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Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde said on Sunday he hoped the Centre will provide financial aid for the ambitious water grid project in Marathwada, and announced that the state will implement an array of welfare measures to commemorate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 73rd birthday. Shinde, who was speaking at an event in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar to commemorate the Marathwada Liberation Day, said they have also made a request for Central assistance for the water grid project to PM Modi, who turned 73 on Sunday.

The region, comprising eight districts, was under the oppressive rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad. An uprising of peasants and common citizens ensured the defeat of the Nizam and his Razakar militia and the region merged with India on September 17, 1948.

“We are trying to divert the run-off water during the monsoon towards the Godavari river basin. The state government has allocated Rs 15,000 crore for the ambitious Marathwada grid project. We have also requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi for (Central) assistance. I am sure we will get support from the Union government,” he said.

The chief minister said the state government had allotted several hundred crore rupees for the betterment of roads and other infrastructure in Marathwada and assured people that a change for the better will be seen in the coming days.

The region is generally considered less prosperous, mainly due to insufficient rainfall.

“Rains have taken a break which is affecting farmers in the region. Last year, when farmers were affected due to the same problem, we had gone beyond the rules and distributed more funds to minimize their misery,” the CM said.

The Maharashtra government held a special cabinet meeting in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (formerly Aurangabad) on Saturday to mark the 75th year of the Marathwada Liberation Day.

CM Shinde also announced a package of Rs 45,000 crore for the development of Marathwada as well as revised administrative sanctions for irrigation projects worth Rs 14,000 crore.

The Marathwada region comprises eight districts – Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (previously known as Aurangabad), Dharashiv (previously known as Osmanabad), Jalna, Beed, Latur, Nanded, Hingoli and Parbhani.

Later, speaking to reporters in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Shinde said Maharashtra will implement the NaMo 11-point programmes, an array of welfare measures, to commemorate the 73rd birthday of PM Modi.

The first programme will be called the ‘NaMo Women Empowerment Campaign’ under which various government schemes will cover 73 lakh women, he said. As many as 40 lakh women will be connected with self-help groups, while 20 lakh more will be connected with “Shakti groups”, Shinde said.

Mission Shakti, a flagship programme of the Union government, aims at empowering women through self-help groups and gainful activities by providing credit and market linkage.

“The campaign has also set a target of giving employment and technical training to 5 lakh women, capital for 5 lakh women to start their own business and helping 3 lakh women entrepreneurs to access market and customers,” the CM said.

The ‘NaMo Labour Welfare Campaign’ will provide safety kits to 73,000 construction workers in the state. The ‘NaMo Farm Pond Campaign’ has set a target of construction of 73,000 farm ponds in the state to increase the capacity to store water received through rainfall, Shinde said.

The ‘NaMo Self-reliant and Solar Power Campaign’ is aimed at making 73,000 villages in the state self-reliant on aspects like water, processing of agricultural produce and its marketing. The campaign also includes the construction of pucca houses, toilets and roads, and focuses on creating jobs at the village level, he said.

‘NaMo Poor and Backward Class Honour Campaign’ will focus on building pucca houses for the poor and the backward classes and construction of pucca roads, community halls and improvement in electricity supply, he said.

Under the ‘NaMo Gram Sachiwalay Campaign’, at least 73 new gram panchayat offices will be built in every district. These offices will have good internet connectivity and operate on solar energy, Shinde said.

The other initiatives are ‘NaMo Tribal Smart School Campaign’, ‘NaMo Divyang Shakti Campaign’, ‘NaMo Sports Grounds and Gardens Campaign’, ‘NaMo City Beautification Campaign’ and ‘NaMo Holy Places and Fort Restoration and Protection Campaign’, Shinde added.

• Published On Sep 18, 2023 at 08:10 AM IST

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A 13-year-old girl is using her smartphone in the dark roomGetty Images

The rise in depression, anxiety and suicidal behaviors among adolescents has generated thousands of commentaries blaming social media while calls for restrictions on teens’ online access many states and Congress are advancing.

