You Don't Need To Be Productive

Hi, my name is Mina Leigh. I'm 5'2 and I'm based in Los Angeles. And that's what I say every week or so when I submit a self-tape to audition. Okay, hard pivot. Have you guys ever read Stephen King's 1979 book, The Long Walk? He actually published it under a pseudonym at the time, Richard Bachman.

And apparently, it was also the first novel he ever worked on, starting it in 1967 as a freshman in college. They recently made a film adaptation of the book, though I haven't had the chance to see it yet. I'm kind of annoyed because I've heard that they changed the ending and I just don't get why movies need to change endings. I mean, I know why, but artistically, I'm opposed to it. And I do think the book ending was

the perfect ending for this story. Anyways, let me backtrack. I read The Long Walk some years ago and it really resonated with me because at the time, I was deep in my dystopian, COVID era, squid game watching state of mind and this kind of fucked premise was exactly what I was craving. It's a group of 100 guys who enter an annual walking competition. I won't spoil the ending, but here are the basic rules that they introduce pretty early on. These competitors have to keep a minimum pace of four miles per hour and they can't take any breaks. The kicker is that if you can't

complete or if you fall below four miles per hour, you get killed. It's very Hunger Games-esque, but you know, precedes Hunger Games. And the last man standing is the winner and he gets an elusive prize that our protagonist takes to mean just, you know, anything that you could possibly want. You might be wondering why would anyone enter this competition? Wrong question. Well, actually, I like to cultivate a learning environment, so there are no wrong questions, but King is not interested in answering that question, because this competition is a metaphor.

I've read of people interpreting it as a metaphor for the Vietnam War, for totalitarianism, but I'm also compelled by it also just being a general metaphor for life itself. We're all just walking until we reach the finish line. Time is a yardstick that we measure. This societal way of viewing time is sadly really messed up,

but it is what it is. Before I continue on with today's video, let's talk about the holidays. I'm partnering with Casetify today to design a few custom phone cases for my loved ones. If you're looking for stocking stuffers or gift ideas,

this is the perfect time because Casetify is having their biggest sale of the year right now. One of my besties, Cass, who also helps so much with my social media stuff, so everyone say thank you, Cass. She's been complaining about her phone case for a while now, so I thought I would gift her a new one. One of our common interests as women of taste is of course david lynch so i created a custom lynching phone case just for her. cas and i both have separate holiday plans so i decided to give her her present early. Oh my god!

She was so surprised.

That's perfect!

This is like the most me thing I've ever seen.

I have to put it on.

And I think she loves it. After all, she's a very creative person and now our favorite artist gets to inspire her every day. The design process is really simple. Just choose the foam model, case style, and upload your photos. Casetify's customization is truly unmatched and honestly, I think this layout looks perfect. I also designed some simpler ones for my family members

and I just love how durable all the cases are. So they're also great for someone, you know, who often drops their phone. If you're still figuring out holiday gifts, these custom Casetify cases are perfect. Once again, Casetify is having the biggest sale of the year right now and you don't want to miss it, so head to the link below or scan the QR code. So several months ago I read Oliver Berkman's 4,000 Weeks. This is a non-fiction

self-help book, but Berkman believes that we think of productivity all wrong. Early on he brings up medieval farmers. Life for medieval farmers wasn't pleasant, and you know, he acknowledges this. There's diseases and plague, dangerous animals roaming around, if you've seen Frankenstein you know, and you were probably constantly fearful of eternal damnation.

