Productivity and pain
Today I woke up five hours after my alarm went off. Then I got a migraine. And I already had a chest infection. So it hasn’t been a very productive day. And I am tempted to let it remain so - to let myself off the hook for doing anything other than watching TV. And even off the hook for watching high quality TV instead of terrible TV. Which leads me to wonder why it is that suffering reduces the amount of work a person can do, or why I (and people?) assume it does. As in, if my head is just going to hurt continuously regardless of what I do, why does this make it an especially bad time to do work, of all things? I feel strongly like I should not have to work under such circumstances, but the feeling doesn’t come with clear reasons. Is it that I will be endlessly distracted by pain? Plausible, but I just wrote a whole paragraph. Is it that work is suffering, and it is bad to make people suffer too much, so you have to wait until they have a buffer of happiness that can be eaten away by the working? Feels plausible, but I don’t know if I would endorse that view on reflection. Is it that the suffering of work and the suffering of endless pain are complementary, so that if you have two at once, things are worse? (And worse enough to make it worth destroying the work that could have been produced?) I am not sure.