However, leaders, authorities, and commentators on the issue uniformly ignore the Centers for Disease Control’s 116-question, 7,800-subject Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey that documented teen’s “mental health crisis” in the first place.

Related

More school counselors could turn the tide on the youth mental health crisis

The CDC survey found 11% of 12-18-year-olds reporting violent abuses and a shocking 55% reporting emotional abuses by household grownups – levels two and four times higher, respectively, than those of similar 2014 survey. Teens are several times more likely to be bullied and injured at home by parents than at school or from online encounters – surprising, since the CDC’s definition of peer bullying is broader than for parents’ emotional abuse.

The CDC’s abuse finding, highlighted in its survey summary, should have set off loud alarms in America’s mental health and institutional communities

Increased domestic abuse, including shootings (at least eight times more children and youth are shot to death by household grownups than at school), relate to the stresses of rising substance use disorder and the pandemic. Parents who lost their jobs are twice as likely to be abusive, the CDC finds.

Given more beating, hitting, kicking, abusive swearing and name-calling inflicted by parents and household adults that exceed normal family disagreements, it’s understandable that more teens are depressed and anxious.

The CDC’s abuse finding, highlighted in its survey summary, should have set off loud alarms in America’s mental health and institutional communities well aware of decades of consistent research linking childhood abuses to adolescents’ poor mental health and tragic outcomes.

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Instead, a curious silence ensued. The Surgeon General’s report on youth mental health mentioned abuse only obliquely — and his second report not at all. Instead, the nation’s top health official touted dubious social-media studies about which reviews warn of “considerable caveats due to the methodological limitations.” Getting scant response beyond a few scattered news squibs, the CDC dropped the abuse issue entirely in its follow-up 2023 report.

This is unconscionable. Full analysis of the CDC’s massive survey data conclusively shows social media is a trivial issue. Parents’ and household grownups’ abuses are the major factor closely associated with every serious teenage trouble — a reality institutional America clearly does not want to engage.

The correlation is a reverse one: depression drives social media use, not the other way around

Compared to non-abused teenagers, the most abused teens report 3.5 times more sadness, 4.5 times more depression, nine times more suicide contemplation, and 24 times more suicide attempts. Teens abused at home were four times more likely to be bullied at school or online. They reported four times more alcohol and drug use, six times more dating violence and school fights and a dozen times more weapons-carrying.

LGBTQ+ girls report more than three-quarters of the abuse by household grownups (76%). Of their abused cohort, 65% reported frequent depression and 27% reported suicide attempts. At the “low” end, 46% of heterosexual boys reported abuses, and of their non-abused fraction, just 10% reported frequent depression and 1% attempted suicide.

Authorities evaded these disturbing findings and stampeded to scapegoat social media. The CDC numbers do show a correlation between more social media use and more sadness and depression. The reason, however, reinforces the Statistics 101 caution against assuming correlation proves causation – especially when a gigantic factor like abuse is omitted.

The complication – glaring when parental abuse, social media use, depression, and suicide attempts are compared directly – is that abused teens report both more depression and more social media use. The correlation is a reverse one: depression drives social media use, not the other way around.

The CDC’s and Pew’s real findings should derail Congress’s and legislatures’ stampede to ban or restrict teen social media use

The most abused teenagers are two to four times more likely than non-abused teens to obtain medical and mental health services online. These connections help explain why youths who use social media one to five or more hours per day report many fewer suicide attempts than teens who never or rarely use social media.

The Pew Research Center study of 1,300 13-17-year-olds similarly found that, “80% said social media gives them some level of connection to what is going on in their friends’ lives”, “67% said social media reassures them that they have people to support them during tough times, and 58% said it makes them feel more accepted.” LGBTQ teens were the most likely to use social media to find support. Pew found very few teens think social media harms them personally, but many more imagine it must harm others.

The CDC’s and Pew’s real findings should derail Congress’s and legislatures’ stampede to ban or restrict teen social media use.

Along with failing to incorporate abuses by grownups into discussions of teenage mental health, authorities and commentators rarely contextualize distressing real-life trends. For example, deaths from suicides, homicides, unintentional drug overdoses and gunshots among teens ages 12-19 rose from 4,500 in 2000 and 4,800 in 2010 to 7,400 in 2022, a rate increase of 60%, generating understandable alarms.

