This morning I got sent home from work with suspected coronavirus. I feel awful, but I’ve slept for like 16 hours so I figure I should do something productive, like whine at you guys.
Whining is a good way to categorise how I’m doing – I feel awful, but not really awful enough that I can’t get out of bed, which is why I went into work in the first place. I’ve been coughing for the last week, my head is pounding, and I’m feverish, but I’m able to stand and that means I can’t really justify a sick day – after all, work’s incredibly busy at the minute, and every person that stays off work is just making things harder for everyone else, so I got dressed and went in.
Reader, I made in an hour. I started at noon, and by one o’clock I was struggling to focus on what my customer was saying, never mind work the computer at the same time. My fever spiked, and after sitting on hold to speak to NHS24 my boss took the executive decision to send me home to self-isolate, which is how we ended up here. I’m now stuck in the house for at least a week to see how things develop, and aside from all the physical symptoms the worst thing is the guilt.
I feel just fantastically, overwhelmingly guilty about where I am right now. It’s not because I feel like a burden on society, and it’s not because I’m worried about infecting other people; it’s because I’m not being productive.
Being stuck unable to do much for a couple of days has really brought home to me how much my identity is tied to my productivity, and how much social ties are used to motivate me to work.
Take the example I gave earlier – work’s busy right now, and if I’m not there it means someone else has to pick up my slack. I’m motivated to go in to help everyone else, rather than because I love my job or want to be there.
I’m also driven by this constant need to be productive, which extends way beyond my contracted 37½ hours per week. Particularly with the rise of social media and online businesses, now more than ever we’re told that everything we’re doing needs to be monetised and contributing to the economy. The #RiseAndGrind, “lets get that bread” corners of the internet push an insidious narrative that working is the point of life, rather than a means to an end – they’re the same people that see taking time off from work as a sign of weakness rather than as an opportunity to go out and enjoy themselves.
My issue with this neo-liberalist perspective is the underlying assumption that producing capital to drive the economy (whether that’s local, national, or global) is the only reason to exist. It’s been said often enough before, and this point’s been made more eloquently that I’m able to make it, but economics is basically witchcraft and is a stupid way to organise a society.
The core benefit of forming social groups, surely, is supporting one another; caring for the sick, the young, and the elderly, working together to survive and to thrive. Organising society entirely around the economy switches that goal, centering profit margins over anything else, and this drives us into our current situation where people are seen – and see themselves – as inherently worthless, and feel it’s necessary to justify the space they take up by being as productive as possible.
It’s the same impulse that drove me back to work three days after a major head injury. It’s the same impulse that leaves me antsy after more than two weeks on holiday. It’s the same impulse that means I usually book out my entire weekends seeing friends, or family, or working on projects, or doing something that feels productive, and that drops this guilt on me when I have to be off sick, or when I end up playing Stardew Valley for a couple of hours instead of putting out job applications or updating my LinkedIn or something.
I don’t really know how to end this, apart from ending it and taking some time to feel better, but I feel like Robin Williams’ speech from Dead Poet’s Society can probably count as a satisfying conclusion for this post:
Medicine, law, business, engineering: these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love…
These are what we stay alive for
Georgina Wilkinson 