But one thing you weren't preoccupied with was time. Or at least in the way we think of it today, because of course humans have always experienced time passing, but medieval farmers wouldn't be scheduling tasks by the hour or forcing themselves to wake up at 5am on the dot all year round. He writes, you milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time, and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that, for example, by doing

a month's milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner, would rightly have been considered a lunatic. There was no anxious pressure to get everything done either, because a farmer's work is infinite. There will always be another milking and another harvest, forever. So there's no sense in racing towards some hypothetical moment of completion. It's still possible to

experience timelessness in this old-timey framework today. I mean, some communities still function on these abstract notions of time, but a lot of people who are bound by clocks can achieve this through meditation and prayer. For me, I experience it whenever I'm deep in nature. I specifically have this one memory of sitting in a hot spring at night in Idaho

and I looked up and I saw more stars than I could have ever seen in my entire life. And I was just so present in that moment and enraptured by the beauty of nature that I had no concept of where I needed to go afterwards or what I was supposed to do

tomorrow. Berkman imagines that medieval farmers probably experienced this timeless sensation quite often. He also goes on to explain that the invention of the mechanical clock is what propelled us into viewing time, which was once an abstract idea, to now a measurable resource. He says, once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself to use it well and to berate yourself when you feel like you wasted it. When you're faced with too many demands, it's easy to assume that the only answer

must be to make better use of time by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder or working for longer as if you were a machine in the industrial revolution, instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. Over the months, especially with the proliferation of AI and chatGBT, I've noticed this one argument

that techno-optimists cling to, which is the idea that AI will make our jobs easier, that it will help us with productivity. I push back against that because I don't think life should be about maximizing your productivity and I'll explain why.

Did you ever stop to think how much leisure time you really have? Some of us put our leisure time to good use and some of us spend most of our leisure time just moping.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Bullsh** he's miserable.

I am not the first to say it, but email is the devil. And I'm someone who grew up with email. My friends and I would send emails to each other in elementary school, on our family computers before we were old enough to get phones. And I actually do have really fond memories of doing this. But now that texting and social media inboxes have taken over the

fun interpersonal communication, it seems like email is relegated to handling the annoying stuff. Work correspondences, login attempts, marketing newsletters from that one store you ordered a candle from five years ago

and that you keep forgetting to unsubscribe to.

I'm out of email for a minute. I can't stand it anymore. I'm getting off, off.

I want to talk about email first because I think it's important in understanding why technology that's designed for productivity doesn't always aid said productivity, no matter what the Silicon Valley bros say. Esther Milne wrote a book called Email in the Everyday, and in it she explains how email was originally touted as a democratic invention in the late 80s and 90s because it provided

workers access to their bosses. But the flip side is that your boss also now had increased access to you. In 2013, we were already seeing the negative effects of email. An American Psychological Association survey found that 54% of respondents checked messages while on sick leave and approximately 60% of 18 to 34 year olds accessed out-of-work communication daily. Milne writes of the findings, overall the survey argued, employees squander more than

a month each year checking email outside of work hours. Milne also brings up a paper by Mazmanian, Olakowski, and Yates, who coined the phrase the autonomy paradox, to describe how increased connectivity can actually raise anxiety levels by creating an always-on work environment. There's also the additional stress of having to keep swapping between your work role and other roles in your life. There's this interesting idea I learned that's called boundary theory, which asserts that individuals tend to draw boundaries

around different areas of their life, so work, family, social, etc. And we do this in order to be able to successfully maintain the required responsibilities in each area. Not only that, but researchers have found that it's also largely impossible to simultaneously enact cross domain roles because each area's demands are incompatible. For instance, the way you interact with your boss is going to be different

from the way you interact with your roommates or your kids. Therefore, we undergo micro role transitions to cross over into different domains. These transitions are psychological, but can be aided by physical movement, as in the case of commuting to an office building to fulfill your work role, or stepping into a church to fulfill your community role. However, Becker, Belkin, and Tuskey argue in their 2018 study that due to this new technology, people are undergoing more frequent

and briefer micro-role transitions. Here's an example. Say you're at dinner with your friends. You're at a nice restaurant. You're having fun. If you're like me, you've ordered an espresso martini and a set of truffle fries to share

with the table, and life is good. You're in your social role. Then you get an email notification pop up on your phone. When you check your phone, you briefly shift into your work role. You put your phone down, and then you're back to your social role. You put your phone down and then you're back to your social role. The result this has on your psyche, as the authors claim, is that frequent micro transitions with their requisite switching costs interrupt deep level role enactment, break focus and attention, and prevent

the individual from truly being present in the non-work domain. Moreover, frequent micro role transitions embody a more abstract, higher level cognitive constrol that is incompatible with fulfilling concrete work tasks that request focus and attention. In 4000 Weeks, Oliver Berkman mentions Inbox Zero as this mystical concept that knowledge workers try to achieve, but the reality is that it is a Sisyphean task, and the minute you clear your inbox, the replies will start coming in.

