They say we live in a secular country, but whoever says that has not encountered the productivity gurus or the stationery YouTubers. bullet journal, intermittent fasting, hobonichi roof, cold showers at five in the morning“atomic habits“, journaling until you end up with blisters on your hands… let’s be clear: productivity and growth aspire to function as civil religions.
Therefore, perhaps it is time to look for an old-fashioned way out, one inspired by Saint Augustine.
The cult of productivity
I know that talking about ‘civil religion’ may seem exaggerated, but the truth is that a very specific aspirational narrative has been normalized: one based on self-optimization. And it’s not all those things that I described above (getting up early, diet, metrics, discipline, etc…), it’s that not achieving it has become a ‘moral failure’.
If you make a mistake, if you don’t arrive, if you don’t achieve it… it’s because you didn’t make the effort, you didn’t organize yourself, you’re not good enough. An example much discussed in recent days are all those readers who, given the evidence that they are not going to reach their “reading challenge” of the year, decide to discard books that they would like to read and prioritize short books in order to reach the numbers that had been marked.
Error has become something we cannot afford.
But Augustine did not agree.
Louis Comfort Tiffany
But, of course, St. Augustine had its moments. One of the most brilliant people of the late Roman Empire, Augustine of Hippo was a ‘pearl‘ in his youth and early maturity. But it quickly became one of Christianity’s sharpest swords.
That, translated, means that he did not agree with many.
He has not only written some of the greatest works of universal literaturebut he worked to destroy (theologically, philosophically and literally) Manichaeans, Donatists and Pelagians. That war changed Western thinking, but I don’t think anyone imagined it would be essential to defending ourselves from the productivity gurus.
Saint Augustine vs productivity gurus
“If I’m wrong, I exist” (“If I fail, add“), wrote the saint of Hippo in book
That is, the idea that a mistake is not only a stigma: it is a piece of information, a learning, a reminder that we are human, but we are on the way.
We could say that error is also productive (and there are people who defend it); but that’s not the point. The point is that, against what Byung-Chul calls the “performance society” (compared to the self-demand that is sold as freedom, but leads to self-exploitation), compared to the spiritual turn of your trusted technobro, there is an even deeper dimension: the right to be and be without the chains that bind us to the productive system.
In a world that asks for “performance” and “utility” to have personal value, Augustine exposes that ancient Christian tradition that says that the ontological value of the person does not depend on anything; that even in the worst of failure, we are worth exactly the same.
Because, pay attention to the fact, when Agustín talks about existing he is not just talking about existing. It talks about doing it, about knowing that you exist and about loving those two realities as a non-productivist theory of self.
Image | Xataka
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