Bartleby, this strange character, prophet or madman, is the hero of a short story by the American novelist, Hermann Melville: Bartleby the Scribe, published in 1853. In 1850 at Wall Street, the kingdom of copyists and businessmen, Bartleby shocks.
Employed as a copyist in a law firm, Bartleby gradually came to pronounce only one sentence, enigmatic: “I would prefer not to...” or “I would rather not”.
However, nothing foresaid this sudden change in attitude for a man then described "of a bearing so poised that he would not fail to impose a happy influence on the other copyists. At first Bartleby made an extraordinary number of writings, like a man hungry for copies, he seemed to be re-oing from my documents.”
Suddenly, the comic unfolds: Bartleby "would prefer not to." He can't anymore or doesn't want anymore. The mystery remains intact. Still, he the applied and busy copyist, saturates. Could this be the expression of a burnout?
Or would he simply have had the courage to say, biasedly, his deepest feeling: my work alienates me, I am busy doing unproductive things that occupy all my time and distract me from my own identity?
"I want you to help me collation this sheet, here! And I handed it to him. - I'd prefer not to, he said. I was staring at him. His thin face was quiet, his gray eyes calm and tuted. No shadow of agitation disturbed his surface.”
Contrary to Deleuze who considers that "Bartleby is not a metaphor of the writer, nor the symbol of anything but rather a violently comic text", I would rather like to see it as the expression of the paradox of occupation of which Bartleby would have suddenly become aware.
In our "city by project" (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1997), society values the occupation envisaged through the prism of productivity: you must be busy and efficient to succeed in life. Often occupation and productivity tend to be confused...
Also, this occupation plays the role of sign in social interactions and tends to be used to indicate a certain status: entrepreneurs, executives and leaders are very busy and very rich people so, we think, they are respectable people from which we must be inspired if we too want to succeed in life.
The excessive occupation is now a criterion of social success or even a way of moving towards happiness.
But today, the border has never been so thin between entertainment and productivity with ICT and all the tools that divert our goals and give us the illusion of being busy.
The mind also and above all needs rest to be effective and think clearly while everyone wants to be more busy to the point of optimising even their rest times.
Therefore, being busy is a socially acceptable way to talk about entertainment? How is the mantra of occupation destroying the balance between urgency and creativity?
To be busy to the point of forgetting to live
I chose this subject to understand an attitude that has harmed me during my years of preparation: I like to be busy, I like to have things to do.
But quickly, everything changes when I add an additional task to my schedule, a task that I had to complete the day before and that I can't finish because I also have to go training or go out with my friends.
So what to do? Either I leave this task and I will train but feeling guilty about not working, or I try in vain to complete this task by feeling guilty about not training. It's endless!
“We associate doing nothing with irresponsibility, being on the wrong track, or even worse, wasting our life. Most of us feel guilty if we’re not busy doing something and get a buzz when we feel really busy.” — Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries
During my preparatory class, I remember the many times when I felt guilty about not being working. Thus, any activity other than economics, mathematics, philosophy or Crossfit was for me rest and therefore did not constitute, wrongly, an occupation.
I was kind of addicted to work.
However, unlike an addiction, it did not give me particular pleasure: my goal was to join a business school at the end of the competitions, I had to occupy my time as much as possible to achieve this goal.
“Often, being busy can be a poor excuse for living an unhealthy life. Busyness can be as addictive as a drug.” (Ibid)
From then on, I was no longer myself in the sense that I had temporarily removed everything that was part of my identity, everything that made me happy (football, music, friends and family), in favour of an illusion of occupation: even if I sometimes had the impression of progressing, often I only had the impression of filling my time with futilities as evidenced by the preparations of my kohlles...
In fact, I was afraid of the void. I was afraid of what could happen if I did nothing ; if precisely I let myself live ; I organise my life in such a way as to do what really matters instead of believing themselves to exist by being too busy...
This is the problem of preparation and the infernal spiral in which I was.
From 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. in the evening, I was constantly busy: I jumped from math to economics through languages or philosophy.
Moreover, I always appreciated and appreciate philosophy because it is the only subject that allows me to put my mind, to take the time to organise my ideas and to think simply for the simple pleasure of this activity.
“Being a work addict leaves very little time for the things that really matter—such as making love, making conversation (especially listening to others), listening to music, playing sport, seeing a play or film, taking a leisurely stroll in the country, or simply doing nothing.” (Ibid)
We want to be busy to feel like we exist.
But by being too much, we alienate ourselves. For this reason, it is necessary to impose temporal barriers. If during preparation, the creation of a specific schedule was saving for my revisions, it is the same in the professional world. For example, my marketing manager explained to me that he was already busy with marketing on weekdays. Also, outside of working hours and on weekends, he doesn't want to hear about it. It is a way for him to preserve his mental health.
Moreover, it is thanks to this rest that creativity is born: this is the thesis of Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries's essay.
