göktuğ's blog

Productivity is a concept that is inherently tied to a capitalistic understanding of self and of labour. And yet it has also filled a conceptual space that is pretty relevant for a lot of people, me included. But, as ever, for me at least this is in conflict with a desire to reject the imposed capitalistic conception, perception and existence as self-realisation.

Whatever «productivity» is in my life, it is not about goals set for me by higher ups, it is not about the judgements of people, it's not about whether there is some concrete result of effort spent that is valuable in a market. It is about fulfilment, it is about living a joyful life—as a radical act, in the face of imposed turmoil and unhappiness—, and it is about an existential sense of engagement with the world.

So I just came up with an idea to materialise this disregard, to follow this desire to visibly dissociate from a social construct that is infested by such destructive things as wage labour, gig work, hustle culture, self-help, and all the other ways we are made to ostensibly-willingly spend our (free) time¹ along with labour hours for the benefit of the surplus-parasites, all the while trying to protect and appropriate the positive aspects of «productivity» as a current cultural phenomenon.

From now on, I will try to use the concept of «fruitivity» instead of «productivity». This is not just a pure word swap. Because, of course, when I used the word productivity, I did so to refer to my conception of it. As with all words and every person uttering them. The reason then to coin this word (and a set of accompanying words which I'll expose soon) is to detach a non/anti-capitalistic, personal conception of productivity from the semantic baggage of capitalistic productivity. I want to have words to talk about what I have so far referred to using productivity, or its sibling terms.

Fruitivity thus is an existential/epicurean conception that refers to the kinetic pleasure gained from spending a satisfactory amount of voluntary effort on self-determined personal goals or momentary, fleeting interests. Its goal is to maintain a state of aponia and ataraxia that stems from self-realisation. But it does not concern the false dichotomy of individualism and collectivism either. Neither a moment of fruition nor the conception of self-realisation it relates to needs necessarily to concern the individual only. One can make their communities, their collaboration with others, a major, or even a central part of their self-realisation.

I explicitly do not wish to bring any etymology into this write-up. For me, it is not the etymology of productivity that is the problem, but the set of connotations associated with that name-concept. The main reason for using a word like fruitivity here is, (i) it is different from productivity and does not share in common parlance the capitalistic connotations of the latter, and (ii) I like the word.

A (potentially) completed episode of fruitivity can be referred to as fruition. When I check off a to-do list item, it is a moment of fruition. The effort, or the kind of effort, that lead to such an outcome might be described as fruitive, just like a time-period or space that is associated with fruitivity. Library is a fruitive space for me, I can engage fruitively with self-realising effort in the realm of academic/intellectual pursuit there.

From this seed vocabulary, one can replace an entire realm of capitalistic/ablist jargon that infests our lives and dirties our discourses when attempting to talk about how we attach meaning to our lives. Occasio praeceps, vita brevis, we have no time to share with the capitalists. And yet they demand, and they enforce. In the face of that, the words, concepts, ideas we use are a frontier. We must push back. This is one of my attempts.

¹ «free time», of course, itself is a capitalistic concept as it necessitates the existence of time dedicated to labouring for the extractor classes.