Clarity over Productivity
What if the world does not need your productivity, but your clarity?
After dealing with severe procrastination issues during high school, productivity became my coping mechanism.
My worth became fused with output, my identity merged with achievement, until I could no longer distinguish between what I do and who I am.
This poem emerged from my own untangling from the religion of productivity, the black hole of busyness and the machinery of more.
What if what the world doesn’t need our productivity, but our clarity?
“From the Emptiness
Of Non-Being,
The Mystic Pearl
Crystallizes
In effortless Transformation,
Seen not with Eyes
But with Spirit,
In Inner Silence.”
Clarity over Productivity
“How are you?” they ask,
“Busy”, we reply.
In the religion of productivity,
We have built cathedrals of busyness,
Worshipping at the altar of output,
Mistaking motion for meaning.
Never in human history
Have we produced so much.
The more efficient our tools became,
The busier we declare ourselves to be.
Society rewards what can be counted,
Not what truly counts.
We produce more ESG reports than ever
While forests turn to ash.
For years, I've been caught
In productivity's black hole—
A gravitational pull so strong
That no light or joy could escape.
I kneeled before the god
Of getting things done,
Using productivity as my talisman
Against the wild uncertainty of being.
Productivity became my coping mechanism,
My escape from life's raw uncertainty—
A futile attempt to control the uncontrollable:
Time, mortality, and relationships.
My worth became fused with output,
My identity merged with achievement,
Until I could no longer distinguish
Between what I do and who I am.
What if our busyness
Is not a badge of honour
But a veil of distraction,
Obscuring what truly matters?
The dying rarely wish
They had answered more emails,
Filed more reports,
Attended more meetings.
Look deeply into the mirror.
Do you see joy in your eyes?
Is compassion the undercurrent
Of your daily actions?
Or do you work to flee from silence,
To escape the whispers of mortality,
To find yourself worthy
In the eyes of the other?
Productivity is a raft,
But we've forgotten the shore.
What if what the world needs
Is not your productivity,
But your aliveness?
Your full, unfiltered presence?
Perhaps it time to choose
Clarity over productivity,
Presence over perpetual motion,
Human beings over human doings.
So step outside the machinery of more.
Speak with the wind.
Press your hands into the living soil.
Recognise that you do not exist without the other.
This is not about working hard,
It's about being soft—
Like water finding its way through stone,
Not by force, but by persistent presence.
Let your actions flow naturally
Like a stream finding the ocean,
Neither rushed nor restrained,
In perfect accord with what is.
I know it's a privilege to pause,
To step outside the wheel of doing.
Yet, out of stillness a clarity arises
That no productivity hack can match.
Be the clarity
You want to see in the world.
A more beautiful productivity
Will naturally follow.
“With the Return to the Primal, to the Root, to where Non-Being and Being are One again, the World’s Hurly-Burly grows quiet.”
Beautiful Tijn. I can't think of a better motivation to slow down than to experience more clarity, and live it