Hyper-Productivity Culture & Spiritual Life: Reclaiming Work as a Spiritual Endeavour

Can the soul flourish and practice devotion in an age of consumerism and hyper-productivity?

For the great majority of us, overworking and long hours is a reality we contend with on a daily basis. What is it about our daily lives that causes us to leave work late, struggling to find time for ourselves? Many of the people I speak to feel the crushing weight of modern productivity requirements, and they feel powerless to take their lives into their own hands. This age of hyper-productivity, that is to say the ever-expanding productivity requirements that modernity places on us, is aligned to the mood of the Kali Yuga. After all, hyper-productivity is, ultimately, to serve the bottom line, to bump the profit margin in the favour of shareholders. In short, hyper-productivity is to produce the “gold”, or wealth, for the business owners. We know from the Srimad Bhagavatam that wherever this lust for material wealth lives, so too will the personified spirit of the Kali Yuga reside:

The personality of Kali asked for something more, and because of his begging, the King gave him permission to live where there is gold because wherever there is gold there is also falsity, intoxication, lust, envy and enmity.¹

In modernity, all work is about wealth generation. Where that position on work is taken, the gate is open to lust, envy, and a whole host of negative qualities. And so, the spirit of the Kali Yuga comes to find a home in us.

Can we, as aspiring Bhaktas, truly practice devotional service when we feel the very modern yoke of hyper-productivity sitting on our shoulders? Do the modern requirements of work force us to make a decision - work or devotional service to The Supreme? Is the very nature of work in this period of the Kali Yuga opposed to Jaiva Dharma, the original nature of the soul to work in service for The Supreme alone?

In this article, I want to look at the nature of work and its meaning. Work has evolved over time and an understanding of this evolution will give us a view of what the “Order of the Sacred” looks like and how we have moved to the “Order of the Profane”. We will begin by first exploring the nature of work and how it has changed, highlighting some specific differences between the meaning of work today and the meaning of work in the past. Next, we will explore the meaning of hyper-productivity and why it is a phenomenon quite peculiar to modernity. Finally, we will seek to answer the question of whether one can hold down a job in the present day whilst being fully engaged in Bhakti Yoga through sadhana.

Work & Its Meaning

In the ancient past, all activities, which is to say the arts and sciences, were tied inextricably to principles. Those principles were Dharmic in nature. As I have discussed in other articles and podcasts, the Dharma of an individual was linked to his position in society, which naturally dictated their work. Some have called this “caste”, but this is a term of modernity and, further, a term in the English language, which is thoroughly debased and far from the divine language of Sanskrit, where we find the fullness of the idea overflowing with transcendent meaning. To that end, I will use the term Varṇa (वर्ण), a Sanskrit word referring to the four “castes”, Brāhmaṇa, Kṣatriya, Vaiśya and Śūdra. Each of these Varṇas was, at least in the ancient past if not so in modern day India, not merely arbitrarily decided upon the birth of a child and totally dependent on the Varṇa of his or her parentage, but rather it was a psycho-physical factor taking into consideration a wide variety of circumstances of the individual person, including their intelligence, natural gifts, physical condition, and birth. The Varṇa of any individual was not merely a consequence of their socioeconomic standing, but their psychological and physical conditions.

In the ancient, dharma-orientated world, the Varṇa system was an essential way that one, through her psycho-physical condition, was given the facility to participate in society in a way that served the functional requirement of society, but maintained the essential principles of it. In effect, the Dharma of the individual, which is to say the means by which the individual connected to the principles of divine order and eternal natural law, could be expressed in their work. The work an individual performed as part of the expression of their Dharma was related to the individual’s degree of God Consciousness, the degree to which she was aware of God and exhibited the symptoms of purity and closeness to the divine. The performance of one’s work, and thus their Dharma, was not merely about social order, but the means by which one served The Supreme, and in so doing allowed their consciousness to grow in relationship with the divine and, consequently, bring one into closer proximity with the divine principle.

In order to properly illustrate this, it is important to provide scriptural authority, and this can be found in The Srimad Bhagavad Gita:

mam hi partha vyapasritya
ye 'pi syuh papa-yonayah
striyo vaisyas tatha sudras
te 'pi yanti param gatim

O son of Prthä, those who take shelter in Me, though they be of lower birth -women, vaisyas [merchants], as well as sudras [workers] - can approach the supreme destination.²

Thus, dharma is the full range of human duties and actions in the world in relation to the elevation of the soul to perfection. The Varṇa system’s purpose is to organise the various duties and work in the world into means by which their human service is transcendentalized and perfected to serve God, which is the ultimate svadharma (inherent nature and natural position) of the soul and, thus, the endeavour of all civilisation (in the traditional understanding of the term). By identifying the particular nature of a person, her mode, her psycho-physical condition could be harmonised with the total scheme of a society focused on service to The Supreme and, thus, giving every opportunity to the individual to realise their innermost being and nature.