Not understandable is the official and media silence surrounding the three-fold larger increase in such deaths among adults of ages to be parents of teenagers (30 to 59), from 35,000 in 2000 and 54,000 in 2010 to 109,000 in 2022, a rate increase of 175% to a level four times higher than among teens. Troubling, undiscussed trends among parent-aged adults accompany large increases in adult depression over the period.

The best information examined in full context shows we don’t have a “teenage mental health crisis.” We don’t even understand what that is, given massive youthful improvements in behaviors (led by supposedly depressed girls) that shouldn’t be happening if young people were seriously mentally disturbed. Social media moguls, though no angels, are not the problem.

Rather, we face a crisis of more troubled and abusive grownups – themselves stressed by untreated substance use disorders and pandemic-related troubles – and oblivious authorities. More depression and anxiety are normal responses to the self-aggrandizement of America’s institutional professionals and leadership seeking easy culture-war scapegoats instead of confronting – or even acknowledging – disturbing real crises.

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Staying active this summer as a family

Be a role model for an active lifestyle. Start moving more yourself and find ways to be active together as a family.

Physical activity should be fun for children and adolescents. Encourage kids to keep trying activities to discover the ones they like and will stick with long term.

Reduce or limit sedentary screen time, including watching television, playing video games and using a digital device.

Provide kids with opportunities to be active. Give them active toys and games, like bikes, skateboards, roller skates, scooters, jump ropes, balls and sports equipment.

Get familiar with community facilities near you, like pools, recreation centers, bike paths and parks.

Minority Mental Health Awareness Month

Mental health can positively or negatively impact your physical health and risk factors for heart disease and stroke, according to “Psychological Health, Well-Being, and the Mind-Heart-Body Connection,” a scientific statement in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

Stress may contribute to poor health behaviors linked to increased risk for heart disease and stroke, such as:

• Smoking
• Overeating
• Lack of physical activity
• Unhealthy diet
• Being overweight
• Not taking medications as prescribed

Resources:

More July Calendar Highlights

7/1 – International Joke Day | Tell an Old Joke Day (7/24) Can the groan-up humor of ‘dad jokes’ possibly be good for health?

7/2 – Civil Rights Act Anniversary – signed into law in 1964, prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal.

7/3 – National Eat Beans Day – The Benefits of Beans and Legumes | National Stay Out of the Sun Day

7/3-8/11 – Dog Days of Summer – Can Your Pet Help You Be Healthier?

7/3 to 7/9 – Alcohol Awareness Week

7/4 – Independence Day

7/5 – National Workaholics Day

7/7 – Father/Daughter Take a Walk Together Day | Global Forgiveness Day | National Day of Rock ‘n’ Roll – The American Heart Association has teamed up with the Elevance Health Foundation to teach Americans how to perform Hands-Only CPR. All songs in our ‘Don’t Drop the Beat’ playlist and Elevance Health Foundation Station are between 100 – 120 beats per minute, the same rate at which you should perform compressions when administering CPR.

7/11 – World Population Day

7/14 – Shark Awareness Day

7/15 – National Give Something Away Day

7/16 – National Ice Cream Day – Avocado Banana Ice Cream | American Heart Association Recipes – This creamy all-fruit ice cream is a delicious way to boost both fruit and fiber intake. Easy to prep the night before to ensure a refreshing treat is ready for kids of all ages.

7/17 – World Emoji Day

7/21 – National Craft for your Local Shelters Day

7/23 – National Parents’ Day | March for Men

7/24 – National Drowning Prevention Day Consider – Join our Nation of Lifesavers and learn CPR. The American Heart Association recommends CPR rescue breaths along with chest compressions in cases of drowning | International Self-Care Day – Self-Care Isn’t Selfish Infographic | Pioneer Day

7/26 – National Disability Independence Day commemorating the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law in 1990 | National Dog Photography Day – Healthy Bond for Life / Pets

7/30 – Share a Hug Day | World Friendship Day

7/31 – National Avocado Day – Dairy-Free Berry Avocado Smoothie – This simple dairy-free berry smoothie made with almond milk, frozen berries and avocados is a creamy delicious treat anytime. This recipe from Avocados From Mexico is an American Heart Association Heart-Check Certified recipe.

