Hustle Culture and Productivity Shame
3 Ps on Sabbath: A Poem, A Pondering, A Practice
Ode
By Zoe Higgins
Here’s to everything undone today:
laundry left damp in the machine,
the relatives unrung, the kitchen
drawer not sorted; here’s to jeans
unpatched and buttons missing,
the dirty dishes, the novel
not yet started. To Christmas
cards unsent in March, to emails
marked unread. To friends unmet
and deadlines unaddressed;
to every item not crossed off the list;
to everything still left, ignored, put off:
it is enough.
You can find “Ode” in the remarkable anthology James Crews edited titled The Path to Kindness.
A Pondering: Productivity Shame
I recently spent several days in Boston at a conference along with 10,000 other Bible scholars, academics, and theologians from around the world. It’s a remarkable conference that I look forward to every year, not only because we get to travel to cool cities, but because I’ve made meaningful friendships with people over the years, and this is the one time I get to see many of them each year. I look forward to the consequential conversations we have about the state of our profession, the character of the Bible, and what exactly it is that we’ve all given our lives to doing. I always return home refreshed and exhausted.
But there’s a darker side to the conference as well—the posturing, the pretense, the self-promotion, mostly rooted in a deep uncertainty and anxiety about the state of higher education, the changing role of Scripture and theology in the public discourse, and the evergreen pandemic of imposter syndrome that afflicts the academy.
And then there’s the book exhibit. At one point it was the largest collection of theological books assembled anywhere in the world every year (I heard that once, but don’t quote me). Dozens of academic publishers displaying the fruits of the labors of academics the world over, each stack of books like a standing stone, declaring to the rest of us of what legitimizes someone in this world—getting published, especially by an elite publisher—all collected in a vast hall and on sale for 50% off.
It’s easy to walk around the exhibit hall or scan the colossal list of papers being presented and have no response for the unbidden question: “What have I done with my life?” Do you know the feeling? When you look at all the amazing things other people have accomplished, then you look at your life and feel like all you have to show for yourself are the ashes of your good intentions?
Productivity Shame
A few years ago I learned a term that helped me understand and begin to move beyond the aching sense of insufficiency I often felt in my work and life. On her podcast Hurry Slowly, Jocelyn K. Glei explored “productivity shame.” It’s a combination of, on the one hand, a work culture obsessed with productivity, that makes one’s value dependent on how much they produce, and on the other hand, habituated patterns of self-sabotage in which we set ourselves up for failure by setting unrealistic goals and then berate ourselves when we fail to meet them. We can do this on a day-to-day level by writing 47 things on our to-do list when we only have 37 minutes of our day free from other obligations in which to complete them. Or, we can do it in a structural way by not defining what “enough” means—in a relationship, a business, a project, a to-do list, a life—and then beating ourselves up for not doing/making enough.
We respond to this by feeling shame. It’s not only that we feel we haven’t done enough, but that we aren’t enough. The problem, we believe, isn’t that we set ourselves up to fail, but that we aren’t good enough—or smart enough, courageous enough, disciplined enough, etc.—to actually succeed.
We respond to productivity shame by trying to do more, move faster, be more efficient, push through exhaustion, tick through more items on the to-do list. Hustle culture thrives on this sense of frantic inadequacy, and doubles down by making us feel not just guilty for pausing to rest, but lazy, which is much, much worse. Productivity shame is like quicksand, our attempts to frantically climb out of it just sink our feet more deeply into it.
A Different Way
Zoe Higgins’s poem “Ode” offers another way, a Sabbath-y way to respond to the nagging sense that we haven’t done enough and therefore aren’t enough. It offers a way of self-compassion and grace, that doesn’t push us further beyond our limits but acknowledges and honors them, even embracing and befriending them and so embolding us to rest as an act of resistance to hustle culture of doing more and more and more.
Notice how the poet sees and names each of the undone things. She does not ignore or deny them to try and convince herself “everything’s fine.” Rather, she looks at each unfinished item and releases herself from its power to define her within a system of lack. She defies the power of productivity shame by asserting her enoughness in the face of all that would tell her she hasn’t done—and therefore is not—enough.
The Sabbath’s gift is to remind us—or tell us for the first time—that we are enough, that we have been enough since the day we were born, and nothing we do or don’t do will change that. We are loved as we are. We belong as we are. We are enough as we are. We don’t have to earn Sabbath by completing our work. We don’t have to earn rest by meeting the production quota. Rest and delight and joy are free gifts given by the Prodigal Father to all who will simply open their hands and receive it. Sabbath invites us into a mindset shift that enables a life-rhythm shift that opens us to experience more of what matters most to us.
Slowly, week after week, Sabbath re-wires our brains, which are addicted to the rhythms and assumptions of productivity shame, which compel us to work more and hustle harder to earn that elusive sense of enoughness and contentment we all long for. The message of the Sabbath is that it’s already there inside of you, you just need to slow down long enough to feel it and embrace it.
A Sabbath Practice: Embracing Enough
Spiritual teacher Tara Brach suggests that there are two ways people search for the elusive “enough,” that sense of goodness we all desire: inside of us, and outside of us. It is the difference between trying to “feel good about ourselves” (external) and “feeling deeply our intrinsic goodness” (internal).
Our attempts to feel good about ourselves compel us to look outside of ourselves for contentment and satisfaction and the sense that our life is meaningful. Society tells us we will be good if we land our dream job, get the promotion and raise, find the right friends, read the right books, or get into the right schools. When these things inevitably do not satisfy—or we fall short—we are left questioning our value and longing for something different. Productivity shame feeds on this energy.
Feeling our intrinsic goodness, however, is a way of connecting, at a soul level, with the presence of God within. It is retethering ourselves to the image of God in us. It is affirming that poet Brad Aaron Modlin was right when he said, “I am / is a complete sentence.” It is feeling, deep in our bones, that we are loved. And it has to reach our bones. To embrace the goodness that we are, we must feel loved in our bodies. It can’t be an intellectual exercise.
This Sabbath spend some time feeling into the goodness and enoughness that you are. Sit in a comfortable, relatively quiet place. Slow your breathing. Attend to your breathing for a while until you are present. Then feel in your body what it feels like when you know your goodness. Perhaps recall a moment of deep connection or satisfaction or presence. What did it feel like in your body to be alive in that moment? Feel into that feeling. Feel that goodness coursing through you. Allow it to spill over into your whole body. Remember that that goodness and enoughness is always alive in you. Carry that feeling with you into the rest of the day and see what happens.
