The first is Elizabeth Currid-Hackett’s The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Amazon / Indiebound), which argues that as economic class continues to disarticulate from education level (aka, people with PhDs can be barely making ends meet, and people with a high school education working in the trades, or owning their own businesses, can be solidly upper middle class) people increasingly signal their class status, or their aspirational class status, through “productive” leisure.
Before, you could announce your spot in the upper-middle class through the purchase of recognizable luxury brand items. Now, buying an item for its luxury status is conceived of as crass, or uncultured — a mark of new money. The real way to show that you’re cultured is to evidence (through conversation or Instagram) consumption of cultured things (podcasts, articles, award-winning books, quality television) and participation in cultured activities (pottery class, skiing, bread baking, endless numbers of self-optimizing physical activities).
This style of bourgeois signaling makes me think of the Portlandia skit in which the conversation over dinner circles around asking one another “did you read” [this longform article from this esteemed publication] without ever actually discussing the contents of the articles. What ultimately matters is being the sort of person who reads longform articles and talks about them at dinner, not actually reading them.
The second book, Melissa Gregg’s Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy (Amazon / Indiebound) has totally refigured my understanding of productivity. Gregg, who currently works as a researcher at Intel, started collecting time management manuals, guides, and how-tos from the discount racks at bookstores years ago. And like any good researcher, she started to discern patterns, and spikes in popularity — and went backwards to try and figure out why, for instance, these manuals first started appearing in the ‘70s, and then again in the early ‘90s (see especially: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) and have found their contemporary iteration in late 2000s and 2010s in productivity apps.
The timing, of course, is not coincidental: each spike in the fetish for productivity aligns with a moment of mass anxiety over layoffs, downsizing, and general precarity in the workplace. Within office and knowledge jobs in particular, that precarity translates into a need to demonstrate one’s value — and the most straightforward way to do so is through productivity. (In today’s climate of freelancing, independent contracting, and general side-hustling, cultivating productivity is also a way to make ends meet, or beat others’s out for a contract).
The real way to show that you’re cultured is to evidence (through conversation or Instagram) consumption of cultured things (podcasts, articles, award-winning books, quality television)
Side Note: I’m continuing/mindfully accelerating my decade’s long move towards vegetarianism
Consuming isn't "productive", though
Where?
Pseudo‑activity is generally the attempt to rescue enclaves of immediacy in the midst of a thoroughly mediated and rigidified society. . . . The disastrous model of pseudo‑activity is the “do‑it‑yourself” . . . activities that do what has long been done better by the means of industrial production only in order to inspire in the unfree individuals, paralyzed in their spontaneity, the assurance that everything depends on them. . . . However, spontaneity should not be absolutized, just as little as it should be split off from the objective situation or idolized the way the administered world itself is.
The real way to mark your position is to evidence a cultural omnivorousness, an eclectic mix of high and low: attend the ballet, but also be familiar with the latest dances on TikTok; go to the opera and be a master at karaoke.