How to Escape Productivity Culture When It Follows You Outside

A few months ago, I was hiking with a friend when I tripped and pulled my hamstring. We both had our own alpine climbing goals that summer, and I’d been looking at our morning hike as a training opportunity. I didn’t want to hold either of us back.

I assured him that I’d be able to hobble along at our same brisk pace and, when that became impossible, told him that he should leave me behind. He refused both. Instead, he sat down beside me on the trail.

“You know,” he said. “I think I spend too much time doing in nature, and not enough time being in nature.” The brisk pace—and therefore the training gains—could wait.

It shouldn’t have felt revolutionary, but it did. And it made me realize just how much I’d let my own obsession with productivity bleed into my recreational life.

When Nonstop Productivity Creates an Illusion of Control

I am a person who lives in fear of my own idleness. Every spare scrap of my time is scheduled, tracked, color-coded, and accounted for. The other day, my partner glanced over my shoulder at my phone and asked if I was playing Candy Crush. “No,” I said, holding up the screen to show him the tightly packed colored squares. “That’s just this week’s Google calendar.”

On the one hand, I know that my constant busyness comes from a deep-seated need for control. Fill my schedule with social plans, and I’ll never be lonely. Control my time, and maybe I’ll feel like I’m controlling my life.

On the other hand, I do genuinely like doing stuff. When I lie on my deathbed, I want to feel fully wrung out, like I gave my all to this whole business of life and left no shred of time on the table. No trail unexplored. No mountain unclimbed.

Some folks would call that approach very industrious, or very American. Others would call it toxic productivity.

Toxic productivity is a fairly modern term that encompasses both the desperate need to be productive at all costs—and the guilt that sets in after a day without measurable output. It can look like working long hours at the office. It can also look like assigning checklists and training goals to your hobbies to make them feel “productive,” or trying to monetize them so they feel justified.

Is It Possible to “Do” and “Be” at the Same Time?

Initially, I bristled at the idea of “doing in nature” as a binary to “being in nature.” Couldn’t I have both? Couldn’t I like being outdoors and give mountain sports my all? Wasn’t doing the opposite a waste of time?

Sitting beside someone who was perfectly happy to listen to the birds and watch the wind flutter through the ponderosa pines, I suddenly wasn’t so sure. I’d spent hundreds of hours pushing myself through pain and chasing an imagined future self instead of dwelling in the present. Maybe that also counted as wasted time.

Instead of letting the outdoors be an escape, I’d turned it into yet another arena for excellence. I hadn’t even made it back to the trailhead, and I was already mentally recalculating the mileage and gain I’d have to do later in the week to make up for our lost training time. He, meanwhile, had nowhere to be but right there.

Maybe some people can push their pace and fully absorb their surroundings at the same time. I don’t know if I can. As long as I’m thinking about my time, my heart rate zone, or my pitch count, a significant fraction of my mind is elsewhere. Partial presence in nature is better than no presence in nature. But I realized that to get a full reset, I needed to make time to stop chasing, sit in the dirt, and simply be still.

The Happiness Trap

In Western societies, the relentless chase of self-improvement is usually celebrated. But research indicates that active pursuit of anything can actually make you less happy. That includes the pursuit of happiness itself.

A 2018 study from a pair of researchers at the University of Toronto and Rutgers University revealed that people who pursue happiness tend to do so because they believe time is running out, and that happiness is a destination that they must reach before it’s too late. Worse, the act of chasing happiness can actually put you in that kind of scarcity mindset, even if you aren’t already.

That’s the irony of setting goals, especially around wellness. The authors of the 2018 paper write that “trying to be happier often leads people to monitor not only happy thoughts but also unhappy thoughts at the same time, and the ironic salience of this negativity makes them feel unhappier.”

In other words: fixating on a thing—whether it’s your health, your fitness, or your climbing grade—means you’re naturally focusing on your moments of failure as well as your moments of success. The result is often more dissatisfaction than you would have experienced had you just let yourself enjoy the thing without goals attached.

How to Reclaim Being

In the 2018 study, researchers found that participants were more likely to identify as happy if they viewed happiness as a state of gratitude as opposed to a thing to obtain.

Let’s, for a moment, pretend I believe in the premise that I won’t be happier if I win that race, slash that mile time, or notch that climbing grade. Won’t I be unhappy if I do the opposite? If I sit around being idle? If I skip that lunch run or give up on that climb? Or if, God forbid, I take a whole day—or week, or month—off my sport and watch my fitness hit rock bottom?

Whether you’re ready to hear this or not, all that counts as rest.

A friend of mine, Madeleine Dore, once compiled her own thoughts about hustle culture and productivity guilt in a book refreshingly titled I Didn’t Do the Thing Today. In it, she describes human creativity like a sponge. Sometimes, you’re in an absorb phase. Sometimes you’re in a squeeze phase.

During a squeeze, you can produce and produce and produce, but after a while, you’re completely wrung out. At that point, the only way to refill is to let yourself lie fallow. That doesn’t mean monetizing your hobby or poring over data to optimize your training. It means sitting in the dirt. Reading a book. Sleeping. Ambling. Watching the clouds go by.

The secret to a fulfilling and creative life isn’t in the squeeze; it’s in the absorb.

Do that, and you’ll start to feel your brain sponge refill. You’ll begin to appreciate the pure, intrinsic joy of moving your body outdoors just for its own damn sake. And you’ll finally learn to revel in who you are right now—not in the fictional person you’re still trying to become.

10 Things I’m Doing To (Try To) Free Myself From Toxic Productivity Outdoors

Here’s how I’m attempting to lean into being in nature. These might work for you too:

Remember that spending time outside is an absolutely mind-blowing, incredible, glorious privilege and doesn’t need to be goal-oriented to be worth doing.
Leave my fitness watch at home when I hike, bike, or run, so I’m not constantly checking my metrics.
Reframe “unproductive days” as wins for the brain sponge, not as losses.
Unfollow people who spray about their accomplishments on social media.
Try not to spray about my own accomplishments on social media.
Let my hobbies be hobbies—not side hustles—even if they’re a total money sink.
Avoid counting summits, annual ski days, tent nights, or marathons.
Set qualitative goals like going on a road trip instead of quantitative ones such as sending a 5.12 climb.
Reframe outdoor time as a social endeavor rather than an athletic one.
In the summer, make time twice per month to sit outside and watch the sun set.

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