“Perhaps it is time to choose clarity over productivity, presence over perpetual motion, human beings over human doings.” Tijn Tjoelker
What strikes me is the word choose.
Not optimise.
Not balance.
Not hack.
Choose implies agency, values, and loss. Because choosing clarity means letting go of the comfort of busyness. Choosing presence means disappointing the cult of urgency. Choosing beings over doings means refusing to justify your existence through output.
This isn’t a productivity critique.
It’s an ontological reorientation.
What if we stopped asking: “What did you produce today?”
And asked instead: “What did you see? What did you understand?”
What if instead of “What’s next?”
We simply noticed “What’s here and what am I avoiding by staying in motion?”
Our obsession for doing constantly demands “What are you worth?”
Our inner being wants to know “Who are you when nothing is required of you?”
Choosing undermines the quiet moral economy we’ve all been trained to live inside.
I’ve been circling this truth throughout all my writings:
art as real work
unmaking as necessary
grief without clean stories
growing old through creation
exhaustion with performance
longing for wonder…
Tjoelker’s quote doesn’t add something new, it names the threshold I am already standing on.
Perhaps the crisis isn’t that we’re doing too little, but that we’ve forgotten how to be with what is.
Clarity is not inefficiency.
Presence is not laziness.
Being human is not a luxury.
We don’t have to resolve this.
We don’t have to turn it into a method.
Sometimes the most radical act is simply to live as if this were already true, one slowed breath, one honest refusal, one small act of creation at a time.
What if this isn’t an aspiration, but a daily practice of refusal?
Refusing to confuse motion with meaning.
Refusing to measure worth by output.
Refusing to abandon ourselves to urgency.
Clarity asks us to see what is actually here.
Presence asks us to stay when leaving would be easier.
Being asks us to exist without justification.
This isn’t about doing less for the sake of rest.
It’s about living more honestly.
About letting our attention become an act of care.
About remembering that humanity was never meant to be earned.
Perhaps the work now is simple, and radical:
to live as if being is already enough.
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