So you're back to dealing with 100 correspondences. And more than that, if you gain a reputation for answering emails really quickly, people will start messaging you instead of your coworker who only answers 10 emails a day. So you just end up creating more work for yourself

in your valiant pursuit of getting things done as quickly as possible. All's to say that email, this great new technology that was supposed to help us get our work done faster has only led to us becoming more obsessed with working. At the same time, I do wanna quickly acknowledge

that email and remote work offer benefits too, especially for disabled people, people who don't have reliable modes of transportation and who live far away from where they would need to commute to, and parents who can't afford external childcare while they work.

At the same time, I don't think these problems, like the psychological toll of always being online, goes away just because it's a better alternative than say, spending tens of thousands of dollars per year on a babysitter. Bringing this back to AI, even though tech optimists try to frame AI as this amazing tool that's going to help us get so much work done,

in reality, we're still probably going to be working the same hours. We're just going to be expected to produce more output within those hours. The proof is in the pudding. Back in 2006, Toshiba put out an ad that featured a closed laptop within those hours. The proof is in the pudding. Back in 2006, Toshiba put out an ad that featured a closed laptop within office hours. Sign on its lid and the hours listed were 730 to 830, 10 to 130, 230 to 430, 6 to 630, and 10 to 1015. The copy read,

because the working day is so yesterday, work out when you work best and when you do your best work. Time once wasted in unproductive periods can then be divided between routine tasks, family, friends, and fun. This sounds like the furthest thing from fun to me. But more importantly, if you math it out,

the number of hours working in this ad sum up to seven and a quarter, which actually perfectly matches the pay rate calculated for the salaried white collar professional. So once again, even though we're allowed to work whatever hours we like, we're still working the same amount.

When my co-writer, Am and I were initially chatting about this, they brought up self-driving cars and how they're concerned with self-driving cars is that if they take off we're probably going to be expected to work while commuting. Right now the car really is a peaceful place because people understand you're not supposed to check your phone when you're driving. You're somewhat just

unreachable. It's blissful. But if cars are automated to drive, people will probably fill that time with checking their emails. Melissa Gregg notes this problem as a function creep in her book, Works Intimacy, and quotes a young librarian she interviewed, They're not reducing any workload.

They're just giving us more stuff to do. You kind of think something has to give. You know you can't just keep piling work on us. And if you still don't believe me, historian Ruth Schwartz Cohen explains in her book More Work for Mother that when housewives first got access to devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, which were supposed to save time and labor, no time ended up being saved at

all. This is because our standards for cleanliness rose to offset the benefits. As historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining Parkinson's law, work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. So we're going to work the same amount, if not more. But what if you're okay with working and you like your job? Well, perhaps the job is fun now, but I think it's also valuable to question how meaningful

that work will still be in the future. Nick Eason wrote an article for Rockenter about how AI could lead to less meaningful work. He cites research by Milena Nikolova, a professor in the economics of well-being, who looked at data on thousands of workers across 20 European countries over two decades. And her findings show that automation increased repetitive and monotonous tasks,

and as a result, human workers were asked to do less cognitively challenging work and also were more alienated from human contact. This is, of course, future talk because as it stands, in many corporate office cases, AI doesn't even make things easier. It just shifts the burden to the next person. The Harvard Business Review reported a few months ago

that according to a study from the MIT Media Lab, 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in AI technologies. And the reason is because employees are using AI tools to create low effort, passable looking work that ends up just creating more work for their co-workers. They're effectively creating slop.

I made them extra sloppy, Morgan!