As we can see, for the God-centred society of the ancient world, work was not merely occupational or economic in character. Rather, the work one did was based on the psycho-physical conditions of the individual, their svadharma (nature), and their work enabled them to engage with the Eternal Natural Law and, thus, service to The Supreme. The “caste system” was not so much about social position but rather an acknowledgement that “every occupation is a priesthood.”³ And what made every occupation a priesthood is what it preserved in its sacerdotal function, which is to say the particular means of service to God that it enabled people of certain psycho-physical types to perform and, thus, grow in their conscious awareness of God and their inner being.

And so, no matter what work one was engaged in doing, it was an essential expression of the svarupa of that individual. The emphasis here is on the quality of the work, and not the quantity of the work or the product / output. The work an individual was engaged in was determined by her own unique psycho-physical conditions, not economic factors such as financial remuneration, employment statistics, or Gross Domestic Product.

Contrasting this with what our work is today, we can easily see the difference. Work in modernity at the social level is only concerned with statistics. The type of work, the individual engaged in the work, and whether they are suited for the role is of little concern. Employment itself is the goal, so that nations may report ever-growing GDP evaluations for credit ratings. The Rule of Quantity, as René Guénon termed it, is at play in modernity. Such statistics do not account for quality, nor does it care for creating the right conditions and work for the individual to perfect herself through the performance of service, whatever particular form of service that may be (like the Brāhmaṇa teaching, or the Kṣatriya performing the duties of leadership, governing, and protection of the innocent). There is merely employment, there is no work in the traditional sense, because there is no qualitative aspect to it. There is not a presupposing of the realities of karma and the transmigration of the soul. There is no concept of God and the svarupa of the individual. There is only the issue of a growing workforce in order to produce more. And for what? More must be produced so more can be consumed. And more must be consumed so that profit margins widen favourably for shareholders. And so, in an environment where the individual is only a statistic, the conditions of work are of no importance, since employment of the individual serves the ultimate objective, which is to increase the statistic. Now the individual is employed, she must produce more. Production is measured largely by ill-conceived KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), such as the number of lines of code a programmer writes, or how many Jira tickets get closed, or how many customers were served in a certain time frame. And so, under pressure to produce more - whatever production means according to a myopic KPI - the individual becomes subject to hyper-production culture.

Hyper-production and its Consequences

As already stated, in a society where work has been replaced for employment, or, put in another way, where the essence of work, the nature of the soul, has been replaced by external pressures for production for the purpose of consuming, we will quickly see the manifestation of hyper-productivity. This culture, and it is one most, if not all, of us will be familiar with, is the culture of arriving at the office and leaving late. It is the culture where you leave your office, arrive at home, and check your emails on your phone while warming up your ready-made meal. Byung-Chul Han has described this culture as being one in which:

Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation.⁴

We already spoke of every occupation being a priesthood, and this can be seen as late as the medieval period of Europe, where there was a strict organisation of trades with their own governing bodies that protected that trade, both in terms of ensuring competition between tradesmen and workshops did not transform into a race to be the most productive (i.e. competition leading to the creation of a culture of hyper-productivity), and in terms of protecting the skills and crafts and how they were passed from teacher to apprentice. Each individual felt a love for their work, which was regarded not as a mere source of profit, but rather as an art and an expression of one’s inner being and nature. And to safeguard this, guilds - which should never be considered ancient forms of unions - ensured that competition was balanced and the skills that formed the technically competent individual were tightly guarded secrets and, so, were passed from student to master in a controlled and formal manner. All of this allowed for the particular trade to retain its “art”, its “vocation” and, so, be transcendentalized into a “priesthood” whereby the trade was not merely labour, but sacred rite. These were the prohibitions, commandments and the law that governed the trade, now replaced by projects and initiatives. In a hyper-productivity culture, there is no guild to protect runaway competition. Instead, competition should be maximised and the impelling force for success should be the self-grown motivation to perform a function that can no longer be considered an art because that function - whatever it may be - must be executed in the most time-efficient manner in order to meet the myopic KPIs that measure productivity. In place of the guild you have the atomised worker who is told to be “self-motivated”. All too often, in job specifications I see phrases like “has a start-up mentality” - which is code for “will start working the moment she opens his eyes and stop working only to get the essential minimum requirement of sleep so as to function optimally the next day.”

