I can't really put it into words; in any case I am not yet as honest with myself as I should be, and it is is always hard to get to the bottom of things with words.
Etty Hillesum, from a diary entry featured in An Interrupted Life: the Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork (translated from the Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans)
make sure you’re able to learn and experience things at your own pace.
it might be difficult to admit that you need more time, but it’s essential to retaining your new knowledge and skills while not compromising your health
there are parts of your life you’ll cut away and leave behind. people, ideas, habits and hobbies. it’s okay, it’s natural and it’s essential for growth
I think everyone should make dumb ugly zines and bad music and write shitty books with weird premises and publish them for pay what you will online. I think people should write plays that are only ever intended to be performed with their friends in their living rooms. I think people who like ttrpgs should explore bizarre itch.io games and new systems that have no affiliation whatsoever with any major publishing house. If youre lucky enough to have a cool local community radio station nearby you should listen to that and what people close to you have to say and what they're creating that has no focus on being nationally appealing. I just think creation should be more joyful and local both in a geographic sense and a personal and social sense and unconcerned with whether or not it will be commercially viable or slick or even good beyond your own pride in it. And I think it's good to seek out art that exists for its own sake or to appeal to the community it was created within
it is perhaps more helpful to move the conversation away from “it’s okay not to be productive” to “we need to have a long hard think about what counts as productivity”.
if you’re ill (chronic or otherwise), it is productive to spend a day sleeping and resting up. your body needs you to rest so that it can heal.
but something that is true for everyone is that things like healing from trauma, learning new things, practicing hobbies, building relationships… are all productive ways to spend your time. just because you’re not making money doesn’t mean you’re not being productive.
looking after yourself is productive. looking after others is productive. hell, playing with your pet is productive.
productive means being in a state of producing something. that’s all it means. and when you’re doing the things your body needs you to do… you’re producing your own well-being. you’re producing neural pathways. you’re producing happiness.
if you can feel a sense of productivity from non-traditional productive actions… I think that’s a lot more helpful for your mental health than just claiming that productivity isn’t important. of course it’s okay to not be productive. but I know I feel better when I think of happiness as something I can produce.
today one of the student workers at my job told me that if she’s struggling remembering something important in her course work she’ll wait until her professor asks a question related to that topic during a lecture and then she’ll purposefully raise her hand and answer it wrong because, and I quote, ‘the combined shame and embarrassment of getting an answer wrong in front of more than a hundred of your peers will make sure that you’ll never forget what the right answer actually was’ and if that is not the most next level balls to the wall bonkers extrovert thing I’ve ever heard then I don’t know what is
“No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance. It’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself all this time to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming, but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a life well spent, you’re free to consider the possibility that many more things than you’d previously imagined might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them on the grounds that they weren’t ‘significant’ enough. From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards, or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy, or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.”
Oliver Burkeman, 4000 hours: Time Management for Mortals
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