And actually there's a term that's called work slop, which is AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. The result is that the receiver of this work slop has more work to do because they have to interpret, correct, or redo the work completely. But I would say that for me, the most insidious consequence of introducing these new technologies is that work has come to define our existence and our attitudes and ideologies developed at work have come

to infiltrate other areas of our life as well.

It's more than a hobby.

A hobby is supposed to pass the time, not fill it.

Julie Beck traced the history of hobbies for the Atlantic and she notes that it was during the 19th century that hobbies took off as a positive pursuit. Originally the term hobby mostly signified a trivial or comical obsession. She explains, during the Industrial Revolution, the nascent labor movement advocated for reduced work hours, eventually leading to the eight hour work day and the five day work week. However, some people were concerned that increased leisure time would pave the way for delinquent

activities. So enter hobbies as a productive form of leisure. While I love hobbies and I still believe that people should have them, I also am wary of how hobbies reinforce the idea that idleness is wrong. After all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hobbies were often encouraged to restore the energy that was depleted by your job so that you would have more energy to go back to work.

A 1913 article asks rhetorically, what? You have no hobby? In these days of drive, push and worry, how can you recreate yourself without the aid of a hobby? American industrialist Henry Ford was even pro-hobby, believing that productive leisure could reinforce good work. Historian Stephen M. Gelber describes the hobby as a form of disguised affirmation. They are activities that people do for fun, but in the end reflect the same ideas and habits that capitalism encourages, hard work and productivity. He writes in his book, Hobbies, Leisure and the Culture of Work in

America, as disguised affirmation, hobbies were a Trojan horse that brought the ideology of the factory and office into the parlor. Furthermore, Gelber explained to Beck the pressure of having a hobby as being similar to the pressure of having a job. Hobbies take on this aura of being good, useful, appropriate, and socially sanctioned. Something you should, the word here is should, be doing. And if you're one of those slackers that doesn't have a hobby, then you are suffering from some kind of moral weakness or failing.

There is no benefit you can get from hanging around somebody who doesn't have hobbies, plain and simple.

Robert Stebbins, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Calgary, coined the term serious leisure, which is similar to Gelber's idea of productive leisure. The way that Stebbins defines serious leisure is that it requires effort based on special knowledge, training, or skill, and people often try to make progress and get better at it over time. The opposite is casual leisure, which would include things like watching TV or socializing.

I'd argue that casual leisure is also extremely important, but Stebbins tells The Atlantic that, quote, we don't get much identificational mileage out of telling people that we just dig the TV and we watch it all the time, or that we go to the pub every night and have a pint. It's not distinctive. Everybody does it, and in the end you haven't much to show for it. Okay, the thing is like, I don't think there's anything wrong with having non-distinctive hobbies or choosing to hang out with your friends, and I think the impulse to come up with a specific niche combination of hobbies and interests to define yourself is an ego problem that does once again feed into the individualistic neoliberal

cultural landscape that makes community organizing so much harder and thus makes life so much more unpleasant. It's also totally fine to enjoy monocultural interests like, I don't know, Game of Thrones or sunsets. But I think this attitude to set ourselves apart and to make even our non-distinctive hobbies productive has led to the overuse of Goodreads, Letterboxd, and all those other

tracking apps that essentially quantify how much time we've spent doing casual leisure activities. And at a certain point, these activities move from leisure to just work. Even though there's an undeniable dopamine rush whenever you're able to check off an item from your watch list, right? Even though that does exist, according to Stephen Butler, a psychology professor at

the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, research has tended to show that giving external reinforcements or rewards for activities that are intrinsically motivating or inherently satisfying to people tends to decrease their motivation to do them. I also think the need to quantify our hobbies comes from work culture bleeding into our everyday ideologies.