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I have been confused about the boundary between work and leisure for as long as I can remember. It isn’t because my parents worked punishingly long hours or because we never traveled; their relatively flexible academic schedules meant we shared plenty of afternoons eating deli sandwiches at a matinee or thumbing through clearance racks. We traveled to visit family and made annual forays to whatever city was hosting the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. But as a child, I had little interest in trips planned around museums, monuments, and conference panels. I yearned for the type of travel I saw on TV, all palm trees and fruity drinks in a paradise so removed from regular life it required special attire purchased from the “resort” section.

I had always assumed cost excluded us from such utopias, but when my waitressing tips covered a trip to Jamaica my first college spring break, I realized it wasn’t my parents’ lack of funds that kept me from returning from school vacations sunburned or with ski-lift tickets dangling from my jacket — it was their deeply held philosophy of labor. My parents believed that people who took escapist holidays were the unlucky ones: uninspired drones performing alienated labor, whether punching a clock on the assembly line or closing million-dollar deals in a soulless corporate tower, dreaming of days off.

They, on the other hand, were blessed to be paid to “pursue a life of the mind,” a job — sorry, calling — that required understanding, as my father would gush, “the entire world as a text ripe for interpretation.” To exist as an uncritical consumer rather than a cultural observer was a failure, or at least a missed opportunity. Taking time off was literally impossible, and who fortunate enough to do such work would want to?

This worldview, I now understand, was a loftier, late-20th-century version of the “if you love your work, you’ll never work a day in your life” / “no days off” mentality that became a linchpin of early-2000s hustle culture. As an adult, I seek out pools and palm trees more than my parents ever did, but I have been unable to escape this outlook entirely. As an academic who analyzes “everyday life,” I instinctively seize every opportunity to historicize, whether at the grocery store or the gym.

It’s not a bad way to live, but it is difficult to just enjoy anything when your default state is to analyze everything. My archive is potentially endless, a professional profile I usually find invigorating, but being “always on” is also exhausting. At the same time, that sense of depletion is also kind of embarrassing. My research has involved poring over piles of old sex-ed curricula and watching hours of Chippendales videos — is that even real work?

This ambivalence is probably why I am incurably addicted to productivity content, whether the stuff that promises to make me speedier, slimmer, and smarter or that which skewers such self-optimization efforts as internalized neoliberal oppression. I devour it all, hoping that somewhere amid rise-n-grind Instagram and essays on rest as anti-capitalist resistance, the boundary between labor and leisure will be revealed. Two fascinating new books get to the heart of this distinction, with which I think many of us struggle mightily: Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (Random House) and Sheila Liming’s Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (Melville House). As the titles suggest, each challenges our modern productivity culture. Odell urges readers to consider that they might be “living on the wrong clock”; Liming tells us to imagine an alternative organization of our lives, one that begins with relearning how to hang out.

Odell, an artist and writer who taught art at Stanford University for several years, focuses on technology, the environment, and our generally reckless interactions with these forces. Her bestselling 2019 book, How to Do Nothing, was an impassioned call to reimagine how we spend our time and energy (its pre-pandemic timing was propitious). Saving Time is more explanatory, offering “cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is.” Odell gracefully traces our productivity obsession’s ever-tightening grip from the writings of the industrial-era management scientist Frederick Winslow Taylor to early fitness magazines to today’s travel-influencer Instagram. Over time, Odell shows, the watchful eyes of factory foremen evolved into eyeball-scanning surveillance software and self-imposed Fitbit regimes. “Measuring fungible time,” she writes, “is like envisioning standardized containers that can potentially be filled with work.”

