I have always had a flirtatious interest in the ever morphing American dream, from The Great Gatsby to Fear and Loathing, from the chickens and picket fences of the 50s to the foreign adventures and many attempts to bring democracy to ourselves and others. Every age of America reinvents and transforms the dream and thereby some part of the national soul. But sitting in Old San Juan in a tropical rain, trying to keep mosquitos off my ankles, I began to think no iteration was quite as vile as this one. Despite all the greed and hatred of the past iterations, no version of the dream had been so mechanical — so dehumanizing — as this dream of productivity.

We dream now of making Every Moment Count, of achieving flow and never leaving, creating one project that must be better than the last, of working harder and smarter. We multitask, we update, and we conflate status with long hours worked in no paid overtime systems for the nebulous and fantastic status of being Too Important to have Time to Ourselves, time to waste. But this incarnation of the American dream is all about doing, and nothing about doing anything good, or even thinking about what one was doing beyond how to do more of it more efficiently. It was not even the surrenders to hedonism and debauchery or greed our literary dreams have recorded before. It is a surrender to nothing, to a nothingness of lived accounting.

This moment’s goal of productivity, with its all-consuming practice and unattainable horizon, is perfect for our current corporate world. Productivity never asks what it builds, just how much of it can be piled up before we leave or die. It is irrelevant to pleasure. It’s agnostic about the fate of humanity. It’s not even selfish, because production negates the self. Self can only be a denominator, holding up a dividing bar like a caryatid trying to hold up a stone roof.

I am sure this started with the Industrial Revolution, but what has swept through this generation is more recent. This idea of productivity started in the 1980s, with the lionizing of the hardworking greedy. There’s a critique of late capitalism to be had for sure, but what really devastated my generation was the spiritual malaise inherent in Taylorism’s perfectly mechanized human labor. But Taylor had never seen a robot or a computer perfect his methods of being human. By the 1980s, we had. In the age of robots we reinvented the idea of being robots ourselves. We wanted to program our minds and bodies and have them obey clocks and routines. In this age of the human robot, of the materialist mind, being efficient took the pre-eminent spot, beyond goodness or power or wisdom or even cruel greed.

There’s so many casualties to this view of the mechanical human. Wisdom itself has vanished from the discourse, replaced by mere knowing. I don’t mean that these are less wise times, but that the very idea of wisdom has vanished from the culture. If I hear the word being discussed it’s generally as a game stat. Evidence is everything, but the context that gives it meaning is worthless. The very idea of the liberal education that was once the foundation of our Enlightenment culture is mystifyingly irrelevant, even for the rich rulers it was invented for. How, we collectively ask, does understanding history, philosophy, or art make us more productive? The vibrant life was replaced with mere health. Wonder became a pump for applicable creativity. How shall we get everything done? Despite having more labor-saving technology than anyone in history, we have made it so we have more to get done than any form of society before us. We even created a social obligation to enjoy ourselves with maximal efficiency, and called it a tourism industry.

Productivity, the word, was born at the beginning of the 19th century as the ability to bring forth. Land could be productive, or cattle, the sea, or a woman. But by the 20th century it was eclipsed by its new economic definition: the rate of output per unit. Productivity lost the implication of fertility and vitality and became something you could measure: put the output over the unit unit input. If you raise the numerator, you are more productive, no matter what the units represent. They can be almonds per field worked. Or fine furniture per Pennsylvanian Mennonite. Or profit per inmate-year in a private prison. To aggregate productivity, and therefore measure all that can be measured and produce a number to rationalize a civilization, numerators must be translated to the same basic unit: revenue. Very roughly, when we do this across a nation, we call the result GDP and use it to measure the health of a society.

How we all compare in GDP

By GDP, India and Canada are running neck-and-neck in national productivity. Your guess is as good as any for what this means in the lives of any particular Indian or Canadian. Whatever it is, they’re definitely beating South Koreans at something or other. We like GDP though, because like coordinates it seems to tell us where we are on a list. In the 20th century economics became a philosophy of life. We liked knowing what we knew, even if, as so many events in the last hundred years demonstrated with painful redundancy, no one knew what our knowledge meant. Productivity as measured never really told you much about what they call “outcomes.”

Starter knowledge measurement. It gets worse from here.

Knowledge is something you can measure. You can create metrics and universal evaluations that can fill the columns of accounting records. Above all we become interested in measuring ourselves. Word count/day, lines of code/day, hamburgers served/hour, steps taken/day, test questions/100, money earned/field’s average salary. We got quarterly reviews, job evaluations, and tested certifications. Productive people came to know exactly if they fit somewhere or not.

Wisdom is an airy-fairy quality that no one can quantify, like fancy, vitality, joy, hope, visions of far off times, and a worthy life. These things are metis — to be handled in literature but left as noise, canceled whenever possible, in society. Productive people, like productive machines, have no scores for metis, wisdom, or worthy life. So these things live on in poetry, and fantasy, and if we’re lucky, our sinful unproductive time. They are erased, and with them, the futures they contain. They are not creatures of now, which is what productivity is about. They only ever come up these days when all the other stuff inevitably collapses.

This is killing us. It’s starving our souls and stunting our intellectual pursuits into ever more stratified vertical slices.

Karoshi: Suicide Saleryman is a flash game where the goal is to kill yourself at work on every level.

Technically Americans work slightly more hours per year than the Japanese, but neither of those numbers include unpaid overtime or extra work you’re supposed to do around and for your regular job. Uncounted, this work remains unreal, though its consequences are harder to dismiss. The Japanese have defined a form of death-from-productivity: karōshi. Karōshi is when you are so productive your heart or head break and you bleed to death inside yourself. Conversely, if those organs have persisted but the mind has not, karōshi can become karojisatsu: suicide from overwork.

Karoshi Factory, a sequel to the original Karoshi.

America has no death from karōshi. We don’t count it as a category of death, and therefore in our measurable world it doesn’t exist. We are productive without price. Not because people aren’t dying, they surely are, uncounted lives and families are smothered with despair. There is no price because there’s no measure to quantify what we are losing.

Many people, especially in technology, say their productivity is changing the world, and this is irrefutable. But no one seems to know what they’re changing it into, because no one can measure the world. When no one can measure the world, how much can it really exist?