“Many work addicts fail to realize that more work doesn’t translate into more productivity. There isn’t necessarily a relationship between working hard and working smart.”
If we never permit ourselves to be bored, we will never have those periods of reflective thought that are the preparation for creative processes.
Ainsi, nous sommes tellement occupés au point que nous oublions parfois de vivre.
We want to be busy because this is valued by society. We want to be busy even if it harms our creativity and even, somewhere, our productivity.
According to Paul Valéry, modern man is losing "all inner leisure, which is something other than chronometric leisure", inner leisure that designates "this essential peace of the depths of being, this priceless absence."
In short, it is "a kind of rest in the absence, a benecting vacation that gives the mind its own freedom." (The Outlook For Intelligence, 1935)
Creativity is born in the depths of the mind, where consciousness can do nothing. Paradoxically, it was when I gave myself moments for myself, moments when I no longer thought about what I had to do, that I was the most intellectually available and the most creative.
However, despite this empirical proof, I thought I could overcome this additional workload that I was imposing on myself.
I simply could not distinguish what was important from what was urgent. Also, I treated each task as an absolute urgency.
But, when everything becomes an emergency, nothing is more...
The fault of urgency
In the academic world as well as in the work world, the sense of urgency is instilled in each of our tasks to such an extent that we no longer know what is really important.
Everything must be done immediately and when no deadline is given, the immediate is implicit.
As everything goes faster - communication, work and even holidays - our cognitive abilities must follow.
However, we cannot go faster than the music and to stretch the time too much, it is necessarily we who will derail.
“Modern man is intoxicated with dissipation [...] All current life is inseparable from these abuses (abuse of facilities, speed...) — Paul Valéry, The Outlook For Intelligence ,1935
Thus, the lockdowns imposed in 2020 have sometimes been saving for some. They have been a way for them to stop the infernal spiral of meaningless work and to refocus their minds on their own existence.
However, time stopped for a moment to resume even faster. Today, tired like Bartleby but forced to continue, many people are victims of "the illusion of urgency" as a result of the work of Zhu and his colleagues.1
“Zhu and colleagues found that individuals tend to delay the important tasks that often have higher-impact outcomes and complete the urgent tasks first, despite knowing the out- comes or end results of these tasks are often smaller.” — Daniel R. Kennedy, Andrea L. Porter, The illusion of urgency, 2022
It was me with my kholles. As I had to present these oral exams in the week, I saw them as urgencies. But I forgot that my most important goal was the success of my competitive exam that took place at the end of the year.
“When evaluating a to-do list, it can be tempting to complete the simplest, least important tasks first to build a sense of accomplishment and productivity instead of working on a more time-intensive but ultimately more important task.” (Ibid)
This lack of prioritisation undermined the relevance of my schedule and monopolised my mind.
I saw everything as an emergency and not being able to face all the winds at the same time, I almost flew away! I thought I was productive.
Peaceful productivity
Productivity is economically defined as the ratio between a product (output) in relation to the factors of production (capital and labour) used (input) to manufacture it.
In the business world, being refers to being able to create value as effectively and efficiently as possible, i.e. choosing the right tasks to do and accomplishing them as quickly as possible.
However, it seems that effectiveness is now forgotten in favour of efficiency in the sense that it is no longer the quality of the tasks that counts but the quantity.
The more we work, the more effective we feel we are; and, we think, we should normally be productive. But this is not the case.
As a result, this obsession with productivity and improvement contaminates all aspects of our daily lives. Frustrated by our lack of efficiency at work, we start to optimise all aspects of our lives and even the most absurd ones.
“Productivity orientation during leisure motivates consumers to seek collectible (i.e. novel, unusual, extreme, memorable) experiences in an attempt to check off items on their experiential check list and build their ‘experiential CV” — Keinan, Bellezza et Paharia , The symbolic value of time
Consumers are constantly concerned with making progress and accomplishing more in less time.
The concern is not so much this new trend.
For my part, I find it very relevant to try to optimise one's daily life by trying to improve certain aspects that prevent us from achieving our goals.
On the contrary, the most embarrassing thing is when we try to optimise moments of our daily lives that precisely must be lived as they are.
It would not make sense to optimise your holidays since it is a time dedicated to the regeneration of your identity and creativity, and, as we said above, this can only be done when the mind enjoys full peace of mind.
Finally, to be productive, we must accept to say no, that is, choose only the tasks, actions or habits that make sense to us and help us move towards our goals.
It's about focussing your efforts on what really matters instead of dispersing your forces.
Taking the time to step aside, listen to a piece of music, then leave with clear ideas in the river of life is perhaps a lesson to be learned from all this.
Antoine
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“The mere urgency effect predicts that people will be more likely to perform an unimportant task over an important task that is clearly dominating in terms of payoffs, when the unimportant task is merely characterized by spurious urgency (e.g., an illusion of expiration). […] People’s tendency to procrastinate on what is important in order to finish what is urgent is not a rational inference but a basic psychological preference.”