What an annoying and weird feeling when you have to do something that is not coming from you just because you want to show someone that you are doing something for them, like opening your computer and working on some weird shit just because you want to show your boss that you're working, breaking down useless tasks, and making your sheet looks long so that your boss thinks that you're working. I find that so annoying. Like, why why you have to prove to people that you are doing something? Shouldn't the default to be you do nothing and then do whatever makes sense to improve life, improve productivity, make life better? Yes. But there is a problem. Sometimes when we actually work more, even if we do stuff that can be annoying, it could be useful for other people. Like, imagine you have a road, and you just keeps adding layers and layers of this road to make it as smooth as possible. Of course, this will make life easier for whoever crosses that road. So sometimes, yes, like, the more you burn yourself, the more you work on things that can technically not be very important, but it will definitely make someone lives easier. Think of a house that is clean enough for someone to live in, but a person who likes to see other people serving them can just have more and more people cleaning the already clean house over and over and over so that is protected from the little tiny speck of dust.
The Performance of Work Is Killing Real Work
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The Performance of Work Is Killing Real Work
There is a particular misery in opening your laptop not because you have something to do, but because someone needs to see you doing it. You break a task into smaller tasks. You stretch a bullet point into a paragraph. You make the spreadsheet long. None of it produces anything. All of it costs you something.
This is not laziness talking. This is the opposite of laziness. It is the exhausting, soul-grinding labor of performing labor — and it has become so normalized that most people no longer notice the difference between the two.
The default assumption in most workplaces is that a person at rest is a person wasting time. So the worker performs motion. The manager performs oversight. The meeting gets scheduled to prove the project is moving. Visibility becomes the product, and the actual product becomes secondary. We have built entire professional cultures around the theater of effort rather than its results.
Here is what gets lost in that theater: the road that actually gets smoother. There is real work — the kind that, layer by layer, makes something genuinely easier for someone else. A cleaner process. A faster system. A problem solved so quietly that no one notices it was ever there. That work is invisible by nature. It does not perform well. It does not fill a status update. And so, in environments that reward visibility, it dies.
The counterargument is worth taking seriously. Sometimes the extra effort — even the effort that feels redundant, even the polish that seems excessive — does make life better for the person on the receiving end. A road smooth enough to drive on can always be made smoother. A house clean enough to live in can always be cleaner. There is a version of going beyond the obvious threshold that is genuine care, genuine craft.
But there is another version. It is the house that is already clean, scrubbed again and again not because anyone benefits from the additional cleanliness, but because someone with power enjoys watching people scrub. That is not craft. That is control dressed up as standards. And the worker who cannot tell the difference — or who has stopped being allowed to tell the difference — is the one paying the price.
The question worth sitting with is not how to work harder. It is how to reclaim the judgment to know when work is real. Every hour spent manufacturing the appearance of productivity is an hour stolen from the thing that might have actually mattered. The performance of work is not neutral. It crowds out the work itself.
We do not need people who are better at looking busy. We need conditions where the person who solves the problem quietly, then sits back down, is trusted rather than suspected. That trust is rarer than it should be. And its absence is costing us more than we measure.