Unproductive note on productivity
"If you don't like shit but it's all around you, that rather means the shit likes you." (not mine)
Looking through all of the productivity tips and motivational comments on LinkedIn, I get the impression that people are trying to convince themselves that they can stay productive in a job they have no interest in. It's like you're continuously attempting to hack yourself — to push your mind to think of issues it doesn't want to, to do things you'd never started if you were free to decide.
I recall a teammate who was so excited about our projects that he could spend long evenings in the office and come back the next day with fresh ideas to discuss. That lasted until he stopped caring about the job for reasons I don't quite understand. In order to keep up with the work, he began to experiment with all of these cucumber techniques, which allowed him to carry on for a few months more. He ultimately left, and I haven't heard from him since then. Something clearly happened, so his job started to feel like a horrible waste of life.
I recall when I was ten years old and my father came home with a brand new Pentium 1. The computer smelled like magic. It was so thrilling just to mess around with the machine, write a few lines of text in an editor, then start with Borland Pascal, Delphi, C, and finally C++. It never felt like work, if you know what I mean. Some 25 years later, the situation appeared to have reversed. If I received a new request to handle, I opened my task list and wrote down something like "let's think of this and that" with a date appointed. In the end, I found myself with a mess of tasks whose only objective was to make me feel miserable every time I looked at the list. That is not normal, is it? Even if you use all of these Jedi techniques to get shit done, keep your inbox empty, and prioritize here and there, it will not improve your mental health since it does not contribute to your feeling of self-completeness. The shit will never get done because there is a hell more shit than you can personally handle.
Something essential is being lost along the journey from childhood to where we found ourselves suffering with empty daily rituals. After all, why not simply do what you're designed for? Connect to your roots and rediscover the forgotten nerve of life from when nothing seemed particularly wrong and you talked to the World face-to-face, and the World used to respond. If we make it a habit to calibrate our present state of mind with those past days, won't it feel differently?