“A…silent assumption that leads to anxiety and depression is ‘My worth as a human being is proportional to what I have achieved in my life.’ This attitude is at the core of Western culture and the Protestant work ethic. It sounds innocent enough. In fact, it is self-defeating, grossly inaccurate, and misleading.” -from Feeling Good by David D. Burns, MD

One of the many sad ironies of the appropriation of Stoicism on the part of legions of Silicon Valley tech bros is that it fundamentally trips over the core ideal at the heart of the Greco-Roman school of philosophy.

It is this: virtue — ie our ability to be fundamentally good, decent human beings — is the sole good in life, and everything that is outside of our control — including our wealth, our social status, and ultimately our work itself — is as ‘nothing’ to us.

At first, this sounds absurd. After all, while our wealth, social status and job may not be entirely under our control, the odds are that if we work hard, find ways to be more productive, and take pride in our efforts, we will be rewarded with more money and better jobs.

Moreover, every productivity writer on the market today buys into the idea that being a productive worker is an intrinsic good that gives meaning to our lives. You hear this now in almost every podcast or blog discussing startup culture. Business is no longer something we do to make money, but part of humanity’s great search for meaning. They couldn’t possibly be wrong.

And yet the relationship between productivity and happiness, when you look at, murky at best. Worse still, the belief there is a direct, causal relationship between the two can lead to psychological disaster.

To better understand why, consider Mike. He is very good at his job, is handsomely rewarded for it, and has held a position at his company for a long time. He is always reminded in performance evaluations and from his bosses about how valuable he is to the company. His family looks to him as a source of strength and security.

Eventually, through no fault of its own, market forces fundamentally disrupt the company’s industry. Soon, they are forced to downsize. Though it pains Mike’s bosses, they must let go of some of their most talented employees, and this includes Mike.

Mike, however, has spent his life accruing skills specifically for his industry, part of what made him so great at his job. What is worse, he is in his 50s, not the easiest time to learn a new set of abilities or get a job with comparable pay. So Mike, now out of work, has to take some less glamorous work for significantly less money.

Of course, none of this is in any way Mike’s fault. The disruption to Mike’s industry was quick and unexpected, along with its consequences. Because Mike had for so long attached a sense of worth and self-esteem to being good at his job, he is devastated, and later suffers significant bouts of depression, anxiety and feelings of worthlessness.

This, as you know, is not an uncommon story. While we’ve all heard or seen or even experienced it before, we refuse to accept its message: your worth as a human being does not derive from your work which, while fulfilling, is often beyond our control. In fact, the entire concept of “worth” itself is dangerous and unhelpful, as Dr. Burns hammers home in the cognitive behavioural therapy bible, Feeling Good:

Realize that “worthy” and “worthless” are just empty concepts when applied to a human being. Like the concept of your “true self,” your “personal worth” is just meaningless hot air. Dump your “worth” in the garbage can! (You can put your “true self” in there too if you like.) You’ll find you’ve got nothing to lose! Then you can focus on living in the here and now instead. What problems do you face in life? How will you deal with them? That’s where the action is, not in the elusive mirage of “worth.”

We can’t always control whether we lose our job or how quickly we can find a new one, but we can control how we choose to respond to these kinds of obstacles — and that’s where real purpose and meaning resides.

But we don’t want to hear that because accepting this truth means asking a lot of complicated questions about our society, in which work is glorified as the pinnacle of self-expression, and personal earnings are viewed as a measure of merit and esteem.

Instead, we would instead read about buy into the idea that success in our work life is a merely a matter of being more productive. If you just follow the ‘right’ set of algorithms or rules, you too can achieve ‘success’ in your work life, along with fame and recognition and a fat bank account.

This is why the personal productivity industry is booming today, and why a small army of snake oil salespeople are successfully pushing the idea that individual fulfilment is only a seminar, book, or set of lifehacks away.

We can even go bigger here: the idea that our work is our worth is the fundamental lie that drives most of us in the West, a useful lie which lets obscenely wealthy executives peddle the idea of starving millennials sleep-depriving their way through a hard-hustling gig economy as the route to personal fulfillment.

