What does it mean to be productive?

from a conversation I started elsewhere.

Who decides what is productive or not? Is the stoned out artist sitting at the table pen in hand day-dreaming less productive if they get up and walk away not having put pen to paper?

Does productive always mean tangible product?

And further, what if there is no market for the product (if there is one); is the artist wasting his time or life?

Is it to our best advantage to let market forces be the sole measure of productivity and determine what activities will or will not be seen or supported by society?

You read those books where luxury
Comes as a guest to take a slave
Books where artists in noble poverty
Go like virgins to the grave
Don't you get sensitive on me
'Cause I know you're just too proud
You couldn't step outside the Boho dance now
Even if good fortune allowed
- joni mitchell (The Boho Dance)

Poverty and such is a small sacrifice to pay to be remembered forever

True, if that sort of desire for immortality is what motivates someone. On the other hand, I have known cultural contributors whose contributions were completely ephemeral and who had or have no wide spread audience to reproduce fame or reward beyond their immediate contacts. And I think we should draw a distinction between living in enforced poverty and consciously living sparingly, under a Spartan or minimalist aesthetic.

Given the wealth of western cultures, it is completely affordable to provide every person with a minimal citizens income that would allow for a much wider set of individual pursuits than are presently allowed because of the constraints of having everyone's personal sense of productivity being tied to a bottom line mentality and that bottom line in turn being defined by a consensus about what is or is not utile at the moment.

And I think most of the resistance to this sort thing has nothing to do with the expense per se to provide such a citizen's income, but rather is based on an erroneous, yet common place Calvanistic, Christian work ethic which has little patience with work that is less than apparently muscular or concretely evident. Anything else is regarded as suspiciouly slothful and therefore antithetical to the idea of being productive.