Alex Tarnava unpacks why absolutist productivity culture turns work into performance, self-criticism, and paralysis.
Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: In a reading from StressHacked—recounting your entire chapter “Strategic Task Sequencing: When to Eat the Frog and When to Build Momentum” from The Mind—you advise the listener on when and how to confront their biggest problems, when to coast, and when to take breaks, even. The chapter nods to the sage advice that you ought to “eat the whole frog” first—that is, deal with your biggest problem head-on—though this is not always opportune. One must sometimes build momentum in order so they can eat a frog. Sometimes you start with the appetizer first, whatever that may be.
I think it’s occasionally valuable to contrast this practical advice with theoretical extremes that may not occur in nature. In doing so, we can more clearly see when and where this advice is applicable. In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, the protagonist Josef K. is accused of a crime he didn’t commit. He spends the remainder of the novel trying to 1) find out what crime he was accused of, and 2) clear his name of any such crime. Except, he can’t get any answers from anyone. Everyone tells him to go somewhere else and talk to someone else. Kafka’s universe in The Trial is of course kafkaesque (from where the word comes): it’s surreal but not cathartic. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, even when you struggle to succeed. The system wears you down and this seems to be its purpose.
We are not Josef K. We do not live in a society—yet—where we are messed with simply for existing. We do not, as Gregor Samsa does in another one of Kafka’s works, The Metamorphosis, wake up as a giant bug as a symbol of our alienation. But many of us do feel like Josef K. or Gregor Samsa. We feel like we can neither eat the whole frog nor (unfortunately) build momentum. What do you say to us?
AT: My response to this is, perhaps disappointingly, very short and simple. Most feel this way because they have been trained and indoctrinated to think in a way in which only eating the frog first thing is acceptable. This absolutism lends to frequent meetings with reality in which they are incapable of doing as they were taught is necessary. In this disconnect, few question the underlying ideology, and instead apply the same “certainty” inwardly, questioning their own worth. In this transmutation created from acceptance of an illogical ideology which unfortunately demands an absolute position, the absolutism, the certainty, must be redirected. So, it is redirected in a way that destroys the individuals own capacity to even work towards doing what they feel is a necessity, creating a spiral effect in declining capacity and mental state.
VG: Let’s unpack this. What is the ideology getting people to think they have to eat the whole frog? Why does this ideology demand absolutism from their adherents? What ideology would be better—no ideology?
AT: Simply put, it ties into the same reasoning that dominates many other areas. Humans, generally speaking, have a tendency to try to put things in two neat, opposing, boxes. You’re either a conservative or a liberal; a stringent supporter of something, or an ardent critic and protester. We are increasingly told we have to have an opinion on everything, and that opinion is, also increasingly so, expected to be extreme and absolute. In a society where extreme, unambiguous positions are increasingly dominant, the existence of nuance and complexity is, as such, shunned and dismissed. This is exacerbated by short attention spans, and exploited by antisocial types, and imbeciles, who confidently assert to have absolute, unwavering answers. We end up in a scenario where our currently prevailing cognitive reasoning style, at least for the masses, leads to the conclusion that if we don’t “eat the frog” first thing, that means we must not value success, hard work, or progress at all. So, many attempt to eat the frog no matter what, and when they inevitably fail on a given day, they internalize it as a moral failing—the tragic irony being that this internalization, and drive to push through at times when doing so is impossible, will lead to an increasingly greater rate of failure.
VG: In The Stone Wall, you talk about something similar as it relates to politics. You state that people have a “biological” political position; that is, a point wherein their convictions feel comfortable and place them in a place of homeostasis. The individuals who bounce from extremes, say between the far Left and far Right, are volatile types who nonetheless hover around this “biological” position—somewhere in the center, usually. Not to name names, but one of my dissertation committee members was famous as a Maoist. The election of Donald Trump pushed him increasingly to the Right; until he was defending Trump, at least superficially, from a populist position. I can see myself in someone like him (he was on my committee for a reason). There’s no judgement here. Just an acknowledgement that “eating the whole” frog is sometimes not opportune, and sometimes it’s a mask for when you really should be building momentum, and you don’t want to do the hard thing, which is just that: wait, do nothing at all, or build momentum.
Another topic your answer reminds me of is something we have discussed in this newsletter and in private: the dreaded (at least American) work culture. You work a lot; I work a lot. We are not strangers to work, but I think what you and I are both strangers to is eating the frog when we should be building momentum. Both of us had to unlearn that, I believe: to not waste our social capital because we don’t know yet when to ‘pull the trigger,’ so to speak (your experiences playing Earth 2025 that you describe in StressHacked come to mind here). I think this ontology of ‘eating the frog’ first and only eating the frog has to be unlearned because there is an ambience of neoliberal do-nothingness that permeates our society. And, despite this do-nothingness—bullshit jobs like consulting (a bit self-depracating on my part) and financial speculation—there is still a culture of surveillance, which manifests (under neoliberalism) as self-surveillance. And “eating the frog” first may be an indicator of this self-surveillance.
