Some concerns are infinitely more interesting than their responses. One such concern started to echo around the web in the early days of the Covid-19 lockdowns and has actually ended up being increasingly frantic in the febrile weeks that have actually followed. The concern was this: How shall we remain efficient when the world is going to hell?
Performance, or the lack of it, has actually become the specific metric of choice for dealing with the worldwide econo-pathological clusterfuck of the Corona Crisis. How should we self-optimize when we’re suddenly needing to satisfy our deadlines with our roommates, kids, and inner critics shrieking in the background? If we’re lucky sufficient to be able to shelter in place and we’re not utilizing that time to introduce podcasts and personal jobs and life-hack our way to some cargo-cult pastiche of normality, are we somehow letting the side down?
These are not useful concerns. They are ethical and philosophical questions, and they’re all the more intriguing because of how obviously unimportant they are on the scale of things. When I check in with loved ones far, I normally get an upgrade on how efficient they have or have not managed to be considering that we last spoke. “Efficiency” is not a synonym for health, or for safety, or for peace of mind. But as a precarious millennial who for the past 10 years has addressed every cautious query about my health and wellbeing with a rundown of just how much work I got done that day, I do comprehend the confusion.
It’s barely unexpected that many people are processing this enormous, unknowable collective catastrophe by getting away into smaller, everyday emergency situations. A crisis you produce on your own, after all, is a crisis you might be able to manage. Frantic performance is a fear response. It’s a fear action for 21 st-century humans in general and millennial humans in particular, as we have actually jointly awoken from the American dream with an odd headache and a stacks of expenses to pay. My entire generation found out ruthless work was the method to deal with the rolling crisis, with the mood of impending collapse and financial insecurity that was the elevator music of our entire youth– the relentless stress in between trying to save yourself and attempting to save the world, between desperate aspiration and real hope.
Right through the white-knuckle flight of my twenties and beyond, I clung to work as a method of protecting myself when I was scared, when I was harmed, when the