Reading

Stranded somewhere between home working and the capital metropolis, my flatmates and I took a detour to the pub. Naturally, the conversation descended into the usual mid-covid quarter-life crisis: relationships, the future, our careers and we have all, somehow, come to the conclusion that we *must* have a dream job.

This conversation was particularly topical as I have recently finished reading *Convenience Store Woman* by Sayaka Murata and of course, my flatmates were the first victims of my ramblings about it.

The very title of this novel, deadpan and literal, reflects the personality of Keiko, a 36-year-old store worker who felt like she never quite fit in until she was embraced by the warm glow of her shop’s lights and the safety of its consistent rules. Over the course of her life, Keiko has felt indifference to most things, always failing to “pull off being a person” - feeling like she cannot uphold society’s rules or measure up to her family’s expectations.

In order to remedy this in adulthood, she concocts a plan to mould the office misogynist into the facade of a husband to free her from the social constraints still forced upon women today. In a relationship that was doomed from the start, I don’t think anyone was surprised at how it ended. Although, the ending itself left me pondering my own future and more broadly, the concept of a dream job.

Keiko never had a dream job, she bounced through school and university alone, like a lot of people, with – admittedly – some very interesting behaviours separating her from her peers. She was made to feel different, forced out of the box everyone else seemed to so easily fit into. Until she was walking home from university and, fixated on the shell of an aquarium-like structure, became enamoured by the simplicity of the soon-to-be convenience store. Struck by the space, engulfed in its minimalism, Keiko finally felt like she fit; she finally felt loved.

And this love came second to none. In her mission to just exist, her false-fiancée convinces her she must leave her beloved store and find a job that can sustain both of their futures. He explains, “without a career or a husband, you’ll be of no value to society”, in coercion to actually fund his parasitic ways. This plan comes crashing down on them – or rather, him – when Keiko realises that she had everything she needed all along: her love of her job, and the love from her job. She listens to “the voice of the convenience store” that feeds into her innermost desires, guiding her to live for herself not for society.

We’re taught throughout life that we need to work hard in school to get a job that we love in order to feel fulfilled. Keiko drops out of university, Keiko has never been in a relationship and yet, it works for her, she still feels fulfilled. She lives in such stark contrast to the women we grew up with in the media – the women we were told to be.


![Book shelf](https://res.cloudinary.com/fledger/image/upload/v1649926622/post/convenience_store_book_xu7yet.jpg "*Convenience Store Woman* by *Sayaka Murata.*")

If *Convenience Store Woman* were a film, it would fit neatly into the Y2K genre of independent women movies: exciting, succinct, relatable and with an omniscient narrator that guides you through our unsuspecting female protagonist’s life. Of course, following in this tradition would mean the film would be somewhere between romantic comedy and teen drama – somewhere between *10 Things I Hate About You* and *Clueless*. But Keiko breaks the mould of the Y2K Woman: she lives alone, she is not particularly ambitious and her main goal is simply to exist.

My flatmates and I pondered why we should have dream jobs at all and working through various theories, we were reminded of a video that posits the reason young adult women feel the overwhelming need not only to conform to society’s standards, but also to exceed them is because of the media we ingested growing up.

Much like Keiko, we have all, as women, felt the need to marry well, have children and forge a successful career. They explained that because the media we grew up with contained ambitious young women who go through social hardship and somehow still end up getting both the dream guy and the dream job at the end, we have set our standards too high for our own lives.

I agree that the media we ingested in childhood has affected our development but I do not agree that our standards are too high. These movies helped to set a precedent in the early 2000’s; establish the idea that being a woman does not have to be defined by your relationships or family. Keiko does not define herself by these standards either. She always exists outside of conventional standards and for so long, she was still constrained by these norms - by her family, by her relationship, by the *need* to develop her career.

But unlike in these films, as the novel unfolds, Keiko begins to define herself by her own standards. By what makes her happy. By what *allows* her to exist.

While in these movies we are still conscious of the career choices of our female-led male-directed characters, we are not in *Convenience Store Woman*: she is a woman written by a woman. Often male, often older, these films tell the stories of young women from a man’s perspective. Sure, she’s fierce and independent, but she still ends up a bored housewife with a life she did not earn after the movie ends.

We’re sold on the idea of a dream job – we’re sold a literal dream. We’ve been sold on that dream, as women, for the last two decades, if not more. We’re told to get a job quickly out of university, get a better job, get married and then give up the life you’ve worked for to have children. Keiko doesn’t need a dream job. Keiko never worked to find fulfilment, she found it in herself. She fights against the future set for her by the men that came before us.

That evening, at the pub, my flatmates and I reeled off different features we expected our dream job to have and conveniently, they all seem to match up. Enacting lives we didn’t feel we could control, everything became clearer. We do not actually need dream jobs. We do not actually need to adhere to these standards.

A whole generation of women have grown up and been marooned between ambition and the need to perform their societal duties. There is very little media from my childhood that I believe truly and accurately depict an independent woman. *Convenience Store Woman* marks a change in the writing of women and the perception of them by a new generation.

