Trying to Escape the Trap of Digital Productivity

I felt sick with despair that I wasn’t out in the physical world, so I built a digital identity with the things I had to hand.

Over the past two years, I’ve taken up jigsaw puzzles. One thousand pieces of sailboats, birds, and animated cities that I gradually put together over the weeks and months, then slowly dismantle again. I live in puzzle time, where the only record is Instagram posts captioned with variations of the same thing: “repping that anti-productivity life.”

As someone who has lived with chronic illness for the best (or worst) part of a decade, I’ve found that society’s endless drive toward productivity creates an ethical imperative I routinely fall short of. I’m also a type A overachiever, which meant I could never forgive myself sick days, missed deadlines, time spent in bed. I didn’t want to be seen as lazy—I wanted to “be productive.” But when I couldn’t live up to that standard, online posts advocating idleness became both reflections of and aspirations for my life. The more I posted that I was doing less, the less guilty I felt about not doing more. And it worked. Sort of.

On my Instagram feed is a picture from last year, in which my feet, clad in black-and-gold high tops, rest on my mum’s red front steps. A white potted flower with startlingly green leaves sits perfectly to the side of the frame. The caption reads: “off to exercise? no . . . just sitting.”

But is that really “just” what I was doing right then?

*

I joined Facebook in 2006, when you still needed a university address to make an account. It was my first real social media presence, a barely used Myspace page long since forgotten. No one I knew had a smartphone, but most of us did have digital cameras and our shiny first personal laptops. I didn’t take or post many pictures myself, but I was tagged in hundreds: dance floors, after-parties, after-after-parties, music festivals, Halloween costumes that meant I should never run for public office. Later, when activism and protests became a bigger part of my university experience, the pictures I was tagged in often featured my bundled form standing on a bench in the rain, clutching a megaphone in my hand. Palestine. Racism. Education cuts.

In his 1956 text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman contends that we construct our identities as though we are in a play. Our “front stage” is where we face other people (our audience); it is where we perform our selves. For the longest time, being a party girl was my front stage. So was being a student leader. And, in the fairly uncomplicated way of early private social media, my Facebook mirrored those identities.

As I write this, it feels like I’m composing a caption, a supplementary confession to a picture I’m about to post.

“The back stage,” on the other hand, is where “the performer can relax . . . drop [their] front, [and] step out of character.” No matter how energized we are by the performance, how much we thrive in relation to others, the back stage is a space of relief. My back stage was redoing my makeup yet again in the loos outside the lecture hall that a large group of us had occupied to protest staff cuts, and where we now slept on the floors and seats. It was the terribly dingy apartment I shared with my three closest friends, about which a visitor once tentatively asked: “Does someone here . . . smoke crack?” (We didn’t). It was watching Come Dine with Me snuggled under large duvets, arguing over who would go to the shop to fetch a snack. My back stage was rich in nothing but the warmth of solidarity and friendship.

As I write this, it feels like I’m composing a caption, a supplementary confession to a picture I’m about to post. I have to remind myself that the very point of this paragraph is to describe a life unseen and unobserved, belonging only to those who nestled together in the wings. It was no one else’s business what we did during intermission.

*

But then, in 2013, I fell sick. In 2015, I fell really, really sick. With migraines, fatigue, unrelenting dizziness, and no diagnosis in sight, my front stage was swiftly swept away. No more nightclubs, weekend benders, megaphones. No beer, no dancing, no feminist conferences. I was furious, devastated, resentful. I clawed at the remnants of who I used to be, refusing to look at where I actually was. I was a party girl, remember? I had the tolerance of men twice my size. Soon enough, I would be back to doing things—protests, narcotics, dance moves—again.

Of course, the thing about chronic illness is that it’s, well, chronic. And over time (a long, long time), I reluctantly began to accept that the back stage was where I now lived. I also started to see its value, not just as a place of respite from my busy life, but in and of itself. It’s where I learned to care for plants, for cats, for myself. It was where I remembered that before I was a party girl, I was a daily journaller, an art student, a stationery geek. It was here I realized that a front stage of constant busyness left me too distracted and overwhelmed to be present in my own life, community, and nonhuman environment.

