Loneliness is killing us. That’s what the Surgeon General has concluded and that’s what we see happening all around us. There are a number of contributing factors to the rise of our loneliness epidemic, but one key factor to consider is our cultural emphasis on productivity. Maximized personal productivity breeds disconnection with others.
Our world evaluates lives and people in general by their accomplishments. What you get done in a single day, week, month, year, and life determines your level of worth. The most productive among us are, therefore, the most worthy. This is how we justify ourselves in the absence of meaningful connection. My productivity justifies my existence. And productivity is all about achieving my own greatest good. In the absence of human connection there is no “common good” to work towards, there are only private goods to work for. As a result, this perspective puts an intense amount of pressure on us to accomplish things in order to justify our existence. We must be productive because it’s all we have.
The trouble for many of us, of course, is that life is complex and hard and accomplishments rarely come easy. Our world acknowledges that life is hard but it also tells us that “if you apply yourself, visualize your goals, believe in yourself, and commit to perpetual self-improvement” then you can master life (Noble, You Are Not Your Own, 78-79). And culture gives you all sorts of metrics to evaluate how you’re doing at that mastery. So you can track how many hours of Netflix you watch. How many calories you burn. How many steps you’ve take today. How many likes you got on social media. Our culture invites you to perpetually evaluate yourself from every angle: What’s your credit score? How many books did you read this year? How many unread emails are filling up your inbox? How much sleep did you get last night? How much weight have you gained/lost? How much time did you spend on your phone? How much money did you save? How many extracurriculars did your high school student participate in? You can track everything today – and we will talk about how technology enables all of that – but these metrics give us a sense of accomplishment or failure.
In our modern world, we live with a persistent and haunting feeling that we should always be doing something. We even ask ourselves, in those moments of quiet and unhurried living: am I forgetting something? Shouldn’t I be doing something? We live too with a perpetual and haunting sense that we haven’t done enough. As a result, we can never really rest. So, think about how we vacation. Vacation is a project to be completed and a task to maximize. After all, we feel this impending pressure to “make memories”. So, we judge the quality of our vacation by what we accomplish during it. We end up being so busy and so “productive” on our vacations that we often come home saying, “I need a vacation from my vacation.” If you life’s value is determined by how productive you are then you can never rest.
But all this productivity means that we have no time for friendships. Not real, true, enduring friendships. Because, after all, people aren’t tasks to be checked off. Friendship can’t be an item on our “to-do-list.” So, we just don’t have friends. We’re too busy to make friends, keep friends, or sometimes even to be friendly. If friendship doesn’t fit with our schedule, then it gets put on the altar. All things must be sacrificed to the god of productivity.
We’ve created, as a culture, a weird cycle: we don’t have meaningful connection and so we fill our lives with productivity to give us meaning. But the drive for productivity keeps us from building meaningful connection. And so we fulfill Jacque Ellul’s words, “Man has set out at a tremendous speed to go nowhere.” We are constantly running to find meaning and never getting any closer to it, because we don’t make friendship a priority.
In addition, one last thought is worth mentioning here: our productivity doesn’t just keep us from befriending others, it actually leads us towards a hyper-competitiveness with others. One way to evaluate how productive I am is to compare myself to others. Did I accomplish more? Am I more established in my career than them? Are my kids better off than theirs? Do we take better vacations than them? And social media fuels this comparison, propelling us into a tiresome need to curate an online image of ourselves to impress our “friends”. I must be productive and accomplished. If I am more productive than you, more accomplished, then I have value!
The Lord, of course, does not evaluate our worth based on our productivity. He calls us to rest and gives us worth in union with Him. The church has something to offer a burnt-out and exhausted world striving for value through accomplishment. But we have to be willing to live differently if we hope to make that offer compelling to the world.
P.S. If you’d like to read more about all of this and its theological/anthropological consequences, read Alan Noble’s brilliant book You Are Not Your Own. It is easily one of my top ten favorite books of all time and I am indebted to him for much of this content.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 