This is the kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the artists profiled in Cal Newport’s new(ish) book, “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.” In my review for RealClear, I talk about how Newport
looks at the lives of various creative people and how they organized their output. In the midst of a peripatetic youth, famed painter Georgia O’Keeffe took long breaks from art — even up to four years — before finally landing on a rural property in upstate New York, where she was able to produce hundreds of pieces to later exhibit in the city. Newport uses her trajectory, as well as those of scientists Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, to illustrate the concept of “embracing seasonality.” A working life that echoed the rhythms of the earth was once “deeply integrated into the human experience,” he argues. This mode of productivity was “intertwined with agriculture,” completely unlike the way in which professionals now “toil at computer screens” for “twelve months out of the year with little variation in their intensity.”
Can the working lives of entrepreneurs, freelancers, and academics be organized differently? Newport thinks so.
One might call his vision, in a word, paleo-labor: it aims not only to replicate the healthier cycles of agrarian life but those of an even earlier era — that of the hunters and gatherers.
You may have noticed that in the years since the pandemic, an anti-productivity movement has been on the rise.
Even pre-plague, many people were turning their backs on what they called “grind culture,” alleging that the American ethic of hard work had mutated into something monstrous. Titles appeared like How to Do Nothing and Can’t Even. A woman in Georgia appointed herself the “Nap Bishop” and wrote a book called Rest is Resistance. Lest you fear that Newport’s book is another faux-radical tome exhorting you to forsake your ambitions and join the other justice warriors on the couch, potato chip crumbs encrusted in their loins, be comforted. It is, gladly, a blueprint for delving even more maniacally into your seething desires for achievement, if you have them, and for this it should be generously lauded.
Newport uses the Slow Food phenomenon, which Rod Dreher also chronicled in Crunchy Cons (one of my favorite books), as a model for slow productivity. He is
admirably neither reactionary nor progressive; instead, he is simultaneously traditional and forward-thinking. “Slowing down isn’t about protesting work,” he explains. “It’s instead about finding a better way to do it.” His instincts are in line with those of his contemporaries who sense a need to safeguard and protect the things that truly matter. Ambition is one of those things.
I hope you will read the review and enjoy. Many thanks to Alex Perez for the opportunity — if you don’t know his work, you should check it out.