The Pressure Pressure ofof Productivity Productivity The
It’s official. If you don’t come out of quarantine fluent in Spanish, a prodigy on piano and an expert on baking focaccia bread, you’re a disgrace.
Now for the touchy part … dare I say it? You don’t have to be doing loads of extra schoolwork. Getting ahead for next year would be great, but don’t feel guilty for not doing all that you possibly can. You don’t have to be reading both Moby Dick and Dracula. You don’t have to be doing loads of those online courses that your teacher has been talking about. At the crest of the pandemic, for now, school has been an issue for many. Though online school surges and swashes in a seemingly endless wave of routine even despite the coronavirus, it is the implications of our interrupted school year that is the most worrying.
Even my parents seem to be outdoing me with their productiveness. My Mother’s sawing can be heard in the back of my online classes and while her panelled bedroom does look lovely, I must question why I haven’t even gotten round to hoovering my room yet. Quarantine has flooded the internet with this obscure obsession: productivity. Incessantly, there seems to be this idea that all our time needs to be spent bettering ourselves, picking up new hobbies, and continuing to prove our worth even during a global pandemic. What is this craze for productivity? Is it a source of competition? A distraction?
I’m not talking about online school. I’m talking about those thick, heavy university courses that seems to ooze out of your computer screen and weigh your eyelids down. The type that fills you with daydreams of abandoning all academia and moving Perhaps, the current artwork by Raz Latif to some far-off country discontent with ourselves as a chalet girl. Just is a diversion from the don’t put yourself anxiety that the through that. Save that coronavirus is causing. joy for later. This type Largely, this pursuit has of academia has always been tangible, now become a source of it only has been made anxiety for many, me more intense. With more included. Online time to be online, courses to get into populations have begun to university are not the take notice of the endless be all and end all. flaunting of online lives. Although they may be Floundering aimlessly in a our saving grace after sea of uncertainty, this is the madness of cancelled exams, they’re not there to be a something to hold one to, an incentive to prove themselves shackle around our necks. as equally talented and elite. Even knitting your own masks has become a competition online! There is more to enjoy during quarantine than just getting things done and out of the way. Just as we may never have this much spare time again for productive endeavors, it’s very likely that we may never have this much time to do nothing. Summer term at St George’s is usually so hectic that we don’t get to enjoy the warming weather or the picturesque gardens around this time of year without the looming shadow of exams.
Despite the personal sources of the pressure to be productive, there are certainly outward factors. When articles remind us once again that “Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine” or that “Isaac Newton invented calculus while social distancing,” we could do well to remember that some of the best discoveries have been made by simple observation or laziness. I like to advise myself, as I walk by the forgotten dishes in the sink again, that Penicillin was discovered by Fleming in an unwashed petri dish.
In fact, free time at any point is usually taken up by revision or fretting over school. Days taken off are filled with anxieties of missed classes. Christmas holidays are filled with preparations for mocks. Easter holidays are spent on exam revision. When was the last time that students genuinely got a few weeks without deadlines?
In the rush of outwards factors in this pressure to be productive, one thing is particularly disturbing to me. Ridiculous amounts of weight loss ads are flooding Instagram and every social media platform. Every second post is a transformation of some teenage girl washing up on the explore page, or people on their stories showing pretentious smoothies that are guaranteed to help you “drop ten pounds in two weeks”. Come on, people. Haven’t we moved beyond this?
The answer: a long time. Come to the dark side and take a break. Having had our exams cancelled, our last few days at school trampled upon, and our summer holidays quite possibly tainted, I must say that I think we all deserve one.
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Jessica H, L6
