Never Enough? On continuous growth versus what sustains us
Unfettered Achievement Motivation
Glennan Doyle doesn’t know how to have fun. In a recent interview, her wife, soccer star Abby Wambaugh, talked about asking Glennan what she wanted to do for fun on a weekend, and getting a reply about cleaning/organizing the garage. For awhile, people reading all this stuff could say, “Are you Abby or Glennan?” This article made my husband and me laugh, because we are both Glennan.
It also made me sad. I think it is fair to say that I’m a pretty achievement-focused person — what’s more, I am pretty easy-going about adopting achievement frameworks from the cultural surround and, at least historically, not thinking too hard about whether those frameworks make much sense — especially if they were congruent with my own internal drives. So, I went through graduate school with a perfect GPA, in part because the reward systems capture by grades dovetail with things I like to do — learn about stuff, write, calculate, read, think — and the ways in which I enjoy doing them. Having figured this out, I stayed in school by becoming a professor.
I like my job, and I’m good at my job. By conventional metrics, I am very very successful. I went from being a straight A student to being the equivalent of a straight A worker in academia. You might wonder what on earth is a problem here?
Work as Avoidance
Here’s the thing — when I am anxious about stressful things in my life, especially things that are uncontrollable or otherwise very challenging, work becomes a coping mechanism. I apply for more grants, write more manuscripts, develop more reading lists for new ideas, do work and tasks that my team or my students should be doing rather than me. This strategy inevitably leads to a sense of being overwhelmed and an inability to deal with whatever the anxiety provoking, stressful thing might be. And it’s a vicious cycle. Despite the sense of overload, I usually remain on deadline and I get even this overload set of commitments done. I like my job, and I’m good at my job, and so when things are terrifying, especially when they are terrifying outside my job, I think MOAR JOB!!!! MOAR JOB GOOD!!!!!
And, because I have pulled off the heroic overachieve thing more than once in my life, feeding the achievement drive and ensuring that I can’t think about other inconvenient facts, this cycle reinforces itself. And society helps — what you get when you work this way is more opportunity, more possibility, and in the end, more work. Sometimes you also get more pay and more prestige (or what passes for it in the academic world), and you feel like you are being productive and growing in your capabilities. And you sort of are doing the latter, but at the expense of some other things.
Among those other things are the scary challenges that work overload helps me avoid — which I won’t write about here because those are stories that involve others who don’t necessarily want to discuss on Medium. But, I think fun has also been a casualty of this approach to the world, been one of those things that goes missing, and not just in a simple way.
What Everyone thinks is Fun
First of all, let’s tackle the fun that Glennan Doyle apparently doesn’t get. That’s the fun of adventure, exploration, spectacle. Below is a photograph of Blue Lake, which is located in the west desert of Utah, near the Nevada border. The lake is fed by a warm spring, so it is temperate all year round; for this reason, it is a destination for scuba diving training. I don’t do scuba diving, but I do like to swim in random lakes. Given the isolation, this was a great family adventure for a COVID-19 era New Years. So, at the dawn of 2021, my family and I spent a couple hours driving out to this remote area, and swimming in the lake below. It was majestic fun.
The bigger point is that Abby Wambaugh style fun has been a bigger survivor of my workaholic tendencies — because it is hard to argue that jumping in Blue Lake isn’t worth leaving the office to do, and even more moderate forms of this type of fun — seeing a Ballet showcase for the College of Fine Arts, or just catching the latest big-budget sci-fi film — seem “worthwhile.”
This kind of fun offers escape, novelty, “time away”, in small or large doses. It casts work as the routine from which we need a break. And for many people, work is repetitive, boring, and less than challenging. Note that I’m not necessarily implying a clear 1:1 objective correspondence between some types of work and the degree to which work is unpleasant or pleasant, and I also do not mean work to only point towards paid employment (see Studs Terkel’s classic and also this piece). But, the idea of this type of fun implies some counterpoint to the routine and repetition of daily life — which is dominated by work for most adults.
Indeed, daily swims in Blue Lake could be pleasant for some people, but if your job required you to do so on a daily basis, it wouldn’t likely be fun anymore even if you liked it. This brings me to the other way in which the relentless pursuit of achievement can be a problem, and that’s in the way it complicates our sensibilities about routine, repetitive activity.
