No, Going to Therapy is not Productive.
It's Good. It's Human. It is not Productive.
No, going to therapy is not productive.
Neither is learning the piano, going for a run, or calling your mother.
They are good. They are human. They are not productive.
I'm a little uneasy just writing the phrase, “going to therapy is not productive.” We both know it's true — still, it feels wrong. Of course, there are things we do that are good but not productive. But, as I list these clearly market-value-less human goods and call them unproductive, I feel as if I've undermined something — not quite like I've lied, but that I've done some harm. Why is that? Why does writing “going to therapy isn't productive” feel wrong?
Turning to the dictionary definition, I find a little support.
The effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.
I don’t see much about humans in there at all, much less about art, exercise, and phone calls with loved ones. Still, I bet you and I can picture a productive person. I even bet we’ll picture a very similar person.
I see a person who doesn’t doomscroll TikTok or Instagram too often — they prefer the company of a good book on their lazy Sundays. They exercise, at least a little, most days of the week and cook healthy meals even when they’d prefer to order. They’ve got hobbies, but still make time to volunteer and visit their family on the weekend. Most of all, though, they’re good at their job.
Today, productive means a lot more than “the effectiveness of productive efforts, especially in industry …” When we say someone is productive, what we mean is that they consistently “take actions that are good for their long-term wellbeing.” Stubbornly, productivity clings to its original meaning, too. Somewhere in the backs of our minds, even as it relates to people, productivity still has to do with producing something of market value. The two live together in an insidious dissonance that changes how we view ourselves and human wellbeing.
So, when I say “going to therapy isn't productive” I feel as if I’m denying the reality that therapy can benefit someone’s long-term wellbeing; this is why I felt like I'd done harm in saying it. Equally destructive yet less noticeably, if I say that therapy is productive, I’m implying that therapy is valuable because it helps people be more productive, more capable of producing market value, later. Are either of those what I wanted to say? Not in the least.
To say what I really meant, that it’s nonsensical and harmful to say therapy is productive (seriously, what am I supposed to produce in a therapy session? Reports? Blog posts chronicling my progress?) we first need to disentangle productivity from wellbeing.
Internalizing a Productivity Ethics
To make productivity and wellbeing synonymous, what I call a productivity ethics, we need two things: a society whose highest good is productivity, and for people to measure their self-worth by how productive they are. Lucky for us, we have just that: the one-two punch of capitalism and the meritocracy.
Disclaimer: I'm not here to make a political or economics-based argument for or against these two ideologies. I saw a pattern in how they might affect the way people think about wellbeing, and I want to share that. That’s all.
First, lets over-simplify the motivations of a Capitalist society.
One of the pillars of Capitalism is the profit motive. A company’s primary goal is to generate profit — profit is the highest good. To generate a profit, the company has to be productive; it has to take whatever its inputs are, like worker hours and materials, and produce something it can sell for more money than the cost of the inputs. The company must also do this at a faster rate than its competition. So, companies should be optimizing for productivity so that they can generate a greater profit. Simple.
Now onto the individual. In a meritocracy, an individual's worth in that society is determined by their merit, and merit is a person's ability to contribute to whatever the societies highest good(s) is/are, especially if that ability is rare or costly to develop. In our capitalist case, the highest good is profit.
Profit is generated when we’re productive, so, from school to the workplace, productivity becomes the highest virtue a person can strive for, after all our merit, our worth in society is on the line. Children aren’t praised for learning, that’s difficult to measure, instead they’re praised for the amount of correctly completed homework they can produce. The average office deals, similarly, in observable things like emails sent, meetings attended, spreadsheets and PowerPoints produced.
This seeps equally into our leisure time. People are a lot more impressed if you spent your weekend learning to code or reading non-fiction than if you spent it watching Netflix. Skill-building during leisure time means you’re growing your capacity for productivity — you’re developing your merit — rest be damned.
So, productivity trickles down from employers, into schools, and into us and our leisure time. The profit motive manifests in people as the productivity virtue and becomes our best measure of our self-worth. This is how we get a productivity ethics.
SIDENOTE: It's worth noting again that this is a massive over-simplification. There are plenty of examples in modern capitalism of companies that are not very productive at all but generate profits for their stakeholders. We'll leave that to the side for now. There are also plenty of counter-examples for a real meritocracy in the West (nepotism, I'm looking at you.)
How Productivity Swallows Wellbeing
Naturally, living in a culture obsessed with being productive, we crave lessons on how to be more productive. Books, articles, blogs, YouTube videos, TikTok channels, every medium under the sun is saturated with productivity. And for a long time, much of this content was about how to do more. It makes sense. We want to be more productive — to produce more. What interests me, however, is the recent flare up of sustainable and slow productivity.