Andrew Lyons for The Chronicle

Saving Time pairs vivid and at times poetic examples with an argument that neoliberalism is the organizing structure of modern life. The destruction of the natural environment is central to Odell’s narrative, but she doesn’t succumb to fetishizing the “natural world” or to teleology. Her warning that “now is not the time to turn your back on the ocean” is as much an urgent call to fight climate change and one to stay vigilant about the destructive potential of nature itself, in the storms and wildfires that have ravaged her home of California. With similar nuance, Odell excoriates the obsession with efficiency and output born of capitalism but cautions that “it’s too easy to read history as a linear story of the encroachment of capitalist time into all locales and areas of life.”

Saving Time almost feels deliberately structured to force the reader to relinquish the aspirations of the efficiency impulse it critiques. Analysis is interspersed with sensory-rich descriptions of the natural environment, a typical section winding from a 1950 public-education film about the societal value of recreation to a detailed characterization of the “vanilla, clove, lemon, and black pepper” scent of a hiking trail to a 1750 Ohlone mortar and pestle to a 1934 survey on leisure time, all in a few paragraphs. The book is impossible to read in the extractive fashion taught in graduate school. While slowing down to parse such a text is a risky proposition in our distracted culture, the book mostly rewards the reader for doing so.

Hanging Out is equally contemplative, if less historical. Sheila Liming details her experiences as an itinerant writing professor crisscrossing the country from North Dakota to Vermont and endeavoring to make meaningful connections at dive bars and dinner parties during the pandemic. “There is no sublime to be found on the internet,” she declares, point-blank, a statement that feels both obvious and a bit transgressive, given the rapid encroachment of the web into every aspect of human experience. The presentist orientation of Hanging Out works perfectly for a text that is largely a defense of hanging out, primarily in person, as a way to carve “out a space for what feels genuine and real.”

At the same time, Liming is no uncritical cheerleader. Now an associate professor at Champlain College, in Vermont, she astutely captures the blurred lines between personal and professional that characterize academic conferences — a dynamic that enables precious moments of bonding in a geographically far-flung profession, but also grossly predatory behavior. Liming recounts bailing on a conference to avoid a harasser and crashing a wedding in the same hotel, practically invisible in her professional attire amid a swirl of satin and taffeta. In a moment of dark hilarity, she runs into her harasser — already after another mark — in the elevator, Liming wearing a party-favor scarf with an open bottle of wine sticking out of her laptop case.

Hanging out is always an act of vulnerability, Liming instructs. She ends up roaming the streets of Scotland with strange men and realizes the emptiness of a friendship while awkwardly playing a role on a reality TV set. Still, Hanging Out’s celebration of getting together feels like a balm in our late pandemic moment. Parties, jamming, wedding-crashing, and even stilted elevator encounters are all part of connecting in a more social, more human future.

What happened to our sense of time during the pandemic? Odell remembers the boundary between work and leisure as the difference between two browser tabs. We all have our versions of this. During those cold, undifferentiated weeks, my husband would “roll out the mood” at dusk by lighting candles and playing music, a more definitive way to conclude the workday than by just closing the laptop resting on our kitchen table. I would transition into work by putting on noise-cancelling headphones and embarking on a 15-minute writing sprint — a new unit of work time, dictated by overlaps in my kids’ virtual-school schedules. By way of a natural corrective to such strictures, Odell fathoms the slowness of rock erosion and the sudden crash of ocean waves.

Historically, it is usually a technology shift that accelerates the pace of life, rather than a pandemic that slows it. Streetlights redefined nightfall to signify more than cover for danger. Railroads and highways turned exotic produce into salad-bar staples and rural areas into commuter suburbs. VCRs liberated viewers from a fixed television timetable, and GPS made travel time so predictable that arriving late is a less permissible social offense.

A sprawling social-science literature centers “neoliberalism” as the most powerful force in American society since the 1970s, emphasizing how overarching political and economic systems, rather than specific inventions, have energized the spread of productivity culture. Scholars such as Matthew F. Delmont, Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, and Jonathan Crary have shown how austerity policies have eviscerated social programs and blended with a souped-up self-help ideology that leaves people to fend for themselves, all while making us believe this is the proper order of society rather than its disfigurement. Liming and Odell’s rich storytelling deepens these scholarly analyses and feels like a welcome new stage in the critiques of overwork that have been intensifying since the 1980s. First, tentative calls for “work-life balance” gave way, in the early 2000s, to individualized instructions to “practice self-care.” Then, that prescription was swapped for today’s more-explicit provocations to “embrace mediocrity,” “quiet quit,” or unionize.