The consequences of hyper-productivity go far deeper than we might initially think. Burnout and mental fatigue are but the surface manifestations of a work that is bereft of spiritual expression, but are perhaps the most manifested in our societies of modernity. We have all heard of people leaving work due to having a “mental health crisis”, and one can see how colleagues look at such an individual when discussing him or her, in the same breath sympathising and yet considering him or her to be weak and unable to maintain a strong work ethic - as though artificial productivity were a moral imperative (which it is in a consumerist society driven by profits and not by self-awakening).

As stated, burnout and mental fatigue are but the surface of the many ills and negative consequences of a hyper-productivity culture. Stepping down the ladder, we also find that the notion of devotion is destroyed. When one is self-motivated to complete tasks and projects, to close a Jira ticket and push the KPI metric favourably in the direction of hyper-productive, there can be no sense of devotion towards the task at hand. The task remains just that, a task. And tasks are to be completed. Lingering and “spinning cycles” are negatively viewed. In order to meet the productivity metric, criteria determining task completion is often changed, re-interpreted, or altogether ignored in order to close the task and tick the metric ever higher. The quality of the outcome is not as important as having completed the task. Devotion, therefore, is absent. One cannot imbue one’s work with loving devotion, that sense of service that is so integral to the expression of the soul. And without devotion, everything becomes mechanical. And so, the results of production do not reveal the marks of personality of those who worked to manufacture them. The loss of personality and identity are a hallmark of modernity. Where everything had personality in the past - the Sun and the Moon, the earth and the sky, every tree and mountain, every small brook and raging river - now everything is analysed and viewed as mere matter. And so too, when our work is devoid of devotion, does the outcome of production lack any signature of personality.

Let’s continue further down the ladder. Where devotion is absent, concentration (called Dhāraṇā by Patañjali, and is one of the limbs of the eight-fold yoga system developed by him) is also absent. To perform work in a devotional mindset, the focus of the worker, the performer of the activity, must be concentrated on the task and the purpose of the task. If one is carving a relief for display in a temple, then one’s concentration on the task encompasses every technical detail, all the minutiae of the carving itself, but also towards the end goal, which is to please The Supreme through this act and bring beauty to the temple. Kṛṣṇa teaches in the Bhagavad Gita that such concentration is important, and the concentration in the performance of duties should be applied to the perfect execution of the duty (even if it may be imperfectly performed) and to the performance of that duty being for Kṛṣṇa alone, not for the performer. In such a manner, one performs one’s duty, but does so in a way detached from the outcome. This orientates the work towards perfection, since it is done with devotion to The Supreme. It allows the work to take on a transcendental character.

However, when one is now allowed to apply devotion to the work, which means time and love, nurturing the task so both the product and the performer are orientated towards perfection, then so too concentration cannot be applied. Where there is a lack of concentration, the mind becomes animalistic, untamed and jittery. Hyper-productivity requires that the mind constantly rotate between various tasks, never sitting long enough on one task or one object to allow it to flourish in the mind’s eye and to take on importance. Instead, the mind must flit from email notification, to Teams chat, to a desk walk-up, to jotting down a To-Do note, and so on. The result is that the individual begins to mirror the look of a wild animal with its attention divided between various stimuli. A wild animal can never sit down to a meal comfortably, focusing the mind on the meal. By necessity of survival, it must take a bite and then, with jittery unease, look around for predators.

When the mind mirrors a wild animal in these fluctations required for being hyper-productive, we can be certain that this does not end at the office, but continues into our lives on every level. The mind will rebel at boredom. Quiet moments then have to be filled with the blur of noise. We scroll our phones whilst eating, simultaneously listening to a YouTube video or Television in the background. There can be no cessation to movement, and the mind will reach out for sense objects once it has been allowed to develop a lack of concentration. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, modernity and its hyper-productivity culture requires that one develop a lack of pure concentration in order to be productive. More productivity is not a result of more concentration, but rather a lack of it. We begin to resemble wild animals dividing our attention between multiple activities. In the digitalized workspace, this is even more apparent. Our work day does not end, but seeps into our home life. And so our mornings and evenings, our commutes to and from work, are just a continuation of the task-completion addiction. It never ends. We are never free to allow our minds to sit on any given moment, to allow for profound idleness where contemplation is its own achievement, for this would be unproductive, and being unproductive is the greatest of sins.

