It’s 9:00 a.m. on a random Tuesday, and I’m replaying the exact conversation that led me down this intricate rabbit hole.
The inspiration for this piece comes from my friend, let’s call him Steve. Now Steve, he is—in the most clinical sense—a “highly productive person” with an absent bandwidth for unnecessary upheaval in his life.
Steve works a nice job that pays well and affords him to be comfortable. The kind where you need not bother twice over groceries or the casual urge to buy the latest tech-wonder headphones. The kind that enables a couple of nice international vacations every year and simultaneously lengthens the chain of revered Instagram highlights with the country’s flag.
Steve takes care of his body, or rather maintains it at an optimal performance level, by which I mean, he loves hitting the gym religiously and meticulously counts every gram of protein and carbs in his diet. Yes, obviously he meal preps over the weekend. Did I mention he also invests in the rightest places and is on track to try his hand at his own business soon?
On paper, it seems that Steve has hacked the equation. Good job. Good health. Great savings and a delightful platter of arguably the best Hinge matches. Optically, he seems like an “ultimate catch.”
What strikes me, however, is the “no room for unnecessary upheaval” clause. The lengths to which Steve might go to preserve his otherwise satisfactorily factored day are–questionable.
But I don’t entirely blame him for it.
Refuge in avoidance
Have you ever stood in front of a bathroom mirror on a “tough” day pleading with yourself to pull it together? I know I have.
On days when we don’t feel up to facing life, when our emotions weigh us down or we get stuck in loops of overthinking, how do we cope?
We distract ourselves.
Some people throw themselves headfirst into work. Some resort to retail therapy. Some go and treat themselves at a spa or get their nails done, and some might even go and break a few dishes at a rage room. I have heard it’s truly cathartic.
The key principle at the bedrock remains the same. Distraction. We know therapists tell us and even research proves that taking walks in the sun or returning to old hobbies helps anhedonia in severe depression. So truly, is there something to be guilty of here?
Is it a sin to pull yourself up?
Is it wrong to suppress the “big blues” and turn towards these distractions to keep sane and remain functional?
But let me also ask you this: where does the line get drawn? When does this performance blur between gentle distraction and complete emotional avoidance?
Case in point. Steve.
As we already know, he is a high-functioning enigma. But does his emotional intelligence scale up to the figures on his salary slip?
In his pursuit of perfection, Steve categorically slots his emotions as “inefficiencies”—an ordeal that hampered his productivity. Juggling between a girlfriend, family commitments, four hours of daily gym splits and an ambitiously relentless coding schedule, the math simply didn’t add up. By the time he hit the exclusive speakeasy for his friend’s startup’s success party or his boss’ pickleball court over the weekend, he wasn’t left with hours to process how he felt.
But did it really matter?
There he was, at the top of his game. That’s all that he cared for. On the surface, he was an empty suit–a corporate trained humanoid fully fashioned with an impenetrable wall of polite language and MNC jargon.
Whenever faced with situations that required operating on empathy rather than his logic, he compartmentalised—put them in boxes and stowed them away under his metaphorical work desk for processing later. He attempted to rationalise everything.
But emotions rarely are rational, aren’t they?
He made people feel disposable with his continuous sermons of logic. He told his friends he enjoyed their company, but if they were to fall through, he could continue to do just fine without them. Logical truth. He told his partner on a tough day, to get a therapist instead of talking to him because he didn’t have space in his life for certain kinds of theatrics. Logical truth.
In all these situations, Steve thinks he is right because he is “technically”, saying the truth–point blank. He might be applauded by some for being a “frank” person or even for belonging to a cadre of independence that sits him above the basic hierarchy of needs that define us as human beings.
But we all are thinking the same thing. It’s difficult to feel sympathy for Steve.
You might praise his work ethic but not his emotional quotient.
Now before we essentially cast him as the villain, which I feel most of us already have, let’s take a moment to trace it back to the root.
A blueprint of survival
Steve was raised in a military family, and I can’t imagine that’s a cake walk. I remember this instance where, in conversation with his dad, he joked in his vernacular on how Steve was a “girl trapped in a boy’s body” because he was an emotional child growing up.
Is it far-fetched to imagine “boys don’t cry” being a fundamental law in his upbringing?
Is it too crazy to draw an equation where this childhood prompted Steve to become the adult he is today?
I am a staunch advocate of believing that we don’t get to pick our parents and hence the wounds they pass onto us. Our families and childhood are the blueprint. A family that starves or rations love, basing worth on performance, churns out dysregulated adults.
Imagine this newly minted adult coming to a fork on the road of life. They can choose one of two paths.
He can either choose to let his emotions take complete precedence, he becomes an empath or he can choose to completely delete his emotional database, he becomes an avoidant.
The empath “overextends”, often at the cost of his own boundaries because they associate sacrifice as worth. On the other hand, the avoidant, like Steve, tries to seize total “control” of every minute detail of their environment because they associate peak performance as worth.
Both of these people have the same goal: to feel safe.
They try to build as adults what their families couldn’t provide when they were kids, but they forget, the foundation itself is cracked. When you don’t understand the vocabulary of safety in childhood, you can only choose twisted ways of defining peace as an adult.
We applaud Steve. We promote Steve. We aspire to be Steve. In a world that worships output, discipline, and optimization, emotional minimalism looks like strength. Swapping emotions for productivity gets you labelled as “employee of the month.”
So is this productivity truly a virtue–or just a socially acceptable anaesthetic?
Somewhere between the tupperwares of meal-prepping on Sundays and the next big project, there was a little boy who was told to find his own soothing mechanisms. Somewhere behind code review meetings and Google calendar blocks, there’s a backlog of feelings marked “process later”.
So no–productivity isn’t directly proportional to emotional avoidance.
But unchecked productivity?
The kind that leaves no room for the mess of being human, no room for feeling?
That might just be.
A doctor by day and a littérateur by night, Dr. Shristi Das is building a sanctuary of slow, intentional storytelling—on culture, identity and personal ritual. Her work has been published by The Hooghly Review, Train River Publishing, and Writer’s Pocket. Currently re-exploring her hometown roots and chasing the Calcutta chromosome, she reports on her Substack publication “Knife Into My Noir” via four newsletters.
Substack: @knifeintomynoir
Instagram: @knifeintomynoir
Featured photo by Tima Miroshnichenko (Pexels)
