Already we are halfway through the semester, and perhaps it wouldn’t be too early to start thinking about summer plans. Are you going to be doing an internship/ part-time job? Or maybe you would like to go travelling? While an internship seems most productive, we could argue that taking a break may help us to recharge and thus be even more productive in the long run.
But over the recent winter break I had decided against doing any of that. I’d “wanted to use the time to clear some backlog and write a few essays for fun, and also read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit*”, or so I justified to myself. (*a notoriously abstruse philosophical work.) Turns out that it is not very fun to write essays, much less read Hegel. And so after scratching out my scalp and after falling asleep on the sofa with predictable regularity, I eventually decided to give in to the ‘chill-and-do-nothing’ side of myself that I have constantly tried to suppress like a spring that keeps bouncing back up. “Maybe I’m just tired and need a break before next semester”, I reasoned to myself.
Nonetheless, even when I tried to do “whatever it was that I felt like doing”, from watching YouTube videos to staying at home, it was hard to shake off the nagging guilt that towered over me and chastised my ‘unproductivity’: you could be doing so much more with your time. It was almost as though the only way to escape its perennial shadow was to throw myself back into a struggle against Hegel’s nauseating writing that left me pointlessly disheartened.
This sort of guilt has haunted me for years; it is the familiar voice of an endearing recorder that lies within me and triggers on cue. It could be an impromptu extension of lunch plans with friends, that stretches until nighttime and leaves me ending the day with no ‘real progress’. Or maybe it’s just YouTube and my ‘laziness’ (I mean curiosity) getting the better of me. Regardless, I’ll end the day feeling terribly unsatisfied, almost as though there was something I had failed to achieve, almost as though the time had slipped away… and I had allowed it to.
But I do not complain – after all, this voice is like a parent who wants the best for me, and I know how to fix it. All I need to do is wake up early the next day, say 6am, sit fixated at my desk, and churn out some actual work. By breakfast I could get a thousand words down. And as I eat breakfast with my friends afterwards, within me would beam a feeling of immense satisfaction: I have made good use of my time.
Such self-regulation makes for an effective governing system, as Foucault would say; a result of internalising the discourse from powerful institutions which is then further perpetuated by everyday interactions. Everywhere we go, we see people and institutions telling us what to value, from GPA-based Dean’s Lists to Fitbit step-counters to slim-waisted models. Over time, these values unconsciously seep into our own judgements of things, hardening to form the lens through which we perceive the world. That may explain why I’m so obsessed with ‘making the most of my time’ and ‘doing more’ – a result of the hyper-productive values that permeate everyday discourse. Maybe that’s partially why we would spend our winter break chasing internships and why we would sacrifice precious sleep to study.
But is it really the case that ‘doing more = better’? And what does ‘making the most of one’s time’, or ‘real progress’, even mean? Notions such as ‘success’ and ‘progress’ rest on underlying yardsticks that we use to ascertain the direction and extent of what we consider to be ‘good’. Yardsticks, of which, are subjective, even if indisputably taken to be true.
“All that is true”, you may be thinking, “and nobody is saying that these yardsticks are, well, absolutely objective. These standards may be imperfect, but it is the most practical way of functioning at both a societal and an individual level.”
Indeed, even if these yardsticks are constructed by society and ourselves, they do help us to achieve ‘our’ dreams and goals. For instance, the yardstick that ‘studying more = good’ helps to keep afloat my goal of a decent GPA, and this yardstick of ‘high GPA = good’ would (hopefully) increase internship chances, and this yardstick of ‘internship = good’ would facilitate my employability… a yardstick of which would give me stable income… of which would give me sufficient financial freedom… of which will enable me to start a family or travel the world… of which would, in the final analysis, give me some eventual contentment. Or happiness, or whatever it is that we wish for.
Eventual happiness! Just perhaps not yet – for now, we’ve got to study hard, so that we can work hard at an internship, and then a serious job that pays well, and so the list goes. But eventually, happiness awaits.
The issue is when these yardsticks morph from being a means-to-an-end, to an end-in-itself. I tell myself that all this is for a ‘better future’. And suddenly I’m spending my winter break – the only chance I really get to spend with my family – cooped up in a closed corner. Scratching out my scalp over Hegel’s syntax structure.
It puzzles me why we are constantly deferring our contentment, as though contentment is a condition reserved for our later years, when we have spent our lives slogging hard enough to earn one’s justification to be content. (My friend even mentioned that he fears being fully content now, because then his improvement would stagnate.) Why does ‘happiness’ need to be justified by ‘hard work’?
Indeed, practical necessities and forward-planning are undeniable in today’s society. And additionally, it is very possible for one to enjoy the work they do – for instance, by finding purpose in their jobs; in fact, even in challenging times one may be able to embrace the Sisyphean struggle itself. To those who are able to truly embody this mindset throughout all of life, to have contentment not as a contingent reward but instead as an equanimous anchor that grounds oneself always: I respect that. But for many of us, myself included, who may speak of this mindset but still end up being tied, with subconscious guilt-laden chains, to the proxy yardsticks that have come to govern our actions and rule our judgements – for these few of us, this essay is an attempt to get us to re-consider.
Of course, it is easier said than done, and some academics would argue that neoliberal discourse is so ever-present today that it’s nearly impossible for an individual to find a way out. The extent to which this is true, I don’t yet know. But what I know is that in every moment of life, I would rather be happy and content than unhappy and self-critical. And that trying to force myself, against all my heart, to read another sentence of Hegel… probably goes against this wish. Especially if I am trying to do so while on a long bus ride late at night (a result of eschewing almost categorically from Grab-rides – even if I’m terribly exhausted – to ‘save money for some imagined future’).
Always we assume that happiness is just round the corner, if only we were to work hard now and play our cards right. But maybe this round-the-corner has become a mentality; maybe every time we reach the corner our happiness gets deferred one more bend. And so we keep striving onwards, trading present-moment happiness for future happiness, for the promise of ever-increasing returns that would one day arrive. Little do we realise that this series of moments is life itself, and we are already passing it by.
In this moment, the long-term results of our actions are hard to predict. Amidst the unknowability of calculating future consequences and measuring them against abstracted projections, perhaps the best we can do is to make peace with our current selves. To examine whether there is any dissonance between our current actions and the purported reasons behind them. To ask what it is, really, that we are striving towards amidst the fast-moving currents too often sweeping us in directions that we wind up calling ‘fate’. Maybe there is no objective ‘good’ or ‘bad’ after all, but in some ways it’s up to us to decide what we choose to value.
And so a few weeks into the winter break, I stopped trying to read Hegel. Happy? Not quite. But those traces of dissatisfaction, alongside the free time, that resulted from my decision spurred me to finally properly write down some thoughts that I have wanted to write for a long time now; thoughts that I always said I would write “one day”. And of course the piece was challenging to write, and perhaps during the writing I sometimes failed to live up to the contentment that I preached in the piece itself. But I guess trying-too-hard-to-be-content-and-embrace-the-moment would be a paradoxical endeavour? In any case, you get to decide for yourself. For me, I’ll continue trying to wrap my head around the elusive notion of a contentment that is not contingent on outputs – though I must admit that finishing this piece (at last!) is definitely leaving me rather momentarily happy.
Header & Banner photo from Unsplash
About the Author
Jun Yi is a Year 2 Philosophy and Psychology major who was recently shaken out of his armchair after attending an intertidal walk with tWild. Sometimes he thinks that Philosophy is somewhat of a chess game, and while he is still trying to learn more moves within the system, he is hoping to eventually go beyond its rules and to appreciate life beyond the board.