Since arriving at the University a little over a year ago, I have heard far too many people preface their weekend experience with “Well, I was not as productive as I would have hoped, but…” Even if the rest of the story is comprised of the most fantastic nocturnal escapades, it is fettered by an ineluctable and socially induced guilt over feeling too good, similar to the guilt about looking too good that precludes women from accepting a compliment in polite company (a norm aptly presented and lambasted by the irrepressible Amy Schumer). In the United States, though most manifestly at large, prestigious institutions such at the University, there is a sense that one must maintain a veneer of professionalism and decry revelry by verbally slapping oneself on the wrist at every admission of participation in, much less unbridled enjoyment of, a social activity.
In a previous column, I wrote about our flawed notion of success in the United States, which is closely tied to the focus on overwork and materialism. These values, in turn, are founded on Puritan values central to the founding of the American state, which link hard work to salvation and consequently promote a culture of constant productivity. An axiom of American professional culture is thus the Christian idea that “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.” The pressure to consistently be doing something is deeply ingrained in the American mindset: we tout busyness as a requisite for good business, and dismiss leisure as laziness, despite the fact that many countries that provide their workers with generous paid leave are in good economic health (Germany and Austria, for example).
Our obsession with productivity is exacerbated by the advent of digital technology and the mechanization of menial labor, which ostensibly allows for more time to produce important things but really just makes products of human labor intangible and therefore unsatisfying. You can perpetually work on your resume or your essay or your scholarship application and it will never be “done”: the deadline determines the final product, rather than an inherent finishing point. Computers and digital technology take irreversibility and finality — through the backspace, the control+Z — out of mental work, and instantaneous, online means of communication allow for a near-constant stream of notifications and missives that reinforce the notion that you should always be working on something.
This leads to a drive to at least seem as though we are constantly doing something of worth, which is necessarily related to work. All this does is attach guilt — like a shadow — to any activity that doesn’t pertain to work, remorse like a small dog trotting behind us as we lead it — leashed — to the bars on the Corner. It is perhaps this guilt that prompts many to drink until oblivion, creating a strict binary between the diurnal Puritanical work fiend and the overindulgent Epicurean on the weekend. The stress of believing fun and leisure are imprudent when there is work to be done — and that there is always work to be done — is not only psychologically unhealthy, but may lead to erratic and deleterious behavior as we try and fail to elude the insidious voice in the back of our heads that urges us to get back on the gerbil wheel.
We must abandon the unrealistic conception that we need to perma-work, and in doing so shed the disingenuousness of qualifying fun and relaxation with what we “should” have done, and throwing a filter of self-reproach over pleasant memories. School and extracurricular activities require and deserve a good deal of work and dedication, but not suffering. You should devote time and energy to both, but it need not be excruciating, nor need you feel that you must sacrifice your social life in the pursuit of some nebulous professional “salvation.”
College — and life, in general — teaches you to choose. Classes, friends, an academic — and possibly professional — concentration; the learning curve is steep but hopefully most reach the crest. Qualifying social activity with the retrospective imperative to work not only impinges on the memory of the activity, but also undermines your respect for yourself and your ability to choose. Own your choices — if you revelled, you revelled, and you “should have” been doing nothing other than what you deemed fitting at the time. If you really do need to work, then go work. Don’t live a half-life of “should-be-elsewhere”s. Stop qualifying.
Tamar Ziff is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at t.ziff@cavalierdaily.com.
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