Shamelessly lazy

By Carolina

How did you spend your time during the Corona crisis? This is going to be a big question in the future. Whether it’s asked compassionately or judgmentally is important. If there’s one thing that is deeply rooted in many of us, it’s the feeling that we haven’t done enough. Millennials grew up with a lie - having a bachelor’s degree is the solution for a better life. We are twice as educated as our parents, yet we still need their financial support. We even monetised our hobbies! Eventually every bit of our living has become profit oriented, yet we feel inadequate. So during this crisis, it’s time to remember that doing nothing is normal.

We are bombarded with “how to’s” and the pressure of using this time productively is increasing. None of this hints at empathy. Charlotte Lieberman explained in The New York Times that procrastination is a result of negative emotions. The article was written before the lockdown, but it is relevant now more than ever. Unless we are Jeff Bezos, who profits from the crisis, we experience great stress. I feel that even losing my job is a privileged problem, compared with what others are dealing with. Thus, I made my choice - this time, I’m not going to be productive. Being lazy is my way of coping with it. I used this time to talk with my friends, all of whom shared two phasesweeks of being extremely productive or shamefully lazy, but are they really lazy? There is a fixed idea of what productivity entails. Reading books, practising a hobby and exercising. Doing one of the three or not doing them consistently, is not enough. But the superhumans that we see on our screens are not real. As a result, this pressure is not just applied from us to ourselves, but also to our peers. We are judging our friends, as a reflective frustration. Somebody should be perfect and if not ourselves or those who surrounds us, then who?!

Now is not the time for faster, smarter, stronger. We have followed the advice from the market for too long and now it’s time for a break. We were frustrated before the crisis, because of the lack of success from their recipe. Not following it now might be more rewarding.

What about cooking, going for walks and talking with friends? We underestimated these activities throughout the years, since happiness is measured from success and money, rather than inner peace and happy relationships. My point is that there is a feeling that we forgot how to be human. My friends are amazing people, who accomplished a lot within a few years. Nonetheless they are haunted by guilt, as we all are, when faced with the modern day ‘sin’ of doing nothing.

It’s time for reevaluation of many aspects of our lives, and productivity should be one of them. There is no big or small problem in this crisis. Each other’s ways of coping with it should stand without judgement. The main goal should be trying to stay sane. Hence, it doesn’t matter if I was productive during this time. Being shamelessly lazy gave me something much greater, being kinder to myself and those around me.

of success from their recipe. Not following it now, might be more

Lockdown - is it not enough to just get through it?

An interview with Pops Roberts, producer, vocalist and DJ on her thoughts on creativity and productiity during lockdown.

Lockdown - is it not enough to just get through it?

I interviewed Pops Roberts, producer, vocalist and DJ on her thoughts on creativity and productivity during lockdown.

The UK’s economy is restarting, and with it shops, bars and restaurants are reopening. Service industries are welcoming customers for the first time since March, and we all begin to re-join friends and colleagues. However - nothing is quite the same as we enter the “new normal”. And although our beloved vendors are reopening, with it comes the newly relaxed rules of one-meter social distancing. We accessorise with masks and gloves, and bumble on with our interpretations of what it means to “stay alert”.

Pops and I reflect, at this pivotal moment, on our experiences of lockdown and our journey through the unimaginable. The steps we have taken from closure to now, and how we had momentarily redefined our purpose away from the UK’s obsession with productivity. This was what a lack of freedom was going to look and feel like – whether it would be military on streets, rationing etc. or not... it was hard to picture it at the time with so much misinformation.”

As the lockdown rules to ‘stay home, save lives’ was enforce on the UK - COVID had officially rid us of our daily routines, our jobs and any chances of socialising. It was fascinating to witness my own, and others’, instinctive reaction to this huge shift in routine. We scrubbed our houses spotless, re-joined the job search, cleared out our clothes and launched into intensive fitness regimes. Future concepts began to be rustled up by the business savvy, while social media accounts rose to attention with claims of “secrets to productivity at home”; and all the while publications such as The Times were curating material with “The lockdown status symbol: abs” as its headline. Naturally, the pit of anxiety began to circulate amongst my friends that we were not utilising the global standstill effectively.

Pops describes a “culture of honesty amongst friends”. I received texts that ranged from the anxious “I haven’t done any job stuff [seeking] for ages. All I want to do is just lie in the garden” to the self-deprecating “I cannot stop eating. I kind of enjoy it. A time to pig out with an excuse”.

Pops: “most of us have realised how busy our lives were before this - it’s hard to be expected to go from 100 to 0 overnight. There isn’t direct pressure, but I think it’s a little like when you clear a day off to do something: sometimes I think we can intimidate ourselves with this expectation, and on days like this I’ve barely written anything until I stopped trying to. So, if lockdown is a larger scale version of this, and all your friends are saying “I bet you’re writing loads of music” etc. I can see why a pressure could be perceived.”

