It feels like a hard season for making things right now. I know some great writers who have gone quiet recently. Or are starving.
It’s easy to talk about productivity or discipline at times like this. But when we’re crouched at the edge of the ice, feeding the fires to try to last through the darkness, we need something more.
Nearly three months ago, when I launched my first Substack essay into the void, I just wanted to write about building a life that feels good on the inside. Meaning.
But the biggest unlock in my own life towards creating meaning has been stepping back into creating at all: writing and art, sharing my ideas with other humans, and connecting. So I want to write about doing that too.
But here’s the problem: every time we try to talk about doing things, it so easily collapses back into Productivity — this shallow drumbeat call to Do Things, Check Off Boxes, and Produce Stuff, so presumably someday life will be good, because of all the stuff you’ll get for your stuff. Good job.
Hustle culture and I aren’t friends. At best, it gives me that sort of nose-wash feeling from getting water up your nose in the pool.
So I don’t wanna be that person. I don’t wanna be a productivity guru, and yet we have to talk about continuing the project, making things, and creating. But we don’t want to lose the internal metric, the internal sense of what makes it valuable in the first place.
Enter Ken Wilber
I’ve been reading The Marriage of Sense and Soul by Ken Wilber. I’m only about halfway through, but here’s what I’ve gotten so far. He’s creating an overarching map of reality to help explain why our cultural values are so screwed up.
Ken Wilber’s project here is to connect science with religion.
To do this, he envisions a 2 x 2 grid mapping reality.
On the Right side is the objective “It” dimension – things you can physically see and do empirical science on. This is the domain of science.
On the Left side is internal experience. What it feels like to be an “I” on the top half, and the social, interpersonal “We” dimension on the bottom half – respectively, the domains of art and morals. This side covers invisible inner things like feeling, thinking, agency, and meaning.
Originally, people didn’t make a distinction between art, morality, science, or the observations/experiences that came from them. For example, that’s why early philosophers did science primarily as a thought experiment without external evidence.
Muddled spheres of understanding were also why Galileo was put on trial – his observations of the stars were seen as threatening the moral domain of religion.
And the revolution of modernity was to separate the three so they could grow without implications to the others. So Galileo could keep his head, as long as he didn’t dis religion, and religion would look the other way when he did science.
This led to good stuff, like equality and human rights and justice. There were benefits.
But the downside was that science grew faster than art or morals. Eventually, with discoveries that some interior experiences could be described by external objects (like depression being partly explained by neurons and serotonin), science stopped accepting the reality of any internal dimension, at all.
It only gets to exist if you can see it with a microscope.
Remember, science deals with the Right side, visible or testable external IT things.
So as Wilber put it, “The entire interior dimension – of morals, artistic expression, introspection, spirituality, contemplative awareness, meaning and value and intentionality – were dismissed by monological science because none of them could be registered by… empirical instruments.” (p.56)
So science is like, “That stuff doesn’t really exist. I can’t find it under a microscope.”
Left side internal experiences, like meaning and values, are only allowed to matter if we can give them visible, external passports to prove their validity.
Obviously, this sucks. It gives us a very flat, feelingless, meaningless landscape to work with.
So the project of most schools of thought over the last couple hundred years has been trying to reclaim the inner dimensions of experience from science, which insists they aren’t real.
But it also has this slippery slope effect. Culturally, things only tend to seem “real and valid” if they meet Right side criteria – if they are visible in material reality.
The Slippery Slope to Productivity
So what does that mean for productivity?
Productivity is a Right-hand dimension of experience. It’s an external thing.
We can see you were productive. Your manager can see you running back and forth looking very determined all day, so you get a nice checkmark, and you get to keep your job. If you produce 47 stacks of papers today, you may even get a bigger number in your bank account, which is another thing we can see.
In fact, the goal of hustle culture is to make more stuff so that you get more stuff. It’s all external. The goal is the yacht, and the unspoken implication is that once you have the yacht, you’ll feel happy.
Of course, we all know the yacht does not make you happy, and no matter how fast you run back and forth producing stacks of papers, you’re also probably not going to get one. So you’re kind of screwed both ways.
But the important part here is that, because productivity is a visible, external metric, it is VERY easy in our current culture to see it as the only goal, the best goal.
Because only visible, external goals are real.
But it leaves us wanting.
What is the internal dimension of productivity?
Wilber argues that each exterior thing has an interior correspondence. So what’s the inner version of productivity?
We could call the internal thing that makes you do stuff discipline or willpower.
Both do similar jobs: driving you to reach towards something that will take work, that you don’t necessarily feel like, that you have to persist at for a long time.
But I think the creative project, the project of building a meaningful life that feels good on the inside, calls for more. Not just “Did you push yourself to do the thing?” or “Did you meet the metric?”
It calls for devotion.
Devotion is something that drives us to show up every day for something out of love, out of care, out of a felt sense of rightness and goodness, even if it’s not always easy to see.
Devotion is what drives us to wake up at two in the morning with a crying baby every night, even though you desperately need the sleep.
Devotion is what drives us to care for a sick family member, even though we would rather be doing anything else.
Devotion is something that we need in our creative practice because, ultimately, creativity is an act of love. It’s an act of hope, of building towards something that we can’t see. It’s sustaining the well-being of something that we can’t guarantee the ultimate state of.
What’s the difference between productivity and devotion?
I think part of what makes productivity feel shallow is that there’s no space for how it feels today. There’s no space for why you do it in this moment. It’s all future-focused.
But devotion is present and embodied. It’s something that we do now, it’s something that we feel now, and it’s something that pays us back now in the feeling that we’re creating.
If you work for hours to write something you’re hoping will draw 1,000 views, you’re anxious the whole time you’re making it. If it doesn’t work, you feel horrible after. If it does work, you still feel bad cause it wasn’t authentic, and it brings people who don’t like your other work. That affects the thing itself too. It’s a bad-vibe piece of work, it makes your life suck, and it makes the project harder to sustain, too.
But if you work away on something for hours because you love it, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s a sacrifice you’re willing to make. It might not be comfortable, but it’s something that you chose, and you know why.
You might have hope for the results, but it was never about the results. It was about showing up and dedicating your time and attention and care to the thing itself, because it’s worth it.
And building something that is worth it for its own sake is vastly more valuable, for you and for all of humanity, for everyone that thing touches, than building something that’s just a stepping stone to someplace else.
Making Things That Matter
Productivity is ultimately about meeting an external metric. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that at all. Meeting external metrics is great.
BUT.
We exist in a world where the gravitational pull of caring about external things is stronger than the pull to value the invisible, internal world that makes things MATTER.
And in the creative project, forgetting the heart of the work can be fatal.
We still need to do the thing.
But remembering WHAT YOU ARE DOING IT FOR maybe matters as much or more than just doing it in the first place.
Making things out of love, out of caring that they can go out and do good in the world… that’s the fuel that keeps the fire burning through the dark.
For more on holding the tension through hard seasons:
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