Gemma Speck

I was like, I made an excuse and I went home to work.

And my family was a little bit like, what the fuck, Gemma?

Like, you're not saving lives.

Like, nobody urgently needs an Instagram post at 4pm on a Saturday.

Nobody needs an updated episode description at 9pm on a Monday.

But it was this impulse.

I couldn't

settle for the day until I'd done something productive like this terrible itch that wasn't leaving I think younger me would have been very quick to tell you that like I just really like working hard and I love to work and it's like in my DNA but

I didn't particularly like not being there for family events and I didn't particularly like feeling like I was missing out or not making memories.

So why was I doing it?

That's, I think, always a question we have to ask ourselves at different points, at points like this.

Like, why do we do things we don't want to do when we don't have to?

Why do we feel like we have to?

So let's start by discussing what's going on here.

Firstly, what is our cultural obsession with productivity?

Because this is like, this here is the root cause.

One of the biggest reasons why and how rest became this luxury of this thing to feel guilty about, basically I think happened when

time stopped being something that we moved through and we experienced, and it started being something that you spent and you used.

For most of human history, daily life was, you know, largely organized around tasks, seasons, sunlight, community, natural rhythms, work,

And productivity, like, expanded and kind of lessened based on what the community needed and the season.