The urge to overachieve, even in times of global crisis, is reflective of Britain’s always on-work culture. The direct and wicked humour of our beloved memes only ring true, one stating that “lockdown is the closest thing most millennials will get to retirement”. The concept of the hustle has always been a convincing pressure, an emotional bully where our self-worth is often reduced to our productivity. Anne Helen Peterson describes us as the “Burnout Generation”, where our lives are an endless “to-do-list”. Insert then the rapid decline from this to a historical change in behavioural patterns with the introduction of isolation, and social distancing. Certainly, it doesn’t help when The Times encourages harmful doses of venomous media, which distort our perception of what lockdown should look like; shaming its readers into perceived failure if they’re not gearing up towards a “corona six- pack”. Consumerism hasn’t become obsolete, but instead moved with the times - the abominable monster has replaced the clothing season’s normal focus with overpriced tracksuits.

Pops: “However, I’ve also felt like there’s a been a real culture of honesty amongst my friends that create – no one I’ve seen is trying to make their lockdown look better than it is, people seem to be more mindful in general…so I’ve not felt any pressure from anyone other than from myself when I’ve binged too much on films. It’s important to remember that this isn’t some sabbatical for us –yes, it’s a time of confinement and less daily distractions, but there’s something fragile and heart- breaking going on around us and we can’t expect to feel inspired or super proactive with all this uncertainty about. Yes, SOME people may come out with albums of material, but it’s more important we ALL come out of this as mentally sound and healthy as we can – if chilling achieves this just chill”.

For many, creativity began to replace productivity. We put the hoovers down, held tightly onto to the few clothes we hadn’t chucked out, and finally came to the assumption that spending each day searching for work in an economic collapse was borderline insane. And as the coronavirus brought life largely indoors, we found ourselves with little distraction from oneself. As Pops says, “being isolated or locked down in any way is only ever going to go according to how our minds’ handle it.” And inevitably “a time for a lot of thinking (whether we want to or not)”, and this self-reflection naturally needed an outlet of some form, to make it constructive. Hobbies may seem trivial to us in a society where we are valued by our use in making money for others; but actually, it has been remarkable to see a return of people’s genuine interests and authenticity of self. Small business began to sprout with meaningful ambition, and live streams from creatives and collective action has been forwarded with mass social movements.

Pops: “My own personal lockdown, in these four walls, has been positive – I’ve had time to rethink about the person I am, how I buy food, my consumption and the services that truly are the backbone of life as we know it – it’s a wakeup call we didn’t know we needed and didn’t have time to see. I’ve been reading again and realised how important reading is for you mentally – your internal monologue, how you write, how you see the world and of course stimulating your imagination in general.”

As long as I have known Pops she has been involved in various creative projects in Manchester. During the lockdown she held a live stream from Wilderness Record Store; a two-piece rendition of her band Love Scene for viewers to watch at home. In that blissful moment watching Love Scene, I felt a calming sense of togetherness, sparked by the passion from two band members. We both agreed the online world has, for the most part, been an essential mode of connectivity and inspiration during a time of isolation.

Pops: “When you’re singing to your own phone on a stand, it doesn’t give you an idea of how it will be taken on the other side of the lens...I was really pleased people connected with it, and that there were some happy tears from people that we knew and some we didn’t. Once it had aired, I had messages to confirm this was much needed by staff and regulars alike. We had some overwhelmingly beautiful messages – both in the comments section and in my inbox over the couple of days after.”

In so many ways, COVID is something of a process of grief. Within the space of the first mention of the virus, to the weeks that followed thereafter, everything we know and love has dramatically readjusted. As we pave the way to reinventing the “new normal” we must all seek to find how better to tackle our futures. The need for lockdown, Poppy says is “appalling if you think about it”. Really, “nothing like this has happened internationally in my or most of our parents’ lifetimes. To see politicians that you have no faith in, make huge, life/death decisions is absolutely nail-biting, and to hear about terrible conditions and losses for some people is of course deeply negative.”

We are not in competition for productivity; global catastrophes change the world, and this pandemic is very much akin to a major war. This in itself is an incredible thing to process. There’s no shame in coping quietly, and let me tell you - it is more than enough to just get through it. As we go through a transition of rebirth for the UK, and we find ourselves questioning our involvement in a flawed political system, a bit of peace, quite frankly, is deserved. There is much more to see from the creative culture born from this pandemic. As for Pops and creatives across the UK - “I guess in a way I felt it was important to somehow say hi to everyone and make it feel more like “to be continued” rather than “game over””.

You can check out Pops’ band Love Scene and other live streams through their social media:

IG: @p_ro_jones

@love__scene

Facebook: @lovescenehQ

Twitter: @love__scene