Is sleeping in valid?
I will get to the sleeping in part, but let me start with the bullet journaling industry. Like many ventures that belong to the Productivity trope, bullet journaling is an industrialized, capitalist obsession for control and productivity. The meticulously noting down of tasks and carefully quantifying daily behaviors as indicators of one's quality of life. Such a compulsion comes from the oppressive mentality of the industrialization era, but why hardly anyone questions the motivation behind these contents?
Who cares
Our society's enthusiasm for Productivity is constructed by the westernized, industrialized, capitalistic zeal for profits which sees humans as machines for work. This system tells us that we are inherently valuable as long as we contribute to society. Work is what "moves humanity forward", the capitalist system argues: If there was no passionate engineers to build airplanes, no desperate designers who shaped our sense of aesthetics, no resilient scientists who created cure for chicken pox, we would be living in the collective cage of barbaric consciousness amongst wretched bodies.
This argument remains solid as long as they lean into overgeneralization to evade loopholes. Effective dialogues to reform productivity need to differentiate 2 types of work: those that are driven by care and self-actualization versus those that are motivated by anxiety and the fear of being dispensable.
When you care for someone or something this care enables you to act because you feel that you must act, not least because when you really care to not act is out of the question.
Acts of care are different from the productivity that is empty at heart and savaged by a sense of inadequacy. The moment we participate from said place of scarcity, we are practicing the colonial mentality that exercises oppression onto our own being. Such an emotional landscape is marred with (self-)distrust, (self-)cruelty, (self-)hatred, (self-)violence. We harass ourselves into working and implicitly discriminate those who don't.
Who shows up
As our global economy shifts from a material-based economy to one that capitalizes on human attention, social contribution easily equates to how much awareness we are capable of spreading, how much attention we can capture, or in short, how popular we are. To maintain an audience requires constant materiality of some kind, no matter it is an art work, a song, our literal presence, or our philanthropy (aka money), the point is in the adjective constant. We need to constantly produce and show up. How much we are seen on social platforms becomes a marker of how much we care. Such logic creates a society that leaves meager margins for rest, solitude, silence, and the immateriality.
Today, someone mentioned legitimate reasons to not show up for class that still deserve make-up points. Their list included being sick and other tragedies such as the death of a family member and surgery. Sleeping in, they specifically noted, would not be reasonable. But why not? Doesn't care start with self-care? How is a tired, sleep-deprived body not enough a reason to not show up? How do we practice care for others when we only allow ourselves to not be productive when our bodies are stricken with disease, tragedies, and emotional exhaustion? Who gets to decide who deserves rest?
Considering our mentality behind the need for productivity, it is ironic that the Productivity trope is usually marketed as self-care. We need to be critical about why we produce and why we show up. Else, we are celebrating an insecure addiction for validation, promoted by the profit-first, production-focused, and now compulsive-performative society that oppresses everyone who's in it.
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