You just spent two hours watching a documentary about climate change and you already feel a better person. Meanwhile, your friend spent the same two hours at an art exhibition and posted about it on social media with the caption: “expanding my horizons.” But what about the person who worked a full 8 hour shift, spent two hours on a public transport and just wanted to lie in bed to watch one episode of their favorite show before bed?
The question of what counts as “productive” is more complex than it seems, and it says a lot about how we define value and rest in a society that rarely slows down. Swapping between a screen to another, choosing a museum over Netflix, or simply taking a break from real life after an exhausting day is associated with social demands and realities.
To understand more about this specific question, we need to look at how the idea of productivity became so personal and unequal to each individual and the different ways entertainment can be associated with this phenomenon.
Productivity Is Personal
For some people, a productive day means finishing a course or reorganizing the apartment, but for others it means finally watching that eight episode series they waited for months, or even going to a concert. At the end of the day, productivity gives the feeling of emotional recharge.
Neither of the answers about productivity is wrong, but not everyone feels comfortable admitting that entertainment also counts. The word “productive” is normally associated with something that was achieved or built. Watching a film produces nothing of what some people actually consider productive, but still millions of people feel genuinely restored, inspired and mentally better after consuming stories on screen.
The urge to justify recreation through a productive frame – for example, when we watch a film and say “the movie was in a foreign language, so it counts” – reveals a type of cultural anxiety, disclaimed as the fear that resting is the same as wasting time.
To explain the toxic productivity culture, we brought psychologist Elaine Silva, who uses a psychoanalysis approach to work with patients that have problems like anxiety. She says that the clearest reflection of this in our reality is the alarming increase in the number of cases of burnout and anxiety disorders in recent years. Burnout, which is chronic professional exhaustion, stems precisely from this inability to switch off. People are getting sick because they’ve turned their lives into a spreadsheet of goals.
Rest only fulfills its regenerative role when its purpose is not to make you more productive later. Resting is a biological and psychological right, not a reward you are obligated to earn.
What changes from person to person is not only taste, but also access, energy and the hours available to make a choice. In that sense, putting this perspective, we can conclude that productivity is never neutral.
Swapping One Screen for Another
There is something that happens when we close social media and open a streaming platform instead, that feels almost like an upgrade. While scrolling on social media, we are exposed to a lot of feelings related to comparison, fragmented attention and passivity. But on the other hand, a film has a narrative arc and demands a sustained attention that scrolling does not, since we have a whole world with characters and stories being built.
Activities that require enough mental investment to feel meaningful, without demanding the full cognitive load of work as sense are called “engaged leisure”. For example, a complex tv series can offer emotional engagement, narrative satisfaction and even intellectual stimulation, all packaged in a format that requires you to sit still and pay attention. Compared to the chaos of a social media feed, that engaged leisure can feel almost meditative.
Besides, Elaine talks about the different impacts on a person when it comes to either watching a film or scrolling. When a person chooses to watch a movie or a series, there is a clear purpose, which may be entertainment, learning, or even relaxation, but on social media, the scenario changes completely because of infinite scrolling. “This format generates a constant feeling of something unfinished, of not having completed anything. The ultra-rapid change of context generates enormous mental fatigue. It exhausts the brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, which is precisely the area responsible for our decisions and focus.” the psychologist completes.
What makes this particularly harmful is that the exhaustion is invisible and the mind has been working intensely without ever arriving anywhere. Psychologically, this creates a quiet but persistent anxiety, that is the sense that we are always behind and one step away from something we actually cannot quite name.
This ends up resulting in significant difficulty concentrating on a daily basis, a high level of anxiety, and behavior that becomes compulsive, where the person becomes enslaved to a search for quick rewards through the release of dopamine.
Rest as Resistance
There is a cultural conversation about the right to rest without justification, arguing about the idea that recreation needs to be productive and to teach you something, improve you somehow, be worth reporting on a Monday morning is increasingly being named as a form of internalized capitalism.
Even people who intellectually reject the productivity myth still find themselves reaching for the “educational” podcast over the silly reality show, feeling vaguely guilty after a weekend that felt too easy, and the gap between what we believe and what we feel is where psychology lives.
What this conversation ultimately points to is the need to expand what we count as valuable human activity. Activities like watching a film that made you cry, going to a show that cost three months of saved money or even lying on the couch after a work shift and watching something completely mindless all count as productivity. They are all ways of being alive and of tending to the self and none of them need to produce anything to matter.
Elaine mentions a tip for those who have short time for rest and leisure:
“Start changing this today, make small agreements with your mind. If you can’t take a whole day off, start with 20 private minutes, without your cell phone and without an audience. And when the little voice of guilt appears, answer yourself: “Work is important, but right now my only task is to take care of myself.”
Learning to rest requires practice and patience. But always remember: a life that only has room for obligations is not a productive life, it’s just an exhausted life.
What we can learn about productivity and entertainment?
The urge to make our entertainment feel productive is not a personal failure, it is a cultural inheritance. We live in a world that has spent decades equating human worth with output, and unlearning that is slow, uncomfortable work.
What this conversation reveals is that productivity is associated with class, energy, access and the invisible weight of everything a person carries before they even sit down to rest.
—————————————————————–
The article below was edited by Eloá Costa.
Liked this type of content? Check out Her Campus Cásper Líbero for more!