The attendant social atomization Liming dwells on has received relatively less attention, perhaps due to the role of progressives in its intensification. Since the 2012 publication of Susan Cain’s Quiet, introversion has, curiously, become almost enshrined by some as a superior character trait. The pandemic then gave this antisocial stance the sheen of public-health virtue. As remote workers acclimated to their new solitude, it became commonplace to express outrage at the expectation of even minimal collegiality. At least I don’t have to pretend to be interested in my boss’s weekend. Why should anyone have the right to see my face? Am I seriously expected to wear pants?

Interestingly, the retreat of the laptop class (academics included) could be seen both as a rejection of productivity culture — privileging home life over the office grind — and as a capitulation to it: Some types of outputs surged when inefficient commuting and socializing were stripped away, it turned out. “What happens to a left that dislikes society?” a recent viral essay asked, pointing to the enthusiasm among progressives for pandemic lockdowns and their dehumanizing accouterments, from contactless delivery to video-off Zoom. Public-health officials talked about collective care but often encouraged an inward turn: On New York City subways, a ubiquitous poster instructed riders the “best” behavior was to stare down at one’s phone, masked, rather than converse. Schoolchildren ate silent lunch while sitting on the floor.

These books stop short of specifying how such policies melded understandable health concerns with unfortunate misanthropy, but they are refreshingly unsparing in chronicling the harms of isolation now acknowledged by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, which if articulated even recently could have gotten you condemned as a eugenicist. Liming vividly describes the desiccated interactions of the pandemic, such as solitary Zoom Thanksgiving and a student who explained her compulsive selfie-taking as a way to confirm her own existence. Odell writes of a haunting nightmare she had in the fall of 2020 of grasping a stranger’s hand — a mundane act that was then both comforting and transgressive, reminding her of how “the present cannot and should not be borne alone.” These small but searing memories are a crucial part of what should be a collective chronicle of our Covid era.

Especially with regards to race, class, and gender, power dynamics are encoded into clock time. Some of the loudest boosters of “screwing 9-5” and “working smarter, not harder” are white men like Mark Wahlberg and Tim Ferriss, Odell writes, who are least likely to be closely surveilled at work and thus less sensitive to the possibilities of a collective alternative. Ferriss, for example, suggests setting up an auto-responding, auto-deleting inbox, forcing emailers to write again after a certain date if their communication is still important. In my experience, an academic version of this plays out too frequently: a (typically male) colleague claims he can’t handle Google Calendar or forgot to collect cash for the secretary’s holiday gift, so someone else, often a woman, picks up the slack. These guys may indeed be “saving time” for “hanging out,” but such liberation “for me, not for thee” only offloads labor onto those with less power to resist it.

It is natural to work toward a meaningful life, I think, but we need to expand the terrains where such exertion happens and for whom.

Odell reiterates the critic and gender-studies professor Brittney Cooper’s argument that “white people own time,” in the sense that productivity metrics established by slaveholders and refined by devotees of Frederick Winslow Taylorundergird a capitalist system that leaves minoritized people with less wealth and thus less time, whether because they must abide by a shift schedule, cannot afford to live near work, or endure inefficient bureaucracy that stretches simple tasks into hours. This “time tax” is undeniable yet intractable if we do not move beyond individualistic solutions such as “better time management.” Alternatives are not always clear. Citing a Filipino writer frustrated with his country’s incompatibility with the pace of global business, Odell acknowledges that enshrining “Filipino time” as inherently problematic — or preferable as somehow more authentic — verges on fetishization.

