Productivity discourse destroys the very life it claims to optimize.

Evidence

Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? … The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 32

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘success as teleological goal’ critique aligns with the reader’s standing pattern of content that questions production/logic for its own sake.
• ADDENDUM: Could support ‘On Sacrifice’ framing of ends-in-themselves vs. instrumentalized life, though the overlap is thematic.