Lent 2022 - Week 3 Thursday

Week 3 - Thursday
Releasing Self-Criticism
When you get most of your work done and the inner voice says…

Self-Criticism is: You are lazy! You should have…
It’s rarely feeling like you’ve done enough…resting is not an option.

Silence it: Stop accepting hyper-productivity as a good thing!

There’s nothing wrong with productivity and efficiency, but American Culture tends to take it to an extreme…leading us to believe we are not productive enough, not efficient enough. Then, when we get tired and burned out and we want to take a break, we criticize ourselves as lazy.

We think “being busy” is a badge of honor. Ask anyone how things are going with their job and 9 out of 10 times the answer will be some form of, “Oh gosh! I’ve been SO busy!”
In 2021 I took an anti-racism course from Louiza (Weeze) Doran (if you don’t know her work, you should - @accordingtoweeze) in which I learned that our cultural hyper-productivity comes right out of the slave-industrial complex. Not just in the US, but elsewhere, slaves were brutally punished for not meeting inhumane levels of productivity.

And now we voluntarily hold ourselves to inhumane levels of productivity.

Once again, this is the type of conditioning we must actively resist, not only for our own personal benefit, but to collectively push back against systems of oppression.

Let me know what you think in the comments.
How would you feel about yourself if you weren’t constantly busy?