Such concerns are not merely philosophical; they remind me of a working-class Black student who would consistently show up 10-15 minutes late to our 9 a.m. class after working the opening shift at Starbucks, a job that financed her education. By contrast, a white classmate with a prominent surname arrived just as reliably 10 minutes early — in a chauffeured car. How to fairly assess their attendance, given their divergent degrees of control over time and the historically embedded reasons for the disparity?

This class-stratified experience of leisure also comes crashing through in Liming’s rich chapter on dinner parties. First, a faculty dinner goes off the rails. An evening at a fancy restaurant was planned to celebrate an esteemed visiting writer, and Liming and her partner, “always poor back then,” were thrilled to be invited, despite having to cover their own meals. Midway through enjoying their careful selections — no appetizer, cocktail, or dessert — the university chancellor, downing filet mignon and wine by the glass, joked he had no idea who was paying for an evening that, to him, was clearly just another work commitment. When he left without paying, Liming and her partner could barely swallow their food. There would be no fair splitting of the bill, as they had assumed — nor would they stiff the server, whose presence the chancellor had barely noticed. They would instead cover the chancellor’s check, their carefully planned leisure experience suddenly anything but relaxing.

Another strange mealtime scene is equally striking. Liming bonds with an acquaintance who introduces her to Midwestern fare like hotdish and cookie salad. They hang out over rich snacks, but the friend’s culinary and entrepreneurial talents boost her from blogger to reality television star. Soon, Liming is only invited over by producers, to partake in staged meals made for on-screen consumption. The idealized, transactional gatherings eventually become their only connection and a poor substitute for the spontaneous sociability of an actual dinner party. It’s a story about the perils of turning a hobby into a hustle, but also a reminder of the preciousness of a good, real dinner party, in which time and class difference are suspended, at least until the bill arrives.

In the end, Odell and Liming do not convince me that the pursuit of productivity is misguided, but rather that defining it uniquely in terms of wage-earning work is unhelpfully narrow. It is natural to work toward a meaningful life, I think, but we need to expand the terrains where such exertion happens and for whom. The aggressive marketing of “nap dresses” to affluent women, for example, reinforces the retrograde idea that ladies belong at home resting rather than in public striving. Yet Black women advocating for napping as a form of resistance — or practicing yoga or birding — is radical given the longstanding assumption that they exist to labor for others. The writer Rainesford Stauffer offers a compelling vision: We should acknowledge that ambition can indeed be soul-sustaining, but only if we define it more expansively than in service of the traditional “social script of achievement” to include pursuits such as caregiving, gardening, and marathon training. And, in the spirit of Odell and Liming’s emphasis on human connection, Stauffer emphasizes the importance of challenging the dichotomy between ambition and the fundamental human needs of “belonging, rest, and having a circle of loved ones.” What would it take for these aspirations to be mutually reinforcing rather than exclusive?

One realm where we might consider this intersection is surprisingly invisible in these books: parenting. Thanks to feminist scholars, the uncompensated work of parenting, largely borne by mothers, has become an intrinsic part of conversations about labor. But what of the power of parenting to liberate us from traditionally defined productivity pressures? One personal period of nonproductivity stands out in my memory. After eight months of relatively uneventful pregnancy, I started gushing blood while crossing the street to attend my own baby shower. Within hours, I was settled in the hospital on bedrest for the foreseeable future, attached to a circulation machine. “I feel so useless, unproductive,” I remember crying to my dad, who reminded me that my rest and stillness was actually the most productive thing I could do — it would allow my body to heal and my baby’s lungs to develop. That expansive definition of meaningful work has stuck with me.

Less dramatically, because caregiving prevents me from most professional work on weekends or after hours, and because parenting engages me so differently from my mostly cerebral job, I tend to meet Monday mornings intellectually renewed if not actually rested. Might we elevate the growing productivity discourse by acknowledging how different the work of parenting is, rather than how much it resembles more familiar forms of labor?

If anything, these books and the pandemic moment from which they emerged make it clear to me that seizing every moment as an opportunity to live meaningfully — or productively, a term that doesn’t bother me at all — is my paramount priority, and not because I’ve so internalized self-optimization imperatives, but because I know being fully alive, with one another, is a privilege worth pursuing.

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