In Work's Intimacy, Melissa Gregg discusses how some people can be more satisfied with their work role than their home role because excelling in your work is more measurable than say, excelling in your interpersonal relationships. For example, if you put in 20 more hours into your work, you may be given overtime pay or you may be entitled to a big Christmas bonus. But spending 20 more hours dealing with your crumbling marriage at home doesn't guarantee that your husband or wife will fall back in love

with you. As a result, I think it's safe to say that some people have lost the patience to work through community and social problems because they've been conditioned into getting the concrete reward system that employment offers. When it comes to casual leisure, when we've accepted this reward system that work has given us, it can be difficult to find value in reading books

without having anything to show for it. I mean, there's a number of benefits, obviously, to reading fiction, including improving your ability to empathize, but that's not measurable. You can't track that, and you especially can't capture that visually on social media, which is a whole other can of worms, which is the monetization of hobbies. This isn't a new idea, by the way, as evidenced by books such as

Profitable Hobbies and Handicrafts from 1935, which you can actually buy a copy of on eBay. Look, I'm not better than anyone else who tries to monetize their hobbies. I suffer from this conundrum as well, especially as an influencer, because theoretically, I can make content out of anything I do. Now that doesn't mean that I should, because I find that whenever I'm obligated to do something for money, it takes the joy out of doing that thing. But I'm not denying that I don't instinctively reach for my camera every time I put together

a cute outfit or cook something that looks delicious. To my credit though, I do think I've been better at drawing boundaries over time. For example, I'm kind of adjacent to the book community because I have a book club and I review books every so often and so there was a moment in time when I thought about putting more book recommendation videos out on my TikTok because I do love reading and I love talking about books with other people, but realistically, I knew that this would transform reading, a leisure activity that relaxes me, into a business where I'd be rushing to finish

books every week to meet content deadlines. I also just know that it's not cohesive with my lifestyle to read a new book every single day, like I have other interests that I divide my time between. So I hit pause, I'm being a book talker. But another world aversion me that had less mental health boundaries is putting out reading vlogs every single day. Regardless of what your particular hobby is,

this side hustle siren call is affecting people.

I currently have five side hustle streams of income on top of my regular normal career job. I turned my hobby into a six-figure career and today I'm going to share how you can

do it too.

If you've been looking for a chill side hustle, I have the perfect solution for you.

Last month Forbes reported that 71% of the American workforce have jumped on the side hustle bandwagon. I want to acknowledge quickly that some journalists have reported that the pressure to hustle is declining among Gen Z and millennials as we are becoming disillusioned by the whole work thing in general. And I've definitely heard all these like statements about how like no one wants to work anymore yada yada.

Get your ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.

That's so true.

You have to surround yourself with people that want to work.

But the fact of the matter is, this year's government statistics show that 8.9 million Americans work multiple jobs. Of course there are people who have made their hobbies into side hustles, which is kind of like the group of people I'm mostly talking about, as well as people who are taking on multiple jobs that are equally not passionate about any of their jobs, and these all factor into the statistical data. But I digress because ultimately what I'm trying

to get at here is work has infiltrated all areas of life, whether that be because we're getting pinged by our bosses during dinner time, because we don't have a stable source of income so we're forced to work longer than the 40-hour work week, because we're engaging with leisure through a capitalistic framework, or because we've gone all the way by monetizing our leisure time. And the result is that people are burnt out.

In America, 66% of employees are experiencing some sort of burnout in 2025. The data reveals that younger generations are facing significantly higher rates of burnout, 81% of 18 to 24 year olds, and 83% of 25 to 34 year olds.

So what happens now?

Here's the way Marge spends some of her leisure time. She's learning to play the piano. She's getting a lot of pleasure from her own accomplishment. And she's acquiring a skill that will help her socially.

The irony is that the desire to be more productive has led us to actually becoming more unproductive.

I want to bring up Rebecca Jennings Vulture article, How I'm Fixing My Broken Attention Span because this was one of my favorite reads of the year and she says something really poignant in it that has stuck with me ever since I read it. She writes about her experience watching Chantal Ackerman's 1975 art house film Jean Dillman, which has a three plus hour runtime and is maybe notoriously known for being very slow, thanks to Ackerman's restrained pacing, long takes, and static camera work. However, Jennings explains, I found it curiously easy to focus on.