I’d left Facebook in 2014, eight and a half years after I first signed up, unable to contend with images of the life I could no longer access. But as I leaned into my back stage—cats, tea, books, trees, the Goan village where I now lived—I started an Instagram account. Here, I could share the things that made up my strange new life; it was a way of elevating my quiet days to something worthy of being seen too. I was no longer at protests, at nightclubs, at conferences, so I turned my meditation trackers, watercolor attempts, sick days, and idleness into a front-facing identity. I still felt sick with despair that I wasn’t out in the physical world, so I built a digital identity with the things I had to hand.

I also turned them into a conscious politics—a public refusal to heed the clarion call of productivity. I also found myself circling back to the Marxism that had brought me to activism in the first place. I had learned early on that productivity, an economic term measuring the rate of output, saw people as interchangeable units, sending profits into the hands of a few. Over time, and in great part thanks to neoliberalism, this system of measuring labor became a way of measuring lives. And I no longer wanted it to measure mine.

I made it be known too.

With my photographs of jigsaw puzzles, my leisurely morning reading time, my well-organized stationery, I was “repping that anti-productivity life.” And others, not just those with chronic illness, seemed to appreciate my stance. My focus on the small, the specific, the quiet, led to several online interactions with people who, for a variety of reasons, no longer wanted to carry the weight of productivity. As I posted more via this new, gentle persona, I felt less guilty about how comparatively little I was able to do. I found a way to turn my sense of defeat and embarrassment caused by chronic illness into a point of pride. Productivity? Fuck that. Even the Marxists, who taught me that life is a street protest with your body on the frontlines, would have to agree.

*

Here’s the thing that took me a very long time to realize: Back when I was a protester and a party girl, my social media was a record (largely created by others) of what I was doing. My Instagram, on the other hand, was the doing itself.

Posting snippets from my life online is a means for me to feel part of community, but it is also a way for me to do something, to feel useful. There’s a satisfaction in noticing my crossword lying next to my breakfast, picking up my phone, photographing it, filtering and cropping it, and then sending it out into the world. This process gives me a sense of accomplishment, of productivity. (And of course, as far as Meta’s empire is concerned, I am being productive. The more pictures of my calm mornings, i.e. the more output per person, the more data, or profit, for them.)

If our front stages, by the very nature of the performance that defines them, are productive, it stands to reason that our back stages—unseen, unperformed—are unproductive. When I do my jigsaw puzzles, the puzzle is just a puzzle. It’s not an outward-facing sign of who I am. Except, when I post a record of this experience online, supposedly in service of a politics of anti-productivity, then I’ve made it my front stage, too.

The deep irony in my approach to anti-productivity is that I am taking what I value precisely because it useless and unquantifiable and turning it into a productive, countable performance of the self. Productivity is the ethical and economic logic on which social media is built, and as my offline idleness becomes an online performance, the knowledge that I am replicating the same value systems I purport to be against is demoralizing and exhausting. Online, there is no back stage, no space of relief built into the relentless performance of who I am, who I was, who I aspire to be.

And as for offline? Well, I wonder if I am really ever there.

*

Last summer, amid India’s brutal Covid-19 Delta wave and grimly mounting fatalities, I tested positive. In a blur of pain I anxiously measured my oxygen levels and took my temperature thrice daily. Meanwhile, the temperature online was rising too: a devastating fever pitch of calls for oxygen supplies, pleas for hospital beds, hundreds of thousands of preventable atrocities. I was unwell and unmoored in every sense, and, unsure of what was solid enough to hold on to, I deleted all my social media.

As the weeks passed and the relief of a negative test morphed into the exhausting reality of long Covid—breathing difficulties, neuromuscular twitches, all-engulfing anxiety and depression—I had no room or desire to resume the online performance. Over time, the external world quietened down too, reeling from grief and disbelief. I still stayed offline. I read. I drank tea. I did jigsaw puzzles. I began a life-changing rehabilitation program. I started to take slow, cautious walks.

During this nearly six-month period, my personal was the political I had been trying to claim for so long: I produced and performed incredibly little. But I still kept documenting it. I artfully positioned my breakfast bananas next to my publisher’s branded teacup. I photographed my puzzles, making sure the orientation of all the pictures was consistent. I tilted my phone up to the sky, the pre-monsoon contrasts of deep pink and bright white filling my screen.

One day, my mum and I were sitting by the side of the tiny road where I practiced walking, watching the sun go down over rainy rice fields. As we dangled our legs over the verge and watched the waterbirds, I took at least fifteen pictures on my phone—the sun bursting through the clouds, the sky’s reflection in the drenched farmlands, the changing light. My extremely offline mum turned to me and asked:

“What do you do with all these pictures?”

