#micah 6.8 part 1: never productive enough

I haven’t done a series in a while, in fact since I did the farming series back when I launched the blog. 

But, last weekend, I was in New York City for a friends’ wedding and had some good conversation with college friends about the NYC life of profit and efficiency maximization. 

On the flight home, I re-read the second half of “The Sacred Year” in which the author, Mike Yankoski, explores what it means to live justly. 

It got me thinking about what justice means, and how it looks lived out in a very ordinary life. 

So I’m going to be posting about my own exploration of this subject over the next few weeks, starting with seeking justice with my personal consumption of food, beauty products and clothes, then in my relationship with others, my work, and finally God.

Welcome to my #micah6.8 journey. 

Businessman in shiny patent shoes clap through the station, coat tails flapping behind them as they dodge in between oblivious by-standers.

One brushes brusquely past a dark, stooped figure leaning precariously on a metal railing, a paper bag of ragged newspapers at his feet.

Trodden ticket stubs decorate the speckled grey and maroon floor, stepped over a million times by people going in a million directions.

The ceiling rattles under the weight of the incoming train, carrying with it a new load of passengers with their patent shoes and coat tails.

It sighs, then bursts forth its load in a clatter of shoes clapping across the speckled floor, coat tails trailing behind in the wind of their rush.

I stand in front of the ticket vending machine, fiddling around with my crumpled dollar bill. The machine beeps, warning me it will soon end my transaction due to inactivity.

After literally ten seconds of inactivity.

Ben reaches over and presses the “Continue” button, giving me ten extra seconds of grace.

“Yea, it’s New York. Even the machines are impatient,” he tells me. It’s meant tongue-in-cheek, but both of us catch his slight reference to his recent move to the city this past year.

We squeeze onto the little square of subway floor as he describes the harriedness of NYC life: the working through lunch breaks, the few minutes of attention span you are given before people move on to the next interesting thing, the pressure to always optimize.

I resonate.

While time in the village felt expansive and slow, time in the city felt rushed, packed into tight segments that fit nicely into Google Calendar invites.

I noticed myself getting annoyed with people who got in the way of accomplishing all the items on my Todoist for the day.

Restless when I had to spend more than a few minutes waiting without a Podcast or a book.

Frustrated by emails that cluttered my inbox, as I compulsively skimmed over them in an effort to reach the state of zero unread messages (albeit the state lasting a paltry five minutes).

And that constant nagging feeling – no matter how many emails I read through, or to-do items checked off – that I was somehow forgetting something important.

Maybe I was.

What makes for a better society?

At the Canadian Engineering Education Association conference I attended this past weekend, engineers were described as those who build a better future for all.

What exactly that “better future” was, however, wasn’t entirely clear.

Does it mean that we pursue technological advances at any cost? That we help humans do things faster, more efficiently, with less mistakes?

Is the epitome of technology when we have apps that deliver home-cooked food to our doorsteps, cars that do the driving for us, robots that clean our floors so we will never have to touch a frying pan, steering wheel or broom ever again?

And even if we get to that point and rid ourselves of every possible inefficiency, what will we do with all that free time? Play chess, do more taekwondo?

When my sister was enraptured by Tim Ferriss and the concept of paring down your number of work hours to a minimum, something didn’t sit right in my spirit.

And sure enough, at age 40, and at the pinnacle of “success” and ultimate productivity, Tim is asking some of these questions that really don’t go away no matter how productive and efficient you get.

In fact, at the conference, when chatting with Stephen Mattucci, the National Coordinator of the Canadian Education Engineering Challenge about the next paradigm shifts in engineering, he said this (paraphrased) –

With the Industrial Revolution in the 17th and 18th century, the paradigm shift was to increase production.

Then, we discovered that this mass production was harming our environment, so the 20th century ushered in the era of sustainability, where now we were engineering with the environment in mind.

But now, in the 21st century, we think the paradigm shift is going to be – technological stewardship.

The question will not just be: CAN we do it, but SHOULD we do it?

With the unprecedented growth in science funding, publications and new technologies hitting the market, we are asking ourselves if all this “production” is actually meaningfully contributing to a better society. 

Or if are simply churning out more text on paper to add one more publication line to our resumes to bring us one more level higher in the academic hierarchy just so we can administrate the people below us to churn out more text on paper?

(Not being cynical at all towards the never-ending pressure to publish in academia…)

I do think, however, that if we are not mindful about where this technological bubble is growing towards and simply continue to develop technology for the maximization of productivity, we will find ourselves trapped under the weight of what we have built.

Only running harder to keep up with the constant stream of productivity hacks, newest technology, or social networking apps (and don’t forget to do your 5 minute meditation on HeadSpace!),  like the Instagram infinite scroll you can never get to the bottom of.

But, then if we are not maximizing for productivity or efficiency, what are we maximizing for?

One of my favorite Hebrew words שָׁלוֹם is described this way by Matthew Richard Schlimm in ’70 Hebrew Words every Christian should know’:

Shalom is ‘fullness,’ ‘completeness.’

So it’s well-being. It’s prosperity; not in a cheap…making a profit sense of possibility, but in a deep sense of ‘my wellbeing is integrated with the wellbeing of all around me, human and non-human and the earth on which our lives depend’.

Justice is also described in a similar way in “The Sacred Year” – as the flourishing of everyone because everything else is flourishing.

If I want to live a just and rightly related life, I need to seek to live just and rightly related days, Michael Yankoski goes on to say in his book.

But what exactly do those just and rightly related days look like?

Not entirely sure except that it should leave me with more than just feeling like today wasn’t productive enough.

And so this is where we begin our journey – with an aching dissatisfaction of things the way they are, yet expectant hope that as Micah promised, He will indeed show us what is good.

As I start this series, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic! If this piece resonated with you in any way – the drive to always be productive, the desire to know what all your work is amounting to, or any musings you may have regarding society’s general intolerance for inefficiencies – please send me a message.

My writing hopefully serves as a jumping board for us to all start thinking more intentionally about this topic, and it is most fulfilling for me when the writing then kickstarts actual conversation in community 🙂