The film itself is gorgeous to look at, even if the majority of the time, Jean is scrubbing dishes and making coffee in her claustrophobic apartment for her awful teenage son. The real problem, I realized, was the guilt that came with granting myself the luxury

of spending 3 and a half hours doing something that would not, in any tangible or measurable way, improve my life. My mind drifted to the stove top grate, which needed cleaning, and my step count, which had yet to hit 10,000 that day. It dawned on me that these concerns have never stopped me from spending the same amount of time on my phone, and that the reason for this is my phone prevents me from thinking about anything

at all. This resonated so much with me. It's why I find movie theaters to be a great, peaceful place because my eyes can't wander over to any stovetops. Meanwhile, I think we can all agree with her that nothing numbs you out faster than doom scrolling. There's been many times when I expect to just briefly check my phone and then I'm on that thing for two hours. It's because

these platforms are so overstimulating that it's difficult to notice the time passing, much less to think about anything else. Of course, too much scrolling ends up having negative effects on the brain. Gary Small, a memory, brain, and aging expert and professor at UCLA argues that scrolling TikTok can lead to a lack of building neural muscle and brain fog. A 2025 rapid review study also reported that doom scrolling, zombie scrolling, and social media addiction are all linked to psychological distress, anxiety, and depression. These factors impair executive functioning skills including memory, planning, and decision making. The pervasive nature of digital media, driven by dopamine-driven feedback loops,

exacerbates these effects. Among people in my age group and in my spheres of the internet, I've noticed that this widespread brain rotting has led to a small but mighty resistance movement in which some people are creating their own learning syllabi, choosing to indulge in slow media like Jean Delman, and reading books. While these are noble pursuits in recapturing our attention spans, they don't address the other problem, which is the way that we view productivity. I'd argue the need

to be productive is why many of us doomscroll, relating back to what Jennings wrote, and is also the reason why we simultaneously hate doom scrolling. If you think about it, sure, there is something dystopian about our brains losing cognitive function, but I'd argue that a lot of people are also really bothered

by how they've wasted time on these apps or are concerned about cognitive function less because it's important in operating as a human and more because it impacts their ability to work. Work is once again at the center of everything. It's especially clear to me when I come across these things to do instead of doom scrolling listicles

or videos and the majority of the suggestions are just to read something else on your computer when really the most valuable thing to do instead else on your computer, when really the most valuable thing to do instead of doom scrolling is probably staring at the ceiling or going to the pub to hang out with your friends. If you think about it, if we go by Jennings' example, which is that our brains are craving breaks and everything, I don't necessarily know if choosing to learn, which I'm always in the pursuit of learning and

I think learning can be fun, but choosing to read a PDF may not be like the most pleasurable thing to do. You know what I mean? And essentially we are doom scrolling because we are trying to take a break for pleasure. And so that's why I don't think it's necessarily like a one-to-one thing that we can replace, like doom scrolling with reading a PDF, because we're not addressing what we're actually doom scrolling to do.

But you know, I understand, because I'm susceptible to productivity culture. I know I'm in deep when I catch myself consuming productivity content. You know the vibes, spending hours reading best books to read in 2025 lists instead of actually reading books or saving planner layouts on Pinterest instead of organizing my own planner. I do this because I feel guilty about not being productive, but I'm genuinely too tired to do anything myself. And after all,

it does feel good. Lee Humphreys, a communications professor at Cornell, explained to Vox the concept of narcotizing dysfunction, the idea that self-improvement content only tricks you into believing you're actually learning something, but in actuality you're being lulled into a state of inaction. The irony though is that it would actually be more productive to just stare at the ceiling. Harvard Health Publishing discussed in an article the brain's default mode network or DMN,

which we think of as the do mostly nothing network, like when you're daydreaming or when your mind is wandering. They explain, when you turn your focus brain off, it will retrieve memories, link ideas so that you become more creative

and also help you feel more self-connected too. That said, I don't think we should daydream solely for the productivity benefits because ultimately I don't think we should be motivated to live life based on how it will help our work. As New York Times tech journalist Aaron Griffith warned in 2019, one never exits a kind of work rapture in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk.

