Productivism

Based on Wikipedia: Productivism

Here's a thought experiment that might make you uncomfortable: What if the thing we've been taught to worship—productivity, output, always doing more—is actually making us miserable?

Welcome to the critique of productivism.

The Religion of More

Productivism is the belief that measurable output and growth are the fundamental purpose of human activity. More is always better. A growing economy is a healthy economy. If you're not producing, you're not contributing. These ideas feel so obvious, so self-evidently true, that most of us have never thought to question them.

That's precisely what makes productivism so powerful—and so dangerous, according to its critics.

The British sociologist Anthony Giddens offers a more nuanced definition. He describes productivism as an ethos where paid employment has been "separated out in a clear-cut way from other domains of life." Work doesn't just pay the bills. It defines whether we feel worthwhile. Whether we feel socially valued. Whether we feel like we matter at all.

Think about the first question people ask when they meet you. It's almost never "What do you love?" or "What are you thinking about lately?" It's "What do you do?"

Your job is your identity.

The Limits of a Finite World

The economist E.F. Schumacher, writing in 1975, put it bluntly: "Infinite growth in consumption in a world of finite resources is an impossibility." Then he added a personal touch that cuts deeper than any academic argument: "When my child grows, I am pleased. When I grow, less so!"

This is the heart of the anti-productivist critique. Growth isn't inherently good. It depends entirely on what's growing.

A tumor grows. Cancer cells are remarkably productive—they divide and multiply with tireless efficiency. But we don't celebrate that kind of growth. We try to stop it.

Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, developed what he called the "development as freedom" framework. His argument was subtle but revolutionary: the growth of individual capabilities—creativity, talent, personal ingenuity—matters more than the growth of commercial production. A society where people can think freely, pursue education, and develop their potential is richer than one with more widgets rolling off assembly lines.

This might seem obvious. But it runs directly counter to how most governments measure success. Gross Domestic Product—the total value of goods and services produced—remains the gold standard for evaluating national wellbeing. A country that produces more stuff is, by definition, doing better.

Never mind if the stuff is weapons. Never mind if producing it poisons the water supply. Never mind if the workers are miserable. The number goes up, so things are good.

The American Paradox

In the 1990s, Americans were told a reassuring story about the future. The United States would become a nation of educated managers and specialists. The dirty, physical work of manufacturing would be outsourced to less fortunate countries. Americans would manage. Others would sweat.

The plan didn't work out.

Those other countries—particularly China—had their own ambitions. They didn't want to be the world's factory floor forever. They developed their own specialists, their own managers, their own innovation ecosystems. Meanwhile, American workers who'd been promised elite roles found themselves competing for fewer and fewer positions at the top.

The political scientist Samuel Huntington documented what happened next. Americans now spend more time at work than people in similar wealthy countries. They have worse benefits—less vacation time, weaker job protections, more precarious healthcare. Sleep has become a luxury. Rest is rebranded as laziness. "Slacking" is practically a moral failing.

And still people work harder, striving for those scarce elite positions.

The results are predictable. Depression and anxiety rates are higher than they were in the 1980s. The environment suffers under a throw-away economy designed to keep the consumption cycle spinning. Free time, rather than offering genuine rest, becomes another arena for productivity—time to create something impressive for social media, develop a monetizable skill, build a "personal brand."

Even leisure has been colonized by the productivity mindset.

The Meritocracy Myth

Here's where productivism gets truly insidious. It doesn't just demand that you produce. It promises that if you produce enough, you'll be rewarded. Work hard, and you'll rise. Your success is earned. Your failure is deserved.

This is the meritocracy myth, and Americans believe it more fervently than almost anyone else in the developed world.

The data tells a different story.

In the United States, about 50 percent of a father's income position is inherited by his son. If your dad was poor, you'll probably be poor. If your dad was rich, you'll probably be rich. Not because of genes or talent, but because of the compounding advantages that wealth provides: better schools, better networks, better nutrition, less stress, more second chances.

Compare this to Norway or Canada, where less than 20 percent of income position is inherited. The American Dream—the notion that anyone can make it through hard work—is actually more achievable in Scandinavia than in the United States.

Only 8 percent of American children raised in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution manage to climb to the top 20 percent as adults. In Denmark, that figure is nearly double at 15 percent. Denmark, with its strong social safety net and high taxes, produces more class mobility than the supposedly free-market United States.

Yet Americans persist in believing otherwise. Academic research suggests this isn't just ignorance—it's motivation. People want to believe the system is fair. Believing in meritocracy means believing that your current struggles are temporary, that you're just one breakthrough away from joining the elite.

The novelist John Steinbeck captured this perfectly. He observed that poor Americans don't see themselves as an exploited working class. They see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

This fantasy serves a purpose. As the scholar Tad Delay puts it: "The fantasy of class mobility, of becoming bourgeois, is enough to defend the aristocracy."