What Nobody Wants to Do: Finding Fun in Repetition and Routine?
So, I said I’m a Glennan and I meant it. I actually do clean out closets and prep cook with free time, and I am fully capable of enjoying those activities. I suspect there are alot of Glennan’s out there, and maybe we all have an inner Glennan.
The reason for this is that repetitive, routine activities are restorative. They are sustaining. These are the things that enable the conditions of lives well lived. They include laundry, cooking, cleaning, organizing, repairing and maintaining structures and tools. They require us to pause. They also include rest and sleep. While they may never gift us with the exhilaration of swimming in a warm lake in the middle of a desert winter, they are pleasing in their own right. But that pleasure invites ridicule and mockery in many corners. That is why the Glennan/Abby anecdote is funny — we are not supposed to find pleasure in cleaning out a closet.
Why the Corruption of Routine, Repetitive Pleasures? The Progress Narrative….
So, in pondering the space of fun in my own life, I have been thinking hard about why the routine and repetitive seem disallowed — why, as I initially pondered my own fun-challenged ways, I sought adventure, vacation planning, new activities within which to pursue achievements.
It seems to me that a narrative of progression — the hero’s tale, the Bildungsroman — ties together the threads of capitalism, imperialism, and relentless self-improvement in ways that fundamentally devalue repetition and restoration. This might be a uniquely American version of some of those genres, though I think it is wider-spread. Ursula K. LeGuin wrote beautifully about this in her essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction:
“It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrestled a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…. No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood sprouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.”
Evidence suggests that the oat seed harvesting was far more important to sustaining communities than the hunt, at least for significant chunks of our development as a species. So — the sustaining, repetitive, and routine actions that keep us all alive are simply “off-screen” in relation to the stories that help keep us gripped by emotion.
This “off-screen” or “outside the plot” nature of sustaining, repetitive, routine, and restorative actions (nobody in adventure films goes to the bathroom, right?) renders such actions devalued. So it’s just not done to view “fun” as cleaning out a closet. Exercise cannot be an act of routine self-maintenance, but occurs as a point on the way to a goal (being able to do a pull-up, run a marathon).
The devaluing of the routine and restorative scales from the individual level to the collective. Businesses are to innovate, grow, and progress, rather than merely fill a need and continue to do so. Time for restoration inevitably slows down the speed with which we can grow and improve, even though ultimately failures of restoration leave us with burnout or its equivalents in the material world (infertile fields, erosion, invasive species), among other losses.
Re-valuing Routine and Restoration
All this is perhaps a long-winded, overly academic treatise on why Glennan should be allowed her version of fun, and we might all do well to seek the Glennan kind of fun and more pointedly, to allow that to be fun. The pressure to be on a growth trajectory as an individual, an employee, or a business results in giving short shrift to maintenance and restoration. There are countless examples.
As a professor, the pressure towards intense growth has meant that all manner of restorative activities (filing papers, reading outside one’s area of focus, revisiting old work in the service of teaching it, committee work) become seen as frustrating diversions of time and energy. Likewise, the sage advice of productivity gurus is to outsource your repetitive personal tasks (cleaning toilets, dishes, floors). Such outsourcing distances us from the detritus and decay of our own lives, in ways that represent losses as well as gains. Sure — we have more time to work, but we also are less stewards of our own spaces; we inhabit our own lives with less connection.
At the collective level, this progress narrative leads us to devalue things in troubling ways. The building where my office is located required costly crisis repairs to its HVAC system, in part (I was told) because the system was not cleaned for decades after the building was built in 1970. Or, consider that “essential workers” during the pandemic included some of the most poorly paid occupations in the U.S. — people who do the repetitive, restorative, and sustaining work of cleaning public spaces, for example.
Some might object that the activities I am highlighting are objectively unpleasant and not fun — and maybe, maybe. But how much of the “not fun” is really tied to the “not growth-promoting, not productive, not center-plot and center-stage” quality that we’ve culturally ascribed to these activities? I don’t really know, but I’m planning to allow myself to find out, starting now, and going into the year 2022. What kind of life do I have if I re-enable myself to see the routine and restorative as necessary and also enjoyable? I’ll be picking oat seeds and watching newts with Ool.
