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the end of leisure
 In an academic assessment a few months ago, a senior tutor told me I needed to ‘slow down and pace myself’. I was ‘trying to go a little too far too fast’. My immediate response was indignant. Why would I do that? And perhaps more implicitly: How? I don’t think I know how to slow down. In my work, I am driven by one goal: productivity. How many words I’ve written in a day, how many I’ve read. How many hours I’ve worked. How many boxes I’ve ticked on my to-do list.
Sometimes I worry that I’ve turned my life into another version of that to-do list, an endless rota of tasks to be checked off rather than experiences to be lived. Go for walk: tick. Watch movie: tick. Write blogpost: tick. I’ve been tracking my daily habits since somewhere around 2016, the height of the bullet journalling craze, so a particularly intrepid archivist could create an almost decade-long map of how many mornings I’ve stretched, journaled, or walked a certain amount of steps. Why do I feel this compulsion, to track, record, and regulate each and every hour of my days, even when I don’t have work-related tasks to complete? Part of it is personality, I’m sure. I have the typical trifecta of control-obsessed mental illnesses; you can guess which. Yet there’s something social going on here too, a culture which has enabled, if not directly created, these productivity-obsessed aspects of my personality.
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