“I used to post them on Instagram.”

“Oh. But didn’t you leave Instagram?”

“Right. Yes. But I still have . . . Instagram . . . in mind.”

In her book River of Shadows, Rebecca Solnit writes of mapmaking in nineteenth-century America that “the grid [was] a mental . . . logic” paving the way for colonization, a process of forgetting what came before its lines were drawn. In the twenty-first century, the grid—the original term for Instagram’s square-tiled layout—doesn’t feel all that different.

I recognize that I may never be able to log off entirely. But I also don’t need to be logged on entirely either.

Even when I am not posting a picture, when I have ideologically committed to not posting it, I am still producing it in my mind’s eye. This compulsive documentation of my surroundings isn’t for personal use; instead, it is vertically shot and artfully arranged for a grid I can’t seem to escape. It’s what the environmentalist Vandana Shiva terms elsewhere a “colonization of the mind,” which feels, in the digital era, inextricably linked with the logic of productivity.

I feel like I have to post a picture. I need to share my life. I have to do something to feel worthwhile, even when what I’m doing is supposedly nothing at all.

*

I wish I could conclude by saying that I left Instagram. That I’m done with the grid, digital productivity, performing myself online. I’m not, and as a writer trying to reach readers and a chronically ill person seeking community outside of what they can access offline (and not to mention a fallible human), I recognize that I may never be able to log off entirely. But I also don’t need to be logged on entirely either.

Over the months, I’ve developed various tricks to subvert my overwhelming desire to perform and produce online.

I began by photographing most things horizontally—a format less appealing on Instagram, which encourages and rewards photos in portrait mode, because they fill up a user’s entire phone screen. Changing the format of my pictures means I feel less inclined to share them. What’s more, I only access social media on my laptop’s browser. This renders the most addictive aspect of Instagram—its Stories feature—far less enjoyable. Each story occupies only a tiny portion of my computer screen, I have to lean in closely, and even so the text remains largely illegible. Equally important, I’m not able to post my own. I need the app for that (which involves consciously downloading it from the App Store).

When I went on my first holiday in nearly two years—four days with two wonderful friends in verdant landscapes—we didn’t tell the internet. We took tons of cute pictures, but none of us posted them. In turn, this year, when I spent four days by the beach, watching a spectacular sunrise most mornings, I was well-primed to keep it to myself.

I do still redownload Instagram and post things; I’m not entirely reformed. But these posts have been mostly whittled down to my jigsaw puzzles, the occasional book recommendation, and photographs that support my writing. I no longer share my tea, my cat, my crosswords, my garden, the beautiful skies on my walks.

What you pay attention to grows, both tangibly, like the attention given to a garden or a career, and in mental space. As I reconsider my relationship to social media, I realize what I’m ultimately seeking is something, anything, that exists before, outside of, and after the grid-like logic of colonization (which was, of course, a project of economic empire—of productivity).

In my mountaintop hometown in Southern India, large swaths of uniquely biodiverse montane grasslands were designated as wasteland by British colonizers, who imported and planted highly productive timber plantations of pine, eucalyptus, and wattle trees instead. These invasive species spread far beyond the plantations themselves, drastically changing the terrain and the life it supported: a lasting effect of empire’s productivity.

What I am perhaps trying to do, in my relationship to the internet, is to protect what the logic of commercial social media sees as inherently unproductive. The fertile soil of the grasslands that, if I want them to remain rich and fulfilling, I must leave alone. Because as soon as I turn the grid’s eye upon the unproductive and idle spaces of my life, they begin to change, to transform into performance for a system that is indifferent to my well-being.

I look at the sustained efforts to restore the montane grassland—efforts that are far more arduous than what went into their destruction—and know that restoration of all kinds is difficult but possible. Most of all, that restoration is worth it. Because what seem to be barren grasslands are actually intricate ecosystems of water sources, fungal networks, a host of tiny teeming lives. Similarly, underneath social media’s shiny surface, under every photograph of a drenched monsoon field, carefully crafted “vulnerable” caption, and zoomed-in jigsaw puzzle, lies an irreplaceably rich terrain.

And sometimes, after months of ​sustained effort to focus on embodied reality, I find myself elbow-deep in humus-rich soil. In these rare, crystalline moments, I forget the performance, the stage, the audience. I forget to want to post about it. I no longer have the grid in mind.