Breaking Free From Productivity Addiction

Deep Fix №16

Deep Fix is a newsletter by Alex Olshonsky exploring mental and spiritual health, addiction, work, and philosophy. Thanks for being here. If you were forwarded this email, get your own:

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Art by Igor Morski

After twelve years working in Silicon Valley, I became conditioned to operate under a deadline mindset. When I started working for myself earlier this year, one of the first things I noticed was a familiar, pesky thought:

Al, you didn’t do enough today.

The productivity ethos cuts into the very fabric of my psyche. My effectiveness as an employee and a team leader was directly correlated to how many items I could cross off on my daily to-do list. On most days, my calendar was filled with strategy meetings and 1x1’s. The time in between was spent moving through an endless barrage of emails. Toss in newsletter writing in the morning, and advisory calls related to my side-gig in the afternoons, and I barely took a moment to breathe.

Once I was a few weeks removed from my day job, I started to feel my productivity obsession in a more intimate way. I realized the torturous impact so many years of hustle had inflicted upon my body. My nervous system felt abused and battered. It was like I had just spent a decades-long sleepless night at Burning Man: I was tired, starry-eyed, and thankful for some spaciousness.

But the insidious voice was still there, barking at me like a school bully. Even on slower days of my own idyllic design—writing all morning, moving my body for a sweat at lunch, and coaching in the afternoon—I found myself doubting the merits of my “output.” 

My self-directed misgivings did not only apply to my writing or business-related tasks. I’d fret about returning Amazon packages within 30 days. Forgetting to buy eggs. Cancelling the fourth (?!) online yoga subscription I had tried. Calling back an old friend. Basic life shit. 

Tech job or not, my vexing thoughts around productivity spread like a mind virus. And then, without fail, I’d feel it in my body. A cluster of stress particles would start tap dancing in my gut, unable to disperse themselves. The stress, I felt, must be dealt with immediately—usually by checking my phone or scampering to my laptop.

I call this feeling false urgency.

Typically, I first notice false urgency as a thought such as: I only got half as much done today as I was supposed to. Then, I notice my sympathetic nervous system mobilizing with tension building in my midsection, jittery heartbeats, and clenched fists.

Yet! Thoughts almost always follow feelings. Despite the illusion that false urgency derives from a thought about “work,” there’s always more to explore, and an archeological site filled with artifacts of the soul awaits to be extricated. The feeling underneath my false urgency cuts deep. It attributes my own worthiness to how much I can get done in a day.

Western culture is run by a sense of false urgency. Work demands that we tend to our email, Slack, and calendars. Increasingly, our social lives are shifting from IRL hangouts to the online space, where we must battle against sophisticated algorithms designed to brainwash us into believing the urgency blasted in their notifications is real. Text messaging and WhatsApp culture convinces us that if we don’t respond to our homies in a timely manner, we are being inconsiderate, selfish friends.

Our bodies carry all these burdens more than we realize.

Philosophically, I’m not just an anti-productivity or leisure economy evangelist. The complexity of our civilization demands deadlines—especially when it comes to repairing our damaged biosphere and vitriolic political climate. Our personal lives, too, benefit from a healthy insistence around self-inquiry.

At the same time, I can also admit to myself that much of my life is run by urgencies that do not exist. False urgency is stress masked under the guise of responsibility. Urgency is an invention rooted in fear.

Part of why this topic is so meaningful to me is because false urgency—and the feeling of hyper-arousal—is addictive.

I’ve been sober for nearly six years. I do not miss my drugs of choice, even in the slightest. On most days, I love how I feel.

But damn, I can tell you that a part of me yearns for the high I tasted when I was balancing two jobs, buzzing on tea, pumping some cheap, monocultural electronic music on Spotify, and working my way to inbox zero.

The wiser part of me knows that living in such a state of arousal is not sustainable. That the soul is clouded by constant stimulation. That despite years of training, any felt sense of urgency is spurious at best. And most significantly, that my natural state of being, is, in fact, relaxed and slow.

Addiction is perhaps the ultimate example of false urgency run awry. It’s being unwilling—and unable—to sit with the discomfort of the present moment in our bodies, incapable of waiting until we get our next fix. It’s buying into the ego’s bluff, tricked into believing that we cannot hold whatever is arising. This belief is always false. 

One cannot think their way out of false urgency. It must be dealt with in the body, metabolized in the moment it arises. These days, when that old bastard of a feeling inevitably comes, I take a deep breath and say to myself:

I will call my ego’s bluff. I am willing to sit with this feeling forever—if that’s what it takes to wake up and know love.

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🫀Discord. I’m opening up the Deep Fix community Discord for anyone who might be curious about our dialogues, book clubs—or for anyone interested in mental health, addiction, burnout, psychedelics, or any other topic covered in this newsletter. Spearheading this community of entrepreneurs, humanitarians, lawyers, yogis, and writers is one of the highlights of my life. Right now, all community activities are free as we grow:

🌎 Dialogue. We are meeting next Wednesday to continue our dialogue around cancel culture and freedom of expression. Click here to register.

📕 Book Club. We just started reading The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein. Reply if you’d like to join the read.

🎧 DJ oLo Presents: August 2021. This is one of my favorite playlists in recent months.

🧠 To-Do Lists and the Ziegarnik Effect. A deep dive Wired article about how, despite countless apps and tools, no one has cracked the “to-do list” code. The article mentions the growing school of thought around calendar blocking versus to-do lists, as popularized by authors like Cal Newport (a DFx favorite).

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Thanks for reading Deep Fix.

I’d love to know what you think of today’s shorter essay. In what ways do you experience false urgency?

Until next time …

Get deep,

Olo

P.S… if you enjoyed this week’s missive, could you let me know by hitting the heart button below? 🖤

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