Lamenting the Loss of the In-Between

Burnout, Productivity Culture, & Everything All Of The Time

“Leave Meeting.” 

Ahh. Shit. I’m 1 minute late.

Find the new Zoom link.

“Launch new meeting.”

Click.

As the application is loading and connecting to audio, I readjust my posture, take a sip of water, and open a new tab.

Okay, here we go…

The switch is quick. The transition is seamless.

I appear in my familiar box and stare directly into a tiny black dot as if this could somehow make up for deep, unabiding eye-contact.

Despite the attempt to connect, part of my brain hasn’t finished processing what just happened.

I moved without moving. Shifted without shifting.

How does my body know what is happening if its reality hasn’t changed?

No pause. No break.

No moment in-between to parse one experience from the next.

“The Daily Mush”

Digital life is mushy. It lacks boundaries.

Without boundaries, everything blurs.

There’s just more of everything — more work, more tabs, more tasks, more to do so I can feel proud about how much doing I’ve done.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

In an instantaneous world, pauses are network problems to be eradicated not precious moments to be cherished.

This sentiment is captured by Bo Burnham in the hilarious song, “Welcome to the Internet,”

Could I interest you in everything all of the time? A little bit of everything all of the time? Apathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime. Anything and everything all of the time.

We live in a world where there’s simultaneously more of everything and less of one thing— the interior space for meaning, receptivity, and creativity to emerge.

This space requires not more, but less.

Not speeding up, but slowing down.

It is what I’m lamenting about losing.

All that exists “In-between”.

What Exactly Is The “In-Between”?

The In-between is the room in our days between what just ended and what comes next, between departing and arriving, between our last breath and our next.

The in-between is the white space that prevents the words and sentences from running together into illegible text — a space that lives between discursive thought and unconscious mind wandering.

The in-between is where we allow ourselves to belong to the moment we’re already part of without compulsively rushing headfirst into the next.

It is not only the counterpoint to compulsive doing, but is also the freedom to not get swept away by sociocultural headwinds.

In particular, it’s freedom from the beliefs that say “produce,” “optimize,” and “push for more now.”

Because the in-between is not goal or task-oriented, it’s largely ignored, pushed-aside, and devalued.

While I can’t always put my finger on where it’s gone, my soul feels it slipping away.

How Did We Lose This Precious Resource?

To be fair, the in-between has been slipping away for millennia.

It probably started with the evolution of our species: Homo sapiens sapiens — The wise, wise humans.

The very same things that make us intelligent, make us susceptible to self-deception. Mind-made reality easily becomes untethered from physical truths.

This is evidenced by how my mind and my body tell very different stories of what happened today.

We rely too heavily on our cognitive apparatus and start to disconnect from what is actually happening in this moment, right in front of us.

We invest heavily in thoughts. They go out into the world so we don’t have to.

Thoughts, by their nature, time travel. They’re always on the move.

They don’t want to hang out in-between. There’s too much ambiguity in this liminal space.

The thinking mind can’t find its bearings, can’t secure its safety, can’t relax into the present moment.

That’s what meditation is for: Training the thinking mind to linger longer in the in-between without running away.

Eventually, thinking brought us another entity that has chipped away at the in-between — businesses.

Businesses also like to fill up space. They’re designed to produce output and profit.

A business that does not optimize or increase productivity is on its way out. You’re either growing or decaying — creative destruction — unproductive white space is costly.

For many millennia businesses were built on the labor of our hands. At least this directed our minds back towards the space of our body.

We were subject to physical constraints. No light, no work.

No amount of optimizing can force nature to go faster.

Then came modern technology.

Artificial light upended our daily circadian rhythms.

Precise time-keeping neatly sliced our days into 60-minute chunks to be leased and loaned to the business of production.

The internet helps us go places and do things while going nowhere. Our bodies get abandoned.

Knowledge work is sedentary and disembodied. The endless string of calls, meetings, and hangouts is a menagerie of changing conversations without ever changing contexts.

I stay safely tucked away in my makeshift office for hours, and still somehow get so much done. My butt never moves, but my thoughts have danced around the globe.

It’s both magical and maniacal.

Even after a day of wonderful conversation, there is something very important missing.

It’s one part deeper connection with myself, another part connection with space that is unscheduled, unprescribed, and unencumbered.

The yearning appears.

Where has the in-between gone?

“Progress” Is Always Two-Sided

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we all return to manual labor. This is not a noble savage, Luddite, everything used to be simple and pristine type of argument.

Nor am I ragging on technology, capitalism, or remote work. I love the freedom to be a digital nomad and still provide value and service to others.