Speaking of Maoism, Mark Fischer, in Capitalist Realism, writes (emphasis mine),
Foucault famously observes there that there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. … The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing self-flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing.
Does what Fischer is stating square with the “illogical ideology” you’re describing that makes people feel like they have to do everything at once, instead of waiting, biding time, and making calculated movements towards their success?
AT: I draw a parallel to this last quote, and the current academic paradigm. Academics are taught, at least in the hard sciences, to hedge and caveat their positions so forcefully, to the point in which a layman will read and believe it reports nothing, that their work loses impact in the real world. However, in private they are, in my experience, overconfident in the strength of their findings. This creates a double-think in which the public-facing position drugs less and less confident, more and more played down, while their inner monologue convinces themselves there are really not many, even no, limitations to their findings. The reverse exists in the “eat the frog” crowd, in which their public-facing persona projects extreme confidence, asserting they always eat the frog, could not possibly accomplish more, and are masterful in their execution of tasks—while their inner dialogue flagellates themselves for repeatedly failing to reach the impossible expectations they have placed upon themselves. In this scenario, the “eat the frog” crowd creates a rift in which they become outwardly delusional, inwardly crippled, leading to an outcome in which they settle on a toxic-entitlement, and continued and increasing justification for doing less and less, a repayment they deserve for their past hard work, this delusional position driven by their own self-administered manipulation meant for others. Tragic.
VG: What you are talking about, namely academics hedging and caveating their positions to say ‘nothing’ is also present in the social sciences, not just the hard sciences. In the case of the social sciences, the positions being expressed are extreme, but they’re all similarly extreme and not novel. It is quite revolutionary, in sociology say, so simply quote some of the founders of the discipline, such as Gabriel Tarde. Acknowledging human difference exists in anthropology is similarly a revolutionary act.
The “eat the frog” crowd seems to me more present as independent entrepreneurs and also employees of corporations than academia. The Mike Judge film Office Space does a good job capturing the ethos of the corporation, and Fischer provides a write-up (emphasis mine):
In keeping with the ‘being smart’ ethos, the management style in Office Space is a mixture of shirtsleeves-informality and quiet authoritarianism. Judge shows this same managerialism presides in the corporate coffee chains where the office workers go to relax. Here, staff are required to decorate their uniforms with ‘seven pieces of flair’, (i.e. badges or other personal tokens) to express their ‘individuality and creativity’: a handy illustration of the way in which ‘creativity’ and ‘self-expression’ have become intrinsic to labor in Control societies… The flair example also points to another phenomenon: hidden expectations behind official standards. Joanna, a waitress at the coffee chain, wears exactly seven pieces of flair, but it is made clear to her that, even though seven is Officially enough, it is actually inadequate … What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. … This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
Do you think the ‘eating the frog’ mentality emerges from this substrate of ‘market Stalinism’? If so, how do we address this pathology of doing everything at once—rather than waiting and building momentum—both on an individual and societal level?
AT: Again, some may be disappointed by the brevity and simplicity of my answer. I don’t think the reasoning is complex. “Market Stalinism,” as you put it, is not the causation, but rather the rudder that directs pre-existing inertia regarding mimicking what is seen within this subculture as normative towards this particular behavioral tendency. We are all, for the most part, trained and conditioned by the structural incentives in society from the time we can walk and talk, to comply and conform. These demands are absolute, what is deemed sufficient progressively intensifying until the normative behavior shifts from intentional action towards a purpose, to performative signaling in order to affirm in-group identity. “Woke” culture leads to virtue signaling; corporate culture leads to “productivity signaling.” The result being that most within the Woke movement abandoned any actions that could be reasonably argued as virtuous, opting to unvirtuously proclaim their superior virtue, and those within the corporate culture descending deeper and deeper into unproductivity, sacrificing true effort and growth for the bewildering pursuit of convincing others of how productive they are. When we demand compliance and conformity to an ideology, we will inevitably create a culture in which all who have succumbed to this training attempt to mimic external signals of their compliance, which are immediately rewarded and affirmed by their peers, rather than purposefully and dutifully living in a manner which upholds the underlying principle. The victory of the ideology will, as such, lead to an inversion of action and outcomes antithetical to said original principles.
