I want to be as devoted to pleasure as I am to productivity

Grief, burnout and exhaustion will give you a lot of perspective. It is one of the many experiences in life that will show you who you are, what matters to you and the kind of life you want to live, or rather what kind of life is worth suffering for.

I think a lot about our collective and modern relationship to productivity, work and optimisation. I have been a lifelong member of said cult. I have loved collecting job titles like Pokémon, paying ridiculous amounts of money for trainings, and tearing through psychology books like my life depended on it because in some ways, it felt like it did. I have drank the Kool Aid, poured it over my head and bathed myself in it.

I think a lot about the endless feedback loops that perpetuate this productivity and optimisation culture. Many of us learn that this is where our value is. It is measured in our output otherwise known as what we can provide for others, our bank accounts or number of followers. We learn to perform and we learn that the answer to fear and ‘purpose anxiety’ as Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love names it, is control.

I think a lot about how this shows up as perfectionism, self-denial, restriction and numbness. We exist only from the shoulders up, feel like we are perpetually holding a breath in and wondering why we can’t relax because somewhere along the way, we learned that there is always something better that you could be doing with your time. That you must earn your rest and that the wisdom of your body is not to be listened and trusted, but is to be overridden and pushed through to get the next task done.

When I speak of pleasure and eroticism, I never solely mean pleasure of the sexual variety. I think of lounging in the sun, deep belly laughs, feeling awe, savouring a ripe mango and letting the juice dribble down your chin, a long melting hug with a friend, being creative and whimsical, and sure, also having sex.

The trouble is that pleasure is inherently unproductive by societal definitions because it doesn’t earn us money and we might not have anything to show for it at the end of the day. To choose pleasure is to do something purely because you want to and because it feels some kind of good. When many of us aren’t taught that what we want matters, pleasure will always exist as something outside of ourselves.

This reminds me of a concept called ‘desire smuggling’ by Marcia Baczynski which essentially states: If I find it too vulnerable to ask for what I want, I will project it onto you and try to get my satisfaction through you. For example, this can look like being passive-aggressive about what you want, over-extending yourself in the hopes that the offer will be reciprocated and feeling resentful that the other person doesn’t read your mind.

We can unknowingly fall into these traps because we were never asked what we wanted or we never stayed still long enough to trust what we wanted and to learn how to receive it. It is much easier to fill the time with quite literally anything else.

Part of what can also make choosing pleasure difficult is because it tends to involve disappointing someone else, saying no to something that we would have blindly said yes to, and changing longstanding patterns. As Gilbert said on the podcast, Everything Happens with Kate Bowler, “get used to disappointing people because it’s good for everyone involved”. Disappointment need not be the end of the world.

In Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, artist and writer Tricia Hersey reminds us that the guilt we feel when we rest does not belong to us, but it is something that we’ve inherited. She writes, “Loving ourselves and each other deepens our disruption of dominant systems. They want us unwell, fearful, exhausted and without deep self-love because you are easier to manipulate when you are distracted by what is not real or true”.

It is difficult to hear desire when we’re constantly negotiating with ourselves and doing mental gymnastics over what we should be doing. If every quiet moment is interrupted by guilt or self-surveillance, we lose the stillness required to hear what we actually want.

Unfortunately and fortunately, you don’t get a prize for being the person who has sacrificed the most. As I’ve found, there is also no easy cheat code for opting out of this productivity and purpose anxiety feedback loop. However, it is a worthwhile starting point to ask “what if I took my pleasure as seriously as my work?”.