Toxic Productivity and the Cult of More

Sunday, two in the afternoon. You finally lie down on the couch. You put a film on. Two minutes in, your hand reaches for the phone on its own. You check your email. Back to the film. Five minutes later, the phone again. And underneath it all, a knot pulls tight in your chest, and a voice you know too well starts up: you should be doing something.

No fire to put out anywhere. Zero of it is urgent. So why does lying still feel impossible?

The treadmill that never stops

Picture a treadmill. Long, flat, running under you. You start walking. The belt speeds up. You walk faster. It speeds up again. Soon you are running. Sweat on your back. And the belt keeps climbing.

On both sides, people stand and clap as you go faster. You are doing great. Keep it up. The moment you try to slow down, their faces tighten. The moment you try to step off, they shout.

Nobody tells you where this belt is going. Nobody tells you where the finish line sits, or what happens after you cross it. You know only one thing. Slow down, step off, or stop, and something arrives. Shame. Guilt. The fear that the others will pass you, and that you will never climb back to this pace.

This is your job. It is also your evenings. Your weekends. The holiday where you answer emails from a sun lounger. The Sunday afternoon that fills with low dread, because resting feels like falling behind. The belt never shuts off. Even at night, under everything, you can hear the quiet hum of the motor.

The finish line keeps moving

I want to show you the cruelest design of it. The finish line moves. You reach a target you chased for two years, and for one evening, you feel it. By morning, the belt has sped up again, and the target sits further ahead. A bigger number. A higher title. One more milestone, and then you will rest. The rest never comes, because the line was built to keep sliding away from you.

The rule you swallowed

Early on, someone taught you a sentence, and you believed it. Your worth is your output. The more you do, the more you are worth. The less you do, the less you are worth.

Nobody sat you down and said it out loud. Everything around you simply ran on it. Overtime got praised. The promotion went to the one who came in first and left last. The person who took their full vacation met a small, telling silence. And the half-joke landed on whoever came back from sick leave: and here we are, still working. The message sank in deep. It runs now even though nobody repeats it. It runs on its own.

Roots older than your job

The roots run further back than you think. A hundred years ago, Max Weber described the Protestant work ethic: the belief that hard work is proof of a person’s moral worth. After the war, America added the myth of the self-made man, the one who built the career, the house, and the fortune alone. Japan went all the way to the edge. In the 1970s, they gave it a name: karoshi, death from overwork. People died in their offices, on their chairs, in front of their desks. They were thirty, forty, fifty years old.

And then a newer engine arrived. Today, the platforms pay out the moment you produce. LinkedIn rewards the person who posts daily. YouTube rewards the one who wakes earlier and films more. Instagram rewards those who are always creating. Each of them whispers the same line: to do is to exist. You produce zero, and you start to feel like nobody.

The worship of overwork even comes with its own chants. Grindset. Hustle. Sleep is for the weak. Rise and grind. The 5 AM club. Those phrases never existed thirty years ago. Today, a nineteen-year-old repeats them before he has any idea who he is.

Even your rest got optimized

And another trap that locks the entire thing shut. Even your rest got optimized. You meditate so you will be sharper tomorrow. You sleep so you will have more energy for work. You take a walk to reset your brain for the next sprint at work. You do almost none of it for the simple pleasure of doing it. Your body, your breath, and your sleep, all of it quietly reassigned as equipment in the service of output.

In a setup like that, rest turns into a sin. The Sunday on the couch becomes guilt. The nap after lunch becomes shameful. The aimless walk becomes wasted time. The hour on the floor with your kid becomes: I could be working. Every hour you failed to convert into production reads as an hour you stole from yourself.

What the research says

You need no metaphor to see the cost. The numbers are sitting right there.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter have studied burnout since the 1980s and built the most widely used tool for measuring it. In their work, burnout has three faces. Deep exhaustion, where you have run out of anything left to give. Cynicism and distance, where you stop caring about the work at all. And a sense of futility, where whatever you do, it feels like none of it adds up.

In May 2019, the World Health Organization put burnout into its official classification, the ICD-11. With one careful caveat. They named it an occupational phenomenon, rather than a disease. A quiet kind of recognition. Yes, this is true. Yes, it has a shape. People suffer from it in huge numbers. And the health system still has no clean way to treat it.

Gallup tracks how the world’s workers feel each year. In the 2024 State of the Global Workplace, four in ten people said they felt a great deal of stress each day. Only a third said their lives were thriving. And among managers, the drop in wellbeing ran sharper still.

And one number that is hard to set down. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimated that in 2021, around seven hundred and fifty thousand people died from working too many hours, more than fifty-five hours a week. Heart attacks. Strokes. Bodies that gave out. Karoshi stopped being a Japanese word. It went global.

You have already lived this

You have probably recognized your own week somewhere in here. Here are a few people. See whose evening looks like yours.

Tom is thirty-eight, head of sales. Sunday, half past two, flat on the couch after lunch. He starts a film. Two minutes in, he pauses it and checks email. Back to the film. Five minutes, the phone again. He tries to sink into the screen and gives up. His chest pulls tight, like a knot someone tied behind his ribs. The same refrain loops: I should be doing something. He has no idea what. Zero of it is urgent. He simply has no map for how to exist while he produces zero.

Bob is forty-one. Saturday, quarter past eleven. His six-year-old asks him to play Lego. Bob sits down on the floor. Ten minutes in, he catches himself running Monday’s presentation in his head. Twenty minutes in, he hears himself say, okay, five more minutes, Dad has to work. Something goes quiet in the boy’s eyes. Bob misses it, because he is checking his watch. An hour later he is shut in the study, four weekend hours poured into slides that nobody will read closely on Monday.

Kate is nineteen, and she is on your screen at twenty to ten on a Friday night. My 4 AM Productivity Routine, three hundred and eighty thousand views. Cold shower. Meditation. An hour in the gym. Journaling. Thirty minutes of a book about success. All of it before seven in the morning. The comments cheer. Inspiration. Goat. Life goals. Nobody asks the obvious question. For whom. To what end. What is left of Kate at ten at night, with no energy to talk to the boyfriend beside her. She will never tell you. Kate has to film tomorrow’s video.

I ran on that belt for two decades. I worked through sick leave because that was simply how things had always been done. So hear this clearly, from inside it. The restlessness you feel on the couch was never a character flaw. The guilt that arrives the second you slow down was installed in you by a culture that profits from your motion. It runs on its own now, long after anyone stopped feeding it.

One thing you can try this week

You need no sabbatical and no grand life overhaul to begin. For seven days, run one small log. Each evening, write down two things. First, the hours you actually worked that day. Second, one line on how you felt as you went to bed.

That is the entire practice. No targets, and no optimizing. You are simply holding up a small mirror to the belt, so you can see how fast it has been running, and what it has been costing you. For most people, a week of that is enough to feel the knot start to loosen.

The line the treadmill keeps from you: Step off, and the floor is still there. The world keeps turning without the sprint. You can stop.