While walking with a friend recently, she stopped to appreciate the view, and it certainly was a vista worth pausing to admire. However, she then went on to apologize for asking me to take a moment to enjoy the natural beauty of our surroundings. The fact that she felt the need to make an apology epitomizes a gaping societal flaw we all seem to accept as normal. It’s called Grind Culture, and it’s toxic.
Also known as burnout culture, grind culture refers to the mentality that one must work all day every day in pursuit of their professional goals.* The new work-from-home paradigm created during the pandemic has changed the business landscape for many industries. It certainly offers more flexibility, but the downside is that you are never off. Basically, you live at the office and, unless you are well schooled in creating healthy boundaries, work will seep into your “after hours.” Companies offer unlimited vacation, but there’s no time to take any.
You don’t have to be in the workforce to fall prey to the pace of grind culture. I often find myself rushing through my days with a mental to-do list that never ends. We are slaves to productivity because somehow the message that our worth is measured by our output has taken hold. Consequently, people live with no margins, too busy to accommodate unexpected interactions and adventures. Interruptions are annoyances rather than opportunities.
Without clean margins, we lose the ability to “stop and smell the roses” so to speak or feel guilty for ‘wasting’ time. In the cancer world clean margins are healthy. That’s the kind of pathology report you pray for. Living without clean margins in your daily life can be its own kind of cancer spreading into all areas of your life. We need to choose to create clean margins in our lives because some of life’s best moments happen there.
When I allow busyness to take over, I’ve noticed the first thing to suffer is quiet time with God. That’s my cue to stop and reevaluate my priorities and schedule. Rick Warren warns: “One of Satan’s strategies is to get you so busy doing unimportant things that you don’t have time for the important things in life, and you don’t spend any time preparing for eternity. Satan doesn’t have to get you to sin. If he can’t get you to be bad, he’ll just get you to be busy.” He whispers lies that suggest the busier you are, the greater your worth.
On the other hand, when I choose to make quiet time with the Lord my first priority, my soul is peaceful and open to whatever the day holds. Stillness is essential for our well-being, whether we are able to accomplish it in quiet solitude or amidst a chaotic schedule. It’s not necessarily a place but a state of mind which, with practice, can be achieved anywhere. It might be sitting on a train, in traffic, in an office, or in a doctor’s waiting room.
One of my recent efforts to maintain a healthy spiritual connection was to download a pause app that encourages a 1-2-minute spiritual reflection throughout the day. However, the numerous pings on my phone reminding to PAUSE caused even more angst so I deleted it. Plus, I don’t need an app to remind me to check in with the Lord. His creation (especially during the fall) is its own vivid reminder.
The truth is our worth is not about our output but God’s input. He has given us His Holy Spirit to reside in our hearts as a “deposit, guaranteeing what is to come” (2 Corinthians 5:5). Our inherent value comes from being a child of God. There is nothing we can do to make Him love us any more or any less. In a world where it is harder and harder to find the truth, that fact is a truth we can choose to rely on “yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
Choose Jesus - always.
*https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/what-is-hustle-culture