dinners and cherry pies, but my “busyness.” Because here’s the thing. Even though I’ve almost always worked at home, setting my own schedule and creating my own agenda, I’ve also had a rule that during the day I do not sit down and read a book. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t read things during the day like information related to whatever article I’m writing, Environmental Impact Statements for whatever issue I’m dissecting, other people’s books that I’m editing, etc. But reading a novel, biography, or philosophical treatise is reserved for in the mornings with my coffee and after dinner until bed. I manage to get a lot of books read in those hours, but what in the world makes me think that there is something wrong with sometimes sitting down during the day and reading a book?

I don’t have weekends for reading books, either. Because of my self-employment I don’t really have Saturday and Sunday off. I take days off here and there, to go for a hike or ski or go to town for a movie or lunch, but there’s no designated day for lying around the house reading or watching TV, heaven forbid. Does it mean that I think life is worthless without productivity? Sort of. If productivity means using your individual talents to the best of your ability to create something that is uniquely yours or contributes to the common good or taxes your brain and body, then I’m definitely a fan of productivity. Again, according to Nietzsche: the well being of society is better promoted by everyone pursuing her own “highest good,” or becoming an “enlightened egoist.” If productivity means feeling that you have to constantly be doing something to prove your worth, then I think you’ve got a problem. Or I’ve got a problem.

This has become more obvious to me as I’ve gotten older. It’s a byproduct of having to look back instead of forward and make certain assessments about the outcome of your productivity. If an assessment of the outcome makes you say, “I never really did the things I wanted to do” or “I was never able to effect the changes I wanted” or “what I produced is a pile of shit,” then you better adopt the postmodern position immediately that all things are relative and there is no ultimate achievement or progress. That way your life can’t have been meaningless because there’s no such thing. You need to watch Casablanca again and listen to Rick when he tells Captain Renault, “Our lives don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

It was easier to live with that kind of attitude when I was younger. I have a kind of plodding personality that once I decide upon a course of action, say that of my organizing work that led to La Jicarita News, the radical rag I’ve written and edited with Mark for 15 years, I stay the course no matter how many battles we lose, no matter how many allies fall by the wayside, no matter how many nasty letters and e-mails and phones calls we get from the opposition. And there’s been plenty of that. But somehow I always manage to see as what I do is in my “self-interest” to further the “common good”

But now, as I face the fact that I’m going to retire La Jicarita News because of health issues and the fact that my energy has flagged with age, I can’t keep those nagging assessments out of my head. While I doubt that I would have ever made the choice to be a “professional” so that right about now I’d be looking at a well deserved retirement along with the rest of my baby boom cohort, I could have made other choices: committing much more time to creative writing and publishing, learning how to play the piano really well, traveling much more often to Latin America and speaking fluent Spanish (a more peaceful and pleasant life),

But I do appreciate the small changes I did effect, even if they only amount to changing someone’s life by knowing me or sharing in the work we did. And I don’t think I produced a pile of shit. I could have spent more time perfecting what I produced and been more confident about it, but I guess I had no burning desire to “prove” my self worth and leave something to posterity. So I guess I’ll muddle through this new phase in my life with the same mulish behavior that got me here, for better or worse. And maybe, just maybe, I can finish the Nietzsche biography and start that John Berger book in the middle of the day lying on the couch. Oh, what possibilities.