There have been incredibly strong female protagonists written by women in history, but none quite like Keiko. If we can unlearn what is expected of us and just learn to exist; revel in the everyday, celebrate monotony and put ourselves first, we can live as contently as Keiko does.

We’re taught throughout life that we need to work hard to get a job that we love in order to feel fulfilled. But recently, I'm left pondering my own future and the concept of a dream job.

Will your “dream job” actually make you happy?

## A youtube channel for productivity geeks.

Between March 2020, and June 2021, Youtuber James Scholz hosted so-called ‘study with me' live streams on his youtube channel - seemingly numbingly boring videos of himself sitting down to do nothing but study for hours at a time. In the midst of this growing phenomenon, there were a few things that made James Scholz's streams recognisable: the comfortable yellow lighting; the nostalgia of an old, too-large-for-this-world PC monitor; endless sticky notes on the walls; and the somewhat aloof presence of Mika the ginger cat. The most recognisable, however, was just how long these study sessions lasted. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 15 months straight.

I was one of the hundreds of thousands of viewers who watched the youtube videos. Stuck at home completing my own university degree remotely, hoping to keep myself accountable for study at a time when libraries were closed and lectures were contained to the same small screen on which I would also follow news, watch movies, and browse social media. So I turned to streamers like James Scholz to provide an experience that I sorely missed (and to see Mika, of course). These videos became the virtual equivalent of going to the library with your friends; they created a sense of accountability and connection we coud share in that was, for a while, lost. James Scholz is not the only Youtube streamer who does this type of thing, but the cosy setup and sheer number of study hours was so impressive that many people tuned into Youtube for the show. The channel had its own community.

![Livestream of James Scholz studying](https://res.cloudinary.com/fledger/image/upload/v1641420226/post/productivity_james_scholz_ilftis.png "Screenshot from ‘study with me live pomodoro | 12 hours' on the James Scholz Youtube channel, 11 May 2021. Courtesy of [James Scholz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0qQGvJoK68&t=11083s&ab_channel=JamesScholz).")

Studying alongside James Scholz in his videos with thousands of others, I was, to some extent, impressed by his work ethic. Yet another part of me felt disappointed that this had become my measurement of time well spent: ceaseless hours in a brightly lit room, staring at a screen whilst listening to Youtube videos. Boredom. It began to feel like the culmination of many things that had been brewing in my mind about productivity, the ‘hustle,' and what it all meant.

## A book for recovering productivity geeks.

These are some of the questions that Oliver Burkeman tackles in his 2021 release Four Thousand Weeks, the title referring to the number of weeks the average person lives. Burkeman is a long-time writer for The Guardian, having spent over a decade under the now-retired, self-improvement-geared ‘This Column Will Change Your Life'. His new release, unsurprisingly, has a clear, authoritative, but still relatable and occasionally humorous tone that comes from someone who has spent years thinking and writing about productivity. In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman wants to reframe productivity culture into a more meaningful exercise in considering what to do with the smallness of our time spent alive. To argue his point, Burkeman takes inspiration from a wide range of sources but feels most comfortable in the company of contemporary psychology and old philosophers.

Burkeman, myself, and many others, became enraptured by the productivity sphere when we first encountered it; I with James Scholz. Ideal morning routines, time tracking, mega-effective note taking systems filled our minds. What once felt exciting, however, started to wear off after a while. We found reasons to stop waking up at 5am to do a workout and meditate before classes: we're exhausted and need sleep; it's too much work; it doesn't matter anyway. And after trying and failing and trying again [many of us are now tired of the early mornings and the guilt](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/office-space/the-frustration-with-productivity-culture).

Young people are perhaps not so much products as they are (somewhat) willing participants of online cultures; Youtube, Twitter, Twitch, Tik Toc, etc. Many of us have encounter productivity culture, follow it, and find it valuable; after a while, however, the diamond stops glistening and we find that we are left with a stone in our hands. The stone might be useful for some things, like one piece of a stony pathway, but it is not a diamond.

Oliver Burkeman, a self-professed long-time follower of productivity and hustle culture, shares in Four Thousand Weeks about his own journey with finding the stone and how we might let go of our idea of the diamond. It is the ultimate book for the recovering productivity geek.

> Productivity gives the false impression that we can do everything we want; we *can* become an all-conquering person, never again succumbing to the limitedness that time imposes upon us.

## The perils and joys of procrastination.

The key to better time management is, according to Burkeman, to realise that all worries about life stem from its brevity. Life is too unsettlingly short; we must make as much of it as we can. If I am spending too much time on social media, watching streams, or in a low-paying non-descript job that I have no interest in, then I feel like I am wasting that time, and time is immensely valuable.

We also feel like we are losing time on the things we don't do:  the experiences we didn't share in and the ambitions that we haven't had the time to get to. That cause that we care about - the environment, caring for our elders, getting involved in our community - but we are too busy to get involved in each day.

![Computer screen with Do More](https://res.cloudinary.com/fledger/image/upload/v1641420226/post/productivity_do_more_hkwjxy.jpg "The focus on perfect, well-organised aesthetics is a prominent feature of productivity culture. Photo by [Carl Heyerdahl](https://unsplash.com/photos/KE0nC8-58MQ).")