Your work is not your worth was originally published in Against Productivity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For a table to exist, we need wood, a carpenter, time, skillfulness, and many other causes. And each of these causes needs other causes to be. The wood needs the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and so on. The carpenter needs his parents, breakfast, fresh air, and so on. And each of those things, in turn, has to be brought about by other causes and conditions. If we continue to look in this way, we’ll see that nothing has been left out. Everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table. Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree, and the clouds, we can see the table.

Mainstream productivity culture, however, sees the world differently. For productivity hucksters, your success, usually defined by what you accomplish in life, depends wholly on you and you alone. Are you distracted? Are you focused? Are you living your life to the fullest? Then try doing X, Y, Z and success will follow. Nothing is impossible. You can make your wildest dreams of success come true.

The role of other people in your productivity, when it is mentioned at all, is usually either to ‘boost your social happiness’ or to take work off your hands in the form of delegation.

In the language of most productivity literature, success — even the unreal, 1000x success of the unicorn tech startup — happens in a kind of social vacuum.

But this negates the fact your ‘success,’ even defined along the crass, self-interested lines of productivity culture, is still socially determined. To be exceptional in your field by definition requires others to be mediocre. It also needs others to recognize you as extraordinary.

Similarly, to be wealthy beyond imagination requires millions of others to be much less well off, and requires millions to want to purchase your product.

On a smaller scale, higher productivity means being more efficient at achieving some end, which is almost always socially determined. Maybe you want to be better at your job, which involves impressing your boss, and making your CV more attractive to employers, on whom your financial security relies. The social is inescapable.

It is also rarely an obedient servant to your success, for reasons I pointed out last week. You might be the most productive person at your work, which doesn’t lead to recognition or higher wages but — surprise! — more work. Or you might be extremely productive in an industry that suddenly finds itself obsolete. Or your brilliant service to a company may be, as is often the case, rewarded by finding out your position has been made redundant.

Nor is your success an intrinsic moral good, despite some of the pablum that accompanies tech startup pitch decks. Surprisingly, that millions may suddenly demand your product does not necessarily mean your product is improving lives, something true for potato chips and smartphones, Twitter and Uber.

The idea that popular demand for a product is a vote of moral confidence in a company’s ‘mission’ is one of the more dangerous delusions of our age, and one that traces its roots, in my opinion, directly to a lot of the productivity bullshit Silicon Valley bros ingest every day.

Success, whether that means untold wealth, or winning the Booker Prize, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires a social whole with failed business people, unpublished authors, and perfectly ordinary people who are not visionaries, who are not leaders in their field, who are not surgeons or scientists, who don’t read 100 books a year or follow the tried and true advice of Charlie Munger. Before you denigrate these so-called ‘mediocre people’ in your latest productivity post on Medium, realize that your chimeric success would be impossible without them.

Why there is no such thing as ‘personal’ productivity was originally published in Against Productivity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the face of it, the concept of productivity should be simple: how to do consistently high quality work as efficiently as possible.

Despite the variety of productivity systems on offer such as GTD, the Pomodoro Technique, Kanban etc., the ingredients are all pretty much the same across the board.

When you work, just work. Turn off notifications and use a timer. Keep to-do lists and break down big projects into smaller, easily executed steps. Take regular breaks. Do harder work when you’re more alert.

In theory, then, you should just pick a relatively sound system and make tweaks until you get into a good rhythm, and then voila! You’re more productive.

And yet in practice, what tends to happen is people will try one approach for a while and then discard it when they read about something new, only to repeat this process a few months or even weeks later. And every day there is someone with a new blog or list on how you can be even more productive.

To understand why this happens, we need to first look at the concept in behavioural psychology known as the Hedonic Treadmill. Wiki defines it as “the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”

For example, if you suddenly start to make a lot more money than you used to, you’ll feel happier for a little while, but that happiness will dissipate as your expectations of what you can do with that money rise as well. Sure, you can suddenly afford to buy your own house for the first time in your adult life, but it doesn’t take long after that before you’re pining for a detached unit right in the heart of downtown instead of your duplex in the suburbs.