The next consequence of hyper-productivity pertains to the what I call the negative-positivity of the self-motivated individual. We can all agree that to be self-motivated (i.e. to be motivated towards perfection of ourselves and not sitting on the couch all day playing video games) is healthy. However, the self-motivation of the hyper-productivity culture takes the positive aspects of self-motivation to an extreme overdrive and causes it to become negative. We become the prisoner of the labour camp that is society, and we become our own prisoner and guard. We blame ourselves for failure to meet KPIs and objectives. We view ourselves as being unable to meet the standard of a certain “work ethic”, the moral imperative to produce more at the cost of creating anything of value and expressing the essence of the Self, expressing our innermost being. In short, we exploit ourselves and view it as positive, and failure to apply ourselves to the essentially mechanical task is met with an internal barrage of insults. We begin to talk to ourselves negatively. And so the positive aspect of self-motivation, which should be geared towards perfection of the self, is instead twisted and mutated into negative self-talk, where we blame ourselves for being unproductive. It does not matter that you spent eight to ten hours running from one meeting to another. The metrics are not met and, so, your day was unproductive and you are a failure who is unable to “manage time” efficiently.

To summarise, the consequences of hyper-productivity are all profoundly negative for the individual. It traps her in an endless cycle of mechanical tasks, being unable to express the soul’s desire for perfection, and blaming herself for the inability to meet a morality that was never divine in origin, but entirely man made. The “work ethic” of the modern hyper-productivity culture is a moral system of behaviours designed to appease the false idol of economic success, market penetration, and, ultimately, profits. To be unproductive - in the modern sense of the term - is the greatest of sins. One aught to leave the pursuit of perfection to less-enlightened periods if one wants to be successful (read morally righteous) in this period of hyper-productivity.

Making Our Work Dharmic

As a quick recap, we have now discussed and analysed the following points:

• The historical transition of work and its meaning to both the individual and society;

• The conditions that allows for a culture of hyper-productivity to arise;

• The fact that the culture of hyper-productivity brings with it a new system of soul-denying moral principles and imperatives;

• The multifaceted consequences of hyper-productivity as being profoundly negative for the individual

So what is the answer? We cannot simply say “return to tradition”. This is not sufficient, as we are caught up in the trap of modernity and its culture of hyper-productivity. If the solution was simply to hit the self-eject button, many - if not most - of us would have done so already.

I want to provide practical means of making our work dharmic. That is to say, the methods by which one can transcendentalize their work and bring it in line with the expression of the soul, or its svadharma, as much as possible in modernity. This will not be the approach of “riding the tiger” in Evolian terms, but rather vanquishing the tiger and reclaiming the sacred order.

At this point in our journey, the temptation to weave together various economic policies of the Right and Left wings of the modern political spectrum is strong. However, let us not not be led down that road and instead focus on the domain in which we have the most control - and that is the domain of the self. We cannot bring about giant political and economic shifts, but we can live a life of dharma and the pursuit of perfection in the here and now.

The first principle I wish to impart is that we cannot view work and spirituality as separate domains of existence. This idea is an unfortunate result of modernity, and it is one of results of the movement from the Order of the Sacred to the Order of the Profane. We must view all spheres of activity as being encompassed by and subservient to the spiritual category of existence.

Secondly, I wish to state that not working is not an option. As the Bhagavad Gita states, God is also engaged in His work as an example to us all. Further, the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita is that one cannot shirk one’s duty, but must perform it with an eye to the perfection of the duty, which is in reality the performance of dharma, the expression of svadharma, and the perfection of the self.

At whatever stage we are in life, whether we are still at high school, university graduates, or CEOs of major Fortune 500 companies, we can begin by asking ourselves a fundamental question: “what is success to me and what are the parameters by which I measure success?” Once you have defined those things, ask yourself an even more fundamental question: “was this idea of success one that I defined, or was it one defined for me by a culture of hyper-productivity?” If your idea of success does not include your own perfection (which is ultimately tied into the degree to which we are orientating our consciousness to the transcendent), then something is likely awry and it is possible that you have allowed your understanding of success and the parameters that define that success to be hijacked by subversive forces and their culture of hyper-productivity.

Cultivate profound idleness. We cannot immediately extricate ourselves from our current jobs, and neither should we feel a sense of urgency about doing this - unless we work in an extremely adharmic industry, such as those involving animal or human exploitation beyond the normal exploitation we all experience in modernity. However, we can plan parts of our day to contain profound idleness. We should also have a clear understanding of where work begins and ends, and rare should be the occasion for needing to begin early and/or finish late. For example, I personally build “sacred time” into my diary, which is time I move away from my computer and take a walk, sit somewhere, and internally chant mantras. This enables me to reclaim my work and offer it to The Supreme. Ultimately, I know I must do this as it forms part of my sadhana and vows I have taken as a Brahmana, and, so, it is my duty.

