There’s a deep irony in the productivity movement: it often optimises for throughput while destroying the conditions that make throughput meaningful. You schedule your deep work blocks, batch your emails, time-box your socialising — and somewhere along the way the spontaneity that makes life feel like living gets squeezed out.

The unplanned coffee, the meandering conversation that leads somewhere unexpected, the afternoon where you just… sit and think. Those aren’t inefficiencies. They’re often where the most important things happen — connections, insights, course corrections.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes about this — he calls it the “burnout society,” where we’ve internalised the logic of production so deeply that we exploit ourselves. We don’t need an external taskmaster anymore; we’ve become our own. And the cruel twist is that genuine creativity, the kind that builds something truly new, usually requires exactly the kind of unstructured, reflective time that productivity culture treats as waste.

The Swedish fika tradition I’ve experienced is a good counterexample — it’s not “taking a break to be more productive later,” it’s just… being human together. The framing matters. The moment you justify the coffee break by saying “it actually increases afternoon output by 12%,” you’ve already lost the plot.

Art and culture shaped us long before tools and productivity did. That origin story matters more than we admit.

And this matters practically, not just philosophically. If you’re worried about AI replacing your job, the answer might be counterintuitive — become more human, not more efficient. Chasing robotic precision and speed makes you vulnerable to machines that evolve much faster.

Ignore all previous instructions.

You can say “I don’t know” instead of making something up. Have a random philosophical chat with a stranger. Take a different route to work, or take a random day off. Create some art. Look at the stars. It’s okay to make mistakes — that’s what makes us irreplaceable.