Wasting Time

This summer has cursed me with too much free time but revealed the pitfalls of productivity culture.

When you don’t need to do anything, you could do everything. Therein lies the paralysis of summertime ennui.

This summer, I’ve suffered from a near constant anxiety of “wasting time,” and never is it so oppressive as in the local coffee shop, laptop open, infinite possibilities of engagement at the fingertips, a couple of books (a novel and a theology book) on the table. I’m waiting to start a PhD program next month, and, still on a teacher salary from my old job, have had the three months of summer off. I thought it would be restful. Instead, it’s been stressful. Weird!

There are a million things in this coffee shop that I could do, and activities that look important, like checking email, or reading a think piece, and then there’s the activities that might come across as bum-like to other cafe constituents, like actually reading the books I brought, or working on a short story in a Word document (which probably will never be published or read). Of course, no one cares or watches. There aren’t many people in here, anyway. It’s just self-consciousness talking at this point.

I used to work remotely full time, and with my ongoing freelance projects, can still keep up the facade of online production. But it’s starting to run thin, all this openness, this choice, all this pressure to always be typing something. Any choice I make is haunted by all the options gone neglected, until in the end I waste time, reading nothing, writing little, riddled with caffeine from head to toe.

The pressure to be productive, or at least look like we’re productive, paradoxically often stops us from getting things done. Multiple choices make us struggle to commit to doing one thing at time. The cult of productivity maybe isn’t even about work, but about reflecting an image of seriousness, importance, and sophistication, of looking like I have myself together. We must look occupied at all costs and knit our brows in that concerned, intellectual manner to convince others that we’re real professionals. You mean to tell me you’re reading a book in the coffee shop? And it’s not Atomic Habits? Get a job, bum!

For me, one of the worst consequences of falling for the productivity trap is that it puts writing and reading fiction at the backburner. As I mentioned earlier, much of the fiction I labor on isn’t going to see the light of day, and such is the nature of the craft. You have to write a lot of bad short stories and novel drafts before you come up with one that works well. Conversely, productivity culture, particularly in the blogging world, demands consistent output. That is, if you want to build your “brand.” If you’re a writer, you better be writing to publish, good sir. If you’re working on a short story that no one will ever read, or read a novel that doesn’t add to your online article count, what the heck are you doing?

The novelist and creative writing teacher John Gardner warned young writers about such danger in his masterful little book On Becoming a Novelist. The fiction writer has to be in it for the long run. He can’t spit out a book and publish it the next day (unless he’s using a certain AI assistant to help, of course). Novelists who make money as journalists run the risk of getting too impatient with the book-writing process. They get used to running short blogs, reports, and essays every week or perhaps every day, and if they’re on Substack and sharing a lot on social media, they get used to getting instant feedback from an online audience. Not so for the slow writer laboring on her first novel. She might be waiting tables, or working for a bank, or sweepings hallways. She may have a Substack with 40 followers, and her manuscript, for all her hard work, may someday drown in the slush piles of a hundred publishers.

There’s beauty in staying hidden, though, and choosing the marathons over the sprints. You have to keep believing your obscure labor is worth the toil. I’ve gotten into online blog and freelance culture writing, and while there’s value in it, I have to remember that our culture, obsessed with platforms, online validation, quick results, and superficial measures of value, is no substitute for deepening one’s personal character and deepening one’s craft, even if no one is watching. Here I am, writing this on Substack of all places, ha! But maybe it’s worth sharing. You’ll just have to wait a while to read my novels, even though you probably won’t read them. And you know what? That’s okay.

Photo by Do Nhu on Unsplash