Productivity operates along similar lines. Maybe you decide to start keeping a daily to-do list, setting a timer and taking regular breaks. You suddenly feel like you’re getting a lot more done in a shorter period than you used to. Great!

But no long after you begin to wonder: how do you know for sure you couldn’t be even more productive? And what if you’re not as productive as you think you are? Maybe your co-workers, who never seem to web surf as much as you, are more efficient (it doesn’t cross your mind that the reason they don’t slack off is because they need a lot more time to do the same amount of work).

And what about those days when your productivity system breaks down completely, and you end up refreshing Tweetdeck for two and a half hours instead of writing that outline you’re supposed to finish? Surely there’s a system out there somewhere that will also prevent you from ever straying off track?

The problem I think is that for most of us who are not in the widget-making business, where productivity is literally about producing more things faster, productivity is extremely difficult to measure. For example, you may already be extremely productive relative to the average worker but not know it. Meanwhile, your productivity means you are given more work to do, causing you to fall behind, making you further question your productivity!

Or maybe you have managed to get a lot of work done in a shorter period, but believe your work could be of higher quality (which is true for nearly everyone on earth). Or perhaps you think you have gaps on your CV that you want to fill, or maybe you question why you don’t go home every single day glowing with a sense of mission and accomplishment and happiness and yadda yadda yadda.

Today’s productivity hucksters cleverly take advantage of this inbuilt uncertainty surrounding the concept of productivity by tying it to incredibly wealthy and successful CEOs and investors, such as those on the list I talked about last week — Ray Dalio, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk etc. The idea here is that there is some system that will literally make you as successful as one of these insanely wealthy outliers.

Shitty listicles with titles like “The 5 Things Elon Musk Does Before Every Meeting” propagate the idea that Musk’s success comes from his finely tuned and expertly executed productivity system, and not something murkier like, say, winning a random variation lottery that stretches back to the success of PayPal.

This will, of course, encourage you to keep consuming productivity systems/hacks/tricks garbage until you feel you are one day reasonably close that same, impossible-to-reach ballpark, a day that will almost certainly never arrive. Along the way, you will constantly agonize whether you’re working hard enough and seek out as many productivity hacks as possible to convince yourself you are.

The reality is you’re far better off just finding a system that works for you, adjusting it as you go along, and accepting that it may bear little outcome on the future of your career once you separate out myriad other factors like your industry, your boss, your geographical location etc. More on this some other time…

Time to get off the Productivity Treadmill was originally published in Against Productivity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When most of us think of ‘productivity,’ we imagine to do lists and project management software, David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

This is still principally true, and much of that productivity culture is intact. But with the rise of the ubiquitous tech startup company and the emergence of the gig economy, the concept of the importance and definition of productivity has changed. The scope of the literature has, in the age of neuropseudoscience and behavioural psychology, morphed into something more totalitarian.

In fact, productivity culture has blossomed into a church, and like any church, it maintains a consistent set of beliefs about the world. The cornerstone of this new faith lies in the unlimited power of individual agency, which will not only improve your life but bend the world around you, Matrix-like, to suit your will.

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it,” said Steve Jobs, arguably one of the Church’s principal (unwitting) founders. “You can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

To that end, the Church of Productivity holds that the quality of our lives — which is measured, of course, by our social and financial status — is entirely determined by the decisions we make as individuals every day. These decisions can make us more efficient, help us overcome personal obstacles, and translate big ideas into concrete achievements.

The trick, however, is to find the appropriate mental framework with which to make these decisions. We might call this framework a ‘productivity system,’ but that is no longer ambitious enough. Today, we call it a ‘mental model.’ These models are process-oriented, and if carefully designed and religiously adhered to, they will help protect our work from ‘bias’ and ‘cognitive errors,’ and unreflective ‘System 1 thinking.’ For this reason, they will sometimes run counter to conventional wisdom about the best course of action.

