I visited a really familiar place today. Familiar, but no longer welcoming. It wasn’t a physical place like a building or a park; it was a place within me.
It was that internal space where productivity and output become the only currencies that matter. Everything else—rest, restoration, presence—gets dismissed as wasteful indulgence.
While walking on the promenade with my favourite person, basking in the sunshine I had been dreaming about just hours earlier, I noticed that every part of me wanted to hurry. Every step felt rushed, propelled by an invisible urgency. I wasn’t just walking faster to accumulate steps, to watch the numbers climb toward my weekly goal. I was also anxious to get home, to return to work, to do more. In that moment, this beautiful walk felt like stolen time. Wasted time. Valuable time.
Time I should be leveraging, maximising, monetising—because I’m being chased by the relentless urgency to earn more, achieve more, become more. Without maximum productivity, I feel trapped in a hamster wheel that doesn’t spin properly. Stuck, perpetually behind, never making real forward progress despite the constant motion.
I could sense myself slipping into this state. I watched myself trying to resist it, and I felt the exact moment I lost the battle. Part of me feels disappointed in that version of myself right now—the one who couldn’t simply enjoy sunshine and companionship without turning it into another opportunity for optimisation.
But I’m also aware that, at least this time, I could identify what was happening as it unfolded. That’s progress, however small it might feel.
The first step toward freedom isn’t winning the battle against productivity culture, but simply noticing when we’re trapped in it. Maybe awareness itself is the crack that lets the light in—the beginning of choosing presence over performance, even when every conditioned part of us screams that we’re falling behind.
The irony isn’t lost on me: I was walking in actual sunlight while feeling haunted by the shadow of not being enough. But now, in this moment of reflection, I can see both. The beauty I was standing in and the prison I was carrying with me.
And seeing both means I’m not entirely lost in either.