Oftentimes, it feels like this stems from that one fire-breathing dragon that we never seem to get control over: procrastination. Procrastination is also a heavily featured character in Four Thousand Weeks, where Burkeman suggests that to get over it we must realise that it actually exists in two forms: the good and the bad.

The good kind of procrastination is what we channel in order to live our lives as we want to live them. That is, we procrastinate - or rather, choose not doing - certain things. It is, after all, by not choosing to do some tasks that we choose to follow others, ones that give our lives much more meaning: developing our hobbies; bonding with loved ones. Not doing good procrastinating results in thinking that you can get everything done, trying to do everything, and endlessly falling into the endless tasks that you now have convinced yourself need to be done. We have to use the good kind of procrastination in order to get on with our lives.

The other kind - the one that more accurately describes what I am doing when I sit for hours on my phone when I had actually planned to study or read that ridiculously long article I've been putting off - is less helpful to us. It also has to do with time. More specifically, the inability to accept the finitude of time and our own limited capabilities. I might be procrastinating because, actually, if I were to face this task I would be confronted with the fact that I have a limited amount of time to do it and it is undoubtedly not going to turn out exactly as I want it to.

There is also the other ‘positive' of endlessly procrastinating: if the end product is not something I am happy about, I can just say that I didn't have enough time for it rather than having to deal with the idea that it might be saying something about my own capabilities. But of course, it is only when we clearly see our weaknesses that we can understand how we may improve them.

## The lost promise of productivity culture.

Our obsession with productivity is ultimately an obsession with the unfair unexpectedness of time. Our feelings of anxiety (hurried heartbeats, restlessness) that cause us to procrastinate come from wanting to know with certainty that something will happen. And yet, this is impossible. Burkeman says that the solution is to realise and learn to accept that “insecurity and vulnerability are the default state”.

Taking time to think about why we feel anxious, and not allowing ourselves to run away from the physical sensations of anxiety, may be the solution. After all, “what we think of as ‘distractions' aren't the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They're just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation”. Burkeman's suggestions aren't far off from those offered by mindfulness and meditation: that once we get to know our mind and sit with it, we can start to feel better and make fewer escape-driven choices.

Productivity gives the false impression that we can do everything we want; we can become an all-conquering person, never again succumbing to the limitedness that time imposes upon us. But this is simply not right. “The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control,” Burkeman writes. There will always be the next task, and the one after that, not to speak of the people in our lives that will inevitably disturb us (as they should, Burkeman says, for why is it worth having time to ourselves if we cannot share it with others, too?). Having everything under control is the glistening of the productivity diamond: “we're constantly attempting to master [time] - to channel ourselves into a position of dominance and control over our unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure, and no longer so vulnerable to events”. Protection from vulnerability is an alluring, but impossible, state.

## Is productivity really all bad?

I think Burkeman's list of actions in the appendix (focus on one project at a time; spend more time meditating; etc) echoes something of what Four Thousand Weeks does not mention yet is a very real reason why people take to the productivity mindset. In The Art of Taking Action, Gregg Kech shows how much our life improves when we do less thinking-about-doing and lot more actual-doing. “Action isn't something that comes after figuring things out. Action is a way of figuring things out,” Kech writes. And productivity culture is fast to let us know that it is not ‘thinking about' getting up at 5am, it's all about what to do once the alarm goes off at the start of the day. This can be useful for those prone to overthinking, and might actually be a step towards a less anxious everyday life. Burkeman's suggestion that once you get rid of your unhelpful assumptions about time “you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what's gloriously possible instead” may become more possible once we find tools that help us do so better, making us feel more confident that we are able to do this work at all. Only as long as we do not let it fool us into thinking that we now have it all ‘under control.'

Besides these issues, I think Four Thousand Weeks holds a lot of value for a culture and its people for whom productivity has become a large part. It is a much needed reflection for a phenomenon that swallows up the lives of many people.

## James Scholz stopped streaming.

James Scholz and his streams did not last. For whatever reason, on June 19th, James Scholz stopped streaming, and there was no stream on his channel for the following months. It was in November that the youtube channel started to upload videos once again, this time in much shorter, manageable study sessions. It makes sense to me that this kind of intensive focus on time is never much sustainable in the long term.

It is perhaps unfair to point out James Scholz as a metaphor of the whole of productivity culture, something that is also an industry with its own profit-related motivations and extends beyond the borders of any one individual. But for me, the obsession with productivity that led to the fame of one person for the sake of unbridled focus on the excessively productive use of time felt like a reminder that something had gone missing in our community. This is where Four Thousand Weeks delivers - as a reminder of the only really important productivity question that we need to learn and ask ourselves: “what would it mean to spend the only time you get in a way that truly feels as though you're making it count?”

![Four Thousand Weeks cover photo](https://res.cloudinary.com/fledger/image/upload/v1675114306/post/four_thousand_hours_jp93zt.jpg "Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Cover photo courtesy of [Penguin](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1111522/four-thousand-weeks/9781847924018.html).")

If I am spending too much time on social media, or in a low-paying job that I have no interest in, then I am wasting that time, and time is immensely valuable.