Critically, these models are also meant to take into account random variation or luck, whose effects on our outcomes are merely additional inputs in the system. In fact, the Church of Productivity has little regard for the influence of chance on outcomes, as it diminishes the power of our agency, a view summed up well by Peter Thiel in his lecture, “You are not a lottery ticket.” Random variation and the survivor’s bias are, in the Church of Productivity, a sucker’s game.

Who are the Church of Productivity’s patron saints? There are many of them, and some will no doubt be familiar to you — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Tim Ferriss, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett and, of course, Steve Jobs. The work habits of these enormously wealthy people, no matter how trivial, have been endlessly pored over by legions of lucre-minded followers with their tiny consultancies and Medium blogs, as well as non-stop fawning coverage from the likes of Business Insider, Inc and Fast Company. They, of course, mean to convince you that by emulating the processes of these CEOs and startup founders, you too will enjoy the fruits of their success. And trust me: this shit is everywhere if you know where to look.

But the Church of Productivity is not merely a set of instructions on how to work. It is also, increasingly, a school of ethics. The Church, for example, has an affinity with Stoicism, the Greco-Roman philosophical school which emphasizes accepting your present circumstances and limiting your circle of concern to matters entirely under your direct control. However, the Church tends to strip out the pesky bits of Stoic thinking that involve dedicating your life to furthering the public good, or the altruistic elements of Stoic virtue. Instead, this Startup Stoicism is yet another mental model, “built,” as Tim Ferriss put in it 2009, “for action, not endless debate.”

As an entrepreneur, you can harness Stoic tricks to steel yourself against the irrational fear of things that are not under your control, and train you to endure hardship for a greater good. As Ferriss puts it, Stoicism allows you to “practice what you fear, whether a simulation in your mind or in real-life. Then you, your company, and your employees will have little left to keep you from thinking and acting big.”

And if people such as citizens, regulators, the working poor, react negatively to your ‘acting big,’ that is merely an obstacle to be turned over, an element that is outside of your control and therefore ‘nothing to you,’ to quote the Stoic writer Epictetus. You’ve got to keep your eyes on the prize: an IPO, a buyout, another startup.

The allure of productivity, driven by the pervasive scientism of the present age, is that by surrendering to a system we can achieve what we want in life. There’s nothing inherently wrong about this, of course. And to some degree, this line of thinking is essential for entrepreneurs, who must find a way to contend with incredible risk, self-doubt, and uncertainty.

The problem is that the Modern Church of Productivity of Silicon Valley does not permit the idea that human beings — and that includes startup founders — are far more than individual agents on a solo mission for endless growth and profound wealth, but part of a greater social whole. Steve Jobs realization — that you can influence the entire world and get them to buy your shit — is also a grave and awe-inspiring power, one that should come with tremendous responsibility and considerable care. The obsession with disruption or market monopolies as intrinsic goods ignores the incredible social consequences. The accumulation of massive wealth that follows a successful startup never occurs in a social vacuum, but almost always affects the individual lives of countless unseen millions.

Sure, many startup founders will justify the public interest of their ‘missions’ with the claim that they are only giving the public what they want, whether Uber cabs or Airbnb rooms or smartphones or whatever and that the attendant disruption to local economies is not under their control and therefore not their concern. And yes, some tech company founders are, on the face of it, sincerely moved by the belief their product or idea will make the world a better place.

But startup productivity culture — and the voluminous aspirational self-improvement literature that accompanies it — is fundamentally predicated on the idea that the sole unit of motivation, influence and concern is the Betterment of the Self. For the Church of Productivity, there is no productivity that is not also not profoundly and exclusively personal. This is capitalism, after all. Owners own, the fewer, the better, and workers produce, the less well-paid and the more anonymised, the better.

That’s why I want to use this space to explore, expose and critique the culture, in part to get a better understanding of the roots of tech capitalism’s unique brand of megalomania, disregard for rules and regulations, and rampant self-interest. In doing so, we might begin to understand the insidious motivations and egotistical instincts of Silicon Valley.

If you want to know why Silicon Valley is evil, you need to understand startup productivity culture was originally published in Against Productivity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.