Why We Need to Stop Succumbing to 'Pandemic Productivity' and Gaze at the Sky?

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The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on our mental state in different ways. Students are worried about their exams, teachers are trying to make online classes as interactive as possible, and employees are trying to keep their jobs. The stress is worsened by the constant reminder from family members, peers, YouTube motivational speakers, and especially WhatsApp forwards, to remain PRODUCTIVE. Productivity has become the latest buzz word. Posts on how Isaac Newton discovered gravity and calculus during the plague lockdown, Instagram influencers’ exercising, actors learning to cook have been flooding our WhatsApp since the beginning of the lockdown. Many of my classmates while having a casual conversation over the phone, complain about how unproductive their lockdown is, and about their flooding to-do list. In all honesty, even I have done that; cribbed about not being productive enough.

Productivity is more like GDP, it measures the tangible aspects of life, the ones that are quantifiable, but fails to measure the qualitative aspects. Lockdown has provided us with an opportunity to stay with our parents, eat homemade food (for the who stay in hostels/PGs),  strum the begrimed guitar hanging on the wall for years, or even look at the stars and internalize the magnitude of the cosmos, or even gazing at the Moon wondering about the daring journey of astronauts. These activities may not be productive in the conventional sense of the word, but it will definitely have a profound impact on oneself.

I watched the Cosmos series of Carl Sagan which opened my mind to a new approach of thinking about our existence on the pale blue dot. Cosmos series is in no way related to my professional field, but it had a profound impact on my life. The series made me realize the significance of the human mind and the insignificance of human life in the grand cosmic scheme. An average human being lives for not more than 30,000 days or just over 4,250 weeks on Earth, and many of you reading this must have already lived at least a quarter of it, and will spend the next half grinding and striving for professional success. But these hundred days of lockdown out of 30,000 we have, are the days we might have never thought would come, and spend with our loved ones without missing classes or taking leave.

Writing this reminds me of the quote from the movie ‘The Dead Poets Society’-

“And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for”.

These few days of the lockdown are when we can enjoy the ‘other’ things, things which we stay alive for. Soon after the lockdown is lifted completely,  life will be back to normal. And we may never do things we could do now.

If not anything, gaze at the moon and stars and imbibe their sagacity. Looking at the stars means looking into the past of an object that is light-years away, and may even be dead by now. Being able to think and understand the magnitude of cosmos in itself is one of the greatest biological feats of human evolution. And being able to comprehend how insignificant we are in the cosmos is the significance of the human mind.

 

 That’s why whenever I feel being unproductive, I do nothing but gaze at the night sky; cherishing the human mind and the chaotically beautiful cosmos.

 

Nikhil Erinjingat

nikhileringinkat@gmail.com



Featured image credit: www.sciencefocus.com


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