I recently revisited Jenny O'Dell's book, How to Do Nothing, and in it she advocates for the act of doing nothing, saying, the point of doing nothing as I define it isn't to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive. Throughout her book, she challenges how we view productivity

and argues instead that true productivity helps restore individuals who can then help restore communities. It's true. A lot of how we view productivity is through individual improvement

in a sort of factory-like way. We construct elaborate morning routines and track everything from our water intake to how many pages we read per day. But focusing so much on individual improvement can just turn us into more narcissistic individuals. Steven Gelber even notes in his book that participation in solitary hobbies may help build an ideology of individualism that produces

resistance to non-leisure activities that would reinforce collectivity." I think that can definitely be true, but of course it depends on what the solitary hobby is and how we approach it. Bird watching, which Odell recommends, is something that I think could could transport you back into the medieval farmer's idea of timelessness, which would be undoubtedly restorative to your brain and energy levels and help you re-evaluate

what's actually important in life. Though I think if you go into bird watching with a checklist and an idea that you're more spiritual than the rest of your screen addict peers, that could lead to increased individualism. All in all, I firmly believe that we need to rethink productivity. You know, as I say all this, I also think there's something appealing about being productive, right? Which is why, rather than saying we absolutely should all stop being productive and go join a monastery, I agree with Jenny O'Dell that we just need to redefine it because productivity might just actually be a part of human nature. We like to get things done. The harm is that we're reaching a point where

being productive is more important than being a human. As O'Dell reminds us, much of what gives one's life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters, the off time that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate. She quotes writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who in 1877 called busyness a quote, symptom of deficient vitality.

She says that he observed a sort of dead alivealive, hackneyed people about who were scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. This all brings me back to The Long Walk. While the story is quite bleak and, you know, boys are dying all over the place as I said before, there are still moments of joy and laughter throughout this book. There's also a strong sense of friendship as one character

helps the main character out of a panic attack and when another character dies, the group agrees that whoever wins should financially help out that character's pregnant wife. If we take it as a metaphor for life, it's not the walking or even the destination that defines our life, but the moments of camaraderie along the journey. I admit this is really hard to put into practice. I'm a type A person who works for myself and I'm constantly battling a financial scarcity mindset, but I force myself to take breaks, to go to random events and meet new people, even when I feel like I should be doing something productive instead. Sometimes I've noticed myself

like rushing to conclusions like, oh I've been to this bar before. It wasn't even that fun last time. Like I should just skip out and read a PDF at home or check off another movie from my watch list. But that's just me trying to optimize my life. Every day is a new day. Every day you have the opportunity to run into someone new or see something really cool.

And we should embrace that every day because this is what life is all about. I also want to recognize that, you know, I work for myself and therefore I am my greatest villain. But for people who do have to respond to a boss, like emailing them during dinner time, or who work multiple jobs out of survival, there are varying levels of how much leisure time you have in those situations.

But I think what I want to drive home is that survival, there are varying levels of how much leisure time you have in those situations.

But I think what I want to drive home is that the leisure time that we do have is getting put into working harder or doing other things, and we should be doing something that makes us feel good and we shouldn't feel bad about prioritizing that. There was something that I read earlier from Gelber about how, you know, pre-industrial era, it's like, sure, the medieval farmers could take breaks and look at the stars and hear the bird calls, but essentially, their work and their leisure were entangled together.

It's only when we had the Industrial Revolution and when work hours were segmented as a separate thing, that we realized that we could have our own time. So these medieval farmers, they probably worked less, but they also leisured less. And I think it's really beautiful that we have leisure time now, that most of us have some modicum of leisure time and it would be sad to not embrace that and to not be joyous for the fact that we have time for ourselves.

Okay, now I'm just like talking to talk, but thank you all so much for listening to me today. My name is Mina Lei, as I've said, and I hope you have a lovely rest of your day, and I'll talk to you next time.

Okay, bye.

What might be some good uses for your leisure time? What might be some good uses for your leisure time? Will you let time slip away from you, or will you use it well?