Remove external stimuli as far as possible, and be ruthless in doing so. Eat and focus on the food. Read and focus on the book. Avoid at all costs divinding your focus and concentration. Do not, for example, play music as you work, or read, or eat. Give your focus and attention to the activity at hand. Try to eliminate split-focus in all you do. Begin this practice at home and watch it seep into your work. Further, ensure that you have a daily regime of meditation that includes japa (mantra chanting). Setting aside a regular 30 minutes or more for this activity (what I have termed profound idleness) will not only have immediate effect, but it will quickly become a continuum where the focus and peace you experience in moments of profound idleness spill into all other aspects of your day. You will find a castle of calm in your interior, which will be insurmountable when you encounter the hyper-productive work world.

Understand that your work is sadhana (spiritual practice and duty). If your job is to make coffee, then make it with love and devotion, and then do not expect anything in return. The reward is in the service. If you are a programmer, then transcendentalize your work by ensuring the projects will have a dharmic impact on society as a whole (do not work for online gambling sites, or something adharmic), and aim to perfect the mastery of your skill. Be unmoved by arbitrary requirements and scope-creep. Maintain focus on the task at hand.

Perfection is the pursuit of advancing one’s craft. This pursuit is worth time and energy. When we move away from the mentality of task completion and orientate ourselves towards doing something well, we can take pride in our work, and this is the outcome we should be aiming for: healthy pride. That is not to say an egotistical pride, but rather an egoism⁵ that imbues the work with personality. Imbuing our work with personality does not mean we put our “branding” all over it, but rather, in the same way as artisans of the past created great works anonymously, one can still see the degree of pride, love and devotion poured out into those ancient masterpieces. In short, one can see the imprint of the soul in the work even when the work itself negates the individual - the work rises up and reveals divinity instead of the mundane individual. This imprinting of the soul onto our work provides a far deeper impression than any sort of branding. In fact, branding and logos are the answer to a product bereft of personality. It is a means by which the product is artificially given some sort of personal imprint, but only serves to reveal how utterly devoid of personality it is. Aim to imbue your work with personality.

Finally, offer everything you do to the supreme. Cultivate focus on your work, on the details, and soon you will develop a focus on The Supreme as you perform your work. This will turn your work not into mere task completion, but service to the divine. This attitude of service will naturally come around as you perform your daily routine of sadhana, and it will spill into your daily life and your work.

Conclusion

In the beginning we started by stating that the culture of hyper-productivity is a sign of the times, a sign that we are living in the Kali Yuga. We know this because the spirit of the Kali Yuga is allowed to reside and flourish wherever there is lust for gold. Desire for wealth brings with it falsity, intoxication, lust, envy and enmity. The real way in which we defeat the culture of hyper-productivity is by doing away with ideals of success that deal in wealth and the accumulation of wealth alone. Wealth should be secondary to the act of doing work for its own reward, for the opportunity of service and perfection of the self that it brings. When we take this position, we also remove the falsity, intoxication, lust, envy, and enmity we see arise as a result of a desire for wealth above all. And our sadhana, our spiritual practice of meditation, slowly removes the coverings of lust and envy from our inner being, allowing it to, by degrees, reveal itself in all we do and say. The Self, the innermost being, then comes to express itself in all of our actions, imbuing those actions with its unmistakable signature, which is signature of divinity.

Work is, in short, the opportunity to transcendentalize our activities. When we allow our work to becomes a vehicle for purification and expression of our inner being, then we do not actually work at all:

yas tv atma-ratir eva syad
atma-trptas ca manavah
atmany eva ca santustas
tasya karyam na vidyate

One who is, however, taking pleasure in the self, who is illumined in the self, who rejoices in and is satisfied with the self only, fully satiated—for him there is no duty.⁶

When our work is a vehicle for self-realisation, then all notions of “work” in a negative sense fall away. For such a person able to transcendentalize their occupational duties, only the pleasure of the Self remains, because their work becomes devotion to The Supreme, it becomes an expression of the nature of the soul itself - pure Bhakti Yoga.

1. Srimad Bhagavatam 1.17.39

2. Bhagavad Gita As It Is 9.32

3. A. M. Hocart. Les Castes, p.27

4. The Burnout Society

5. Egoism being the healthy expression of the inner being, not the egotism of mis-identification of the inner being with the material

6. Bhagavad Gita 3.17