Let me show you what I mean with a few core ideas from productivity books over the last 25 years.
(2001) Getting Things Done - David Alan
(2007) Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time - Brian Tracy
(2014) Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time - Jeff Sutherland
(2021) 4000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals - Oliver Burkeman
(2024) Slow productivity - Cal Newport
(2024) Feel good productivity - Ali Abdaal
What we see is two groups: the first 3 are books about finishing tasks with productivity systems, the next three are books about sustainable work through joy and reasonable pacing.
I’m not surprised to see productivity books sharing systems for getting more work done. It’s the quintessential productivity question: How do I take my inputs (as a person, time and effort) and produce more outputs? It seems reasonable that, like the assembly line offered a systematized answer to factory productivity, some sort of system could offer a solution for personal productivity. But this second group of books is holistic — they’re less about systems for doing tasks, and more philosophies for how to live well and work well.
4000 weeks is a philosophy for how to get yourself to go through the difficult process of accepting your limitations, taking on fewer projects, and committing yourself to a handful of achievable projects without feeling guilty about the things you chose not to do instead. It's also, interestingly, a self-proclaimed anti-productivity productivity book.
Slow productivity takes a similar tone. In fact, its author, Cal Newport, regularly advocates for holistic routines that include exercise, healthy sleep, hobbies you never try to turn into side-hustles, and community engagement, as part of what he calls the deep life. To round it off, Ali Abdaal often defines productivity in his YouTube videos as “spending time intentionally” listing activities like playing world of warcraft and having dinner with friends productive as long as that’s what you meant to do.
This new wave of productivity books, typically describe themselves as antidotes to hustle culture, the grind, and burnout. They use terms like deep vs. shallow, intentionality, meaningful, sustainable and the themes like rest, enjoyability, natural human limitations, and values. It all points to something bigger than productivity.
In truth, I don’t think they’re productivity books at all. They’re trying to answer a bigger question: How do we live a good life? But, the only lens we have to view a good life is through merit, merit by productivity. So, these concepts, like intentionality, sustainability, meaningfulness, and activities like exercise, rest, and socializing — wellbeing things — have to be pitched under the umbrella of productivity; they’re considered productive because we value them and … how else could we value them?
The problem with productivity ethics
When we maintain productivity as the highest virtue, then we imply that the primary reason hustle culture and burnout are bad, and worthy of being remedied, is because they are detrimental to our long term productive output. Why should we embrace our limitations, have hobbies, exercise, and read books? Well, to avoid burnout so that we can maximize our long-term output, of course!
To be clear, I am NOT saying these authors are making that claim. I think they’re doing the hard job of moving us away from burnout practices while staying productive. And productivity itself isn’t bad.
Because our societal values are centred around productivity as the highest good, higher than human good, it is the final justification of everything we do if we consider something good. Productivity language is what we’re forced to use when we discuss human goods because it’s all we have left, and it brings with it all the baggage of output maximization with it.
This is the problem with productivity ethics. To value wellbeing, we had to smuggle bits and pieces of it into the definition of productivity so that it could be optimized for as a byproduct of our profit maximization. Nurturing the mind is good because you can use your knowledge to produce better. Nurturing the body is good because people are more productive when they're healthy and well rested. Nurturing the soul is good because people can work longer when they're not depressed and disconnected. This is better than nothing, but not good enough.
As long as we internalize a productivity ethics, we'll always be striving to minimize our down-time. To take as few mental health days as we can. To undervalue compassionate leave because it stifles our productive output. To take fewer days off even if we're provided paid holidays.
So, what do we do about it?
Sweeping societal changes would be great, but I won’t hold my breath. I want to value wellbeing for its own value — not because it makes me productive. So, maybe we can start with a small mindset shift ourselves.
We can start by accepting productivity as a virtue, just not the highest virtue — that should be reserved for wellbeing and human flourishing. Shunning personal productivity would be short-sighted. Instead, we should value productivity for how it supports wellbeing. We all want to contribute to something bigger than ourselves, to know that our work, what we produce and share with the world, is helpful. That's what productivity is for: helping people, enabling their flourishing and wellbeing, and giving us a sense of pride in our ability to offer that help.
Secondly, we can stop calling things that are good, productive, unless they really do produce something. It’s nonsense to ask how I can make a call with my mother, a run, or a piano lesson more productive. They’re not. They never will be. We can ask how they can be higher quality, and it’s usually just by being more mindful and putting in more effort, but they can’t be more productive — nor should they be. That's not the point of any of those things. Please, let’s call them what they are.
They're valuable, they’re human, they’re good. But they’re not productive.
So, no. Going to therapy isn't productive, and thank God for that!
Cheers,
Nathan Laundry