The Zero-Sum Reality

What productivism obscures is the zero-sum nature of the game it promotes.

Good jobs are scarce. Not everyone can be a knowledge worker. Not everyone can be a manager. For every winner, there must be losers. The pyramid, by definition, has more space at the bottom than the top.

This creates a peculiar psychological trap. Research consistently shows that people's contentment depends more on relative wealth than absolute wealth—a phenomenon sometimes called the Easterlin Paradox, named after the economist Richard Easterlin who first documented it. Getting richer doesn't make you happier if everyone around you is getting richer at the same rate. What matters is your position in the hierarchy.

Think about what this means. Even if productivity gains made everyone materially better off—more stuff, more consumption, more everything—it wouldn't necessarily increase happiness. Because happiness, in a productivist society, is tied to status. And status is inherently competitive.

You can't all be above average.

Depression as Dissent

When people fail in a productivist society, they're supposed to blame themselves. You didn't work hard enough. You made poor choices. You lacked the drive, the talent, the grit.

Depression becomes taboo precisely because it constitutes a form of dissent. The depressed person is, in effect, rejecting what society has to offer. Their unhappiness is an indictment of the system.

This is uncomfortable for productivism's believers. If the system is fair and growth is good, why are so many people miserable?

The answer usually provided is that the miserable are defective. They need therapy, medication, attitude adjustment. The problem is inside them, not in the society that shaped them.

But critics point to a more fundamental issue. "Being productive" requires access to the means of production—the tools, resources, connections, and opportunities needed to create value. Most people don't have that access. They sell their labor because they have no other choice. The factory worker doesn't own the factory. The delivery driver doesn't own the platform. The knowledge worker, increasingly, doesn't own the intellectual property they create.

You can't pull yourself up by bootstraps you don't own.

The Stigma of Need

Perhaps nowhere is productivism's cruelty more visible than in attitudes toward public assistance.

In the United States, receiving help carries profound stigma. Programs designed to support struggling families—Head Start for early childhood education, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for basic financial support—are treated not as investments in human potential but as marks of failure. Recipients are viewed with suspicion, assumed to be lazy, irresponsible, perhaps morally defective.

Self-reliance is so deeply valued that accepting help feels shameful. The fewer people value self-reliance, research shows, the less this stigma affects them psychologically. But in a productivist culture, self-reliance is sacred.

The effects are devastating. Studies show that welfare stigma increases passivity and dependency among poor people—exactly the opposite of what productivism's champions claim to want. People who are made to feel inferior act inferior. The shame becomes self-fulfilling.

Caseworkers frequently treat welfare recipients with contempt, making assumptions about deviant behavior and unwillingness to work. Many single mothers cite stigma as the primary reason they want to exit welfare as quickly as possible—not because they've found stable employment, but because the shame is unbearable. They hide their food stamps to avoid judgment. They rush into precarious work to escape the label of dependency.

This is particularly cruel given that lack of healthcare benefits is one of the greatest barriers preventing single mothers from escaping poverty. They're stigmatized for receiving help while being denied the help that might actually free them.

The Opposite of Productivism

If productivism means defining human worth through measurable output, what's the alternative?

It's not laziness. Critics of productivism aren't arguing for doing nothing. They're arguing for a different set of values.

Imagine measuring success by wellbeing instead of production. By leisure instead of labor. By the richness of relationships instead of the thickness of bank accounts. By the health of ecosystems instead of the growth of gross domestic product.

Imagine a society where rest was honored instead of stigmatized. Where care work—raising children, tending to the elderly, maintaining homes and communities—was valued as highly as corporate work. Where the question "What do you do?" referred to your passions and relationships, not your job.

This might sound utopian. Mainstream economists often dismiss such thinking as naive, arguing that productivity and human flourishing are already aligned. More production means more wealth means more freedom to enjoy life.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. Americans are more productive than ever and more miserable than in decades. The connection between output and wellbeing has been severed, if it ever existed.

The Quiet Revolution

Something interesting is happening. The ideas once dismissed as fringe—degrowth, post-work theory, universal basic income, care economics—are entering mainstream conversation. Young people increasingly reject the premise that work should be the center of life. "Quiet quitting," doing only what your job actually requires rather than striving for constant advancement, has become a phenomenon.

Perhaps productivism's grip is weakening.

Or perhaps this is just another moment of questioning that will pass, absorbed back into the relentless logic of growth. Every generation, it seems, rediscovers that the pursuit of more doesn't lead to enough. And every generation eventually returns to the treadmill.

The question remains open: Can we imagine a different way of organizing society? One where human beings are valued for being, not just for producing?

E.F. Schumacher, half a century ago, suggested we could. When a child grows, he wrote, it brings joy. That kind of growth—development, flourishing, becoming more fully oneself—is worth celebrating.

The other kind, the endless accumulation of stuff and status, might be the disease rather than the cure.