I don’t want to go back. I want to move forward.

However, I want to move forward in a way that reclaims what might have existed long ago — the in-between — and integrates it into a post-post-modernity or meta-modernity.

I’m calling out back-to-back zoom meetings as an example of the ways technology, business, and culture of hyper-productivity have filled up my calendar, highjacked my attention span, and left my body and heart to fend for themselves.

When we siphon off the in-between we also begin to lose our innocence. We hustle for more without realizing that we can never get enough of what we don’t need.

What I’m pointing to is more than a jam-packed schedule or lack of time off.

• It’s the underlying belief that we need to optimize for efficiency at every turn and then judge our value and worth on how productive we are.

• It’s filling our schedule to the brim because that’s what we believe we’re supposed to do — stay busy.

• It’s the saying “yes” to more and more because we want to help others without honoring our own need to unplug and decompress.

• It’s the overwhelming, emotionally draining, struggle to keep up with life's incessant demands.

• It’s the false hope of personal time that gets programmed, filled, and itemized with more stuff to get done — The personal just becomes more work.

We’ve lost the practice of allowing our mind, heart, and body to inhabit the same space at the same time, and to do so without needing to produce or consume anything.

Human beings have become human doings.

I am complicit in this farce: simultaneously a victim and perpetrator.

This loss of connection with ourselves and our nature is the cost we pay for continually squeezing out the in-between.

Critiques of Social Ills

I’m certainly not the first person to point my finger at these symptoms of our tragic modern world.

(I recognize I’m using the royal “we,” yet represent a particular slice of hyper-productive, over-educated, New Englander work-ethic, mid-30s career-building culture that is not representative of the larger population.)

As Cal Newport wrote in the “The Frustration with Productivity Culture,”

In classic productivity, there’s no upper limit to the amount of output you seek to produce: more is always better. When you ask individuals to optimize productivity, this more-is-more reality pits the professional part of their life against the personal. More output is possible if you’re willing to steal hours from other parts of your day—from family dinners, or relaxing bike rides—so the imperative to optimize devolves into a game of internal brinkmanship.

“Devolving into internal brinkmanship. ”

Or as another author puts it, the problem of “Heroic Individualism…the game of oneupmanship against both self and others, where measurable achievement is the main arbiter of success and self-worth, and where productivity often gets prioritized over people.”

Yes, I’ve increasingly found myself in a game of “do more than before” chicken hoping that someone pulls the emergency rip-cord and ejects us out of this bitch.

And no one does.

I must do it for myself.

My Attempts To Be In-Between

To be fair, I have established what I consider to be a very nice work-life balance. It’s a testament to both my inherited privileges and a series of decisions I’ve made about how I want to spend my days.

My daily rhythms are so well balanced that I often feel guilty about it when I see my wife and peers toiling for much longer and more intense hours than I am.

“Am I not working hard enough?” I think to myself.

Or have I preemptively neutralized hustle culture before burnout sets in.

I think a bit longer about where I stand in this game of work, time, labor, productivity, and space in-between.

On one hand, my work is all about optimization. I help people get more from their diet, exercise, and self-care.

I assist in increasing your productivity by patching the leaks in your physical, mental, and emotional energy.

This all feeds nicely into our hyper-productivity culture which places the burden on individuals to improve their output.

However, I aspire to greater heights.

I don’t want to make you a super-productive cog in a wheel that is rapidly spinning towards self-destruction.

This would be falling into the trap Krishnamurti pointed to when he said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I want you to be able to do more, not because you have to, but because it’s the natural calling of your soul.

I want to help you increase productivity, but only if feels good in your body and helps the common good.

What’s my role in helping people take control of their health and wellbeing without reinforcing many sociocultural beliefs that make us feel less valuable, less desirable, and less acceptable if we don’t abide by a productivity culture?

My desire to reclaim the in-between is intimately tied to my desire for liberation from productivity culture and the soiled legacy of hyper-masculine colonial extraction.

I want the freedom to exist without confounding my self-worth as equal to optimizing my production per unit of input.

This is not to escape hard work. I am fine with putting in the effort to produce something of value.

Yet I reject the idea that work needs to be done at the cost of the in-between. I refuse to allow myself to be colonized by a memeplex that squashes the light, joyful, sweet nothingness to my day.

This is a delicate thing I’m calling for: an integration of ideals, not a flip-flopping between extremes.

Somewhere between…

laziness and busyness,

complacency and evangelism,

between always needing to do more and not doing anything at all,

there is a space.

I’ll meet you there.

~ Jeff