by Eliana Doyes
Somewhere in the not-too-distant past, society decided that being human simply wasn’t enough. We had to be brands, robots, and motivational posters all at once. Productivity morphed into the new moral compass; if you weren’t optimizing, you were failing; if you weren’t hustling, you were a freeloader; if you weren’t downing kale-cloud smoothies before dawn, well, were you even breathing?
Now, we’re locked in a competition for the most exhaustion.
“Oh, you got six hours of sleep? Adorable. I got negative three.”
“Oh, you took a lunch break? That’s sweet. I osmosis-drank a protein bar.”
The hilarious kicker is no one is getting more done; they’re just getting better at looking like they are. Productivity apps are reproducing faster than rabbits; to-do lists are popping up overnight; we’re spending more time color-coding tasks than we are doing them. We’ve got whole systems designed to help us manage the systems that manage our systems.
And don’t even get me started on the swag. Mugs proclaiming “Rise and Grind.” Posters hinting at “You have the same 24 hours in a day as Beyoncé,” glossing over the tiny detail that Beyoncé’s team numbers in the hundreds, and yours is currently your droopy ficus. There are planners, too, each page a parade of inspirational quotes, as if a well-timed “You got this!” can magically lift the crushing weight of 47 undone tasks.
The only rule of the Productivity Olympics is that you can never win, but you have to smile while losing. And when you post about your loss to the world with a caption of “Monday Motivation!” while your sanity slowly drains, well, you’ve earned bonus points.
The craziest part is we all know it’s a farce. We know humans aren’t supposed to be functioning as caffeinated automatons. But who wants to be the first one to stop pedaling the hamster wheel, afraid that doing so might look… Well, unproductive?
So we keep running, we keep optimizing, we keep feigning burnout as a personality trait and exhaustion as a badge of honor. We keep buying into the delusion that if we just work a little harder, get up a little earlier, or schedule our lives with a little more precision, we’ll finally reach that magical unicorn-like state of “having it all figured out.”
Because somewhere deep down, we know the truth:
The Productivity Olympics aren’t about winning.
They’re about pretending the race makes sense.
Art by M. A. Rauf, “RHYTHM”, (1968)
About the Author
Eliana is a long-distance runner who believes the universe is best understood on foot and that life is a quiet act of mutual connection.