💾 Archived View for tilde.town › ~hush › gemlog › 2023-12-15.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:36:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

On wanting to appear productive

One of the thoughts I often wrestle with is - what do I *actually* want to do?

American culture has a major productivity fetish. I've internalized that quite a bit - I feel a good deal of shame to be "wasting" days the way I do, spending them consuming media rather than being productive. I have a large list of projects I vaguely like the idea of doing, and I hardly do any of them. But, this is where the confusion comes in - if I truly wanted to do these projects, why don't I do them?

Part of the answer is the deceptive patterns of the web - as other writers have expressed more eloquently than I, most content delivery engines on the web are designed specifically to pull your attention and keep you there, for the purposes of generating money from ad views and data collection. But, I feel that isn't the entire answer - there's also a chance that I don't want to *actually* do these projects, I just want the social credit for having achieved them. In other words, I want to appear productive.

To give some examples: Do I actually want to be a great drummer, or do I want to be seen as a person who worked hard and became great? Do I actually want to be an open-source contributor, or do I want to be seen as a driven person who has the gumption and ethic to contribute? Do I actually want to write good music, or do I want to be someone who is seen as a great songwriter?

Do I want to do things, or do I want to be seen as someone who does things? I don't know, at the moment, how to determine whether I'm enjoying the act of production or just looking forward to having a shiny badge to prove to people that I'm a worthy, functional human. I suspect that finding the answer will be a major key to my personal pursuit of happiness.