Every year, Labour Day comes and goes like that one colleague who says, “Let’s catch up soon,” and then disappears for six months. We acknowledge it, we enjoy the public holiday, we post something vaguely grateful, and then on Monday, we go back to replying emails at 8:57am, pretending we are not already tired. This year feels a little different though, or maybe it isn’t different and we are just more honest now, because lately there is a quiet message humming beneath everything we do: you are not enough, not yet, not quite, almost there—but try harder. It doesn’t always come from a boss standing over your shoulder like a secondary school invigilator; sometimes it’s more subtle, it’s in the KPIs that get revised just when you thought you finally understood them, it’s in the “just one more thing” that is never just one more thing, it’s in the way productivity is measured like a game score, and somehow the scoreboard keeps updating itself. You hit the target and the target moves, you improve and the benchmark rises, you rest and someone asks why you’re slowing down, and somewhere along the way, you begin to wonder if you were ever enough to begin with.
The most dangerous part is not even the pressure itself but how quietly we internalise it, how we start speaking the language of productivity as if it is our mother tongue, saying things like “I’ve not been very productive today,” or “I feel useless,” or “I didn’t achieve much,” and not noticing how quickly “productive” becomes “useful” and “useful” becomes “worthy,” as if we have collapsed our entire existence into output, as if we are not humans but slightly upgraded printers, and when the printer jams, we apologise. Let me confess something here, there are days I end my work feeling like I’ve done nothing even though I know, objectively, that I’ve done a lot—emails replied, lessons conducted, students engaged, scripts drafted, people spoken to—but because none of it felt big, it felt like it didn’t count, as if meaning must always come with scale, as if quiet effort is somehow lesser, and I know I’m not the only one, because somewhere out there someone is folding laundry, replying messages, checking in on a friend, meeting a deadline, and still thinking, “I didn’t do enough today,” which is wild when you think about it, because if a friend told you they did all that, you would probably say, “Wah, not bad ah,” but when it’s ourselves, suddenly the bar is Olympic level.
Labour Day was never meant to celebrate productivity; it was meant to protect people from it, and that is the irony, because the day exists because there was a time when people were worked to the bone, when hours were long, conditions were harsh, and rest was considered a luxury instead of a right, and Labour Day was a line drawn in the sand to say we are not machines, we are not infinite, we are not here only to produce, and yet somehow we have come full circle, not in the same visible ways but in quieter, more insidious ones, where the pressure doesn’t always come from outside but from within, where we optimise ourselves, track our habits, measure our time, and somehow even turn rest into something we must earn, where even our breaks have goals and we say things like “let me just rest productively,” which I don’t fully understand but it sounds stressful. There is something else we don’t talk about enough, which is that exhaustion doesn’t always look like collapse, sometimes it looks like functioning, you wake up, you go to work, you do what needs to be done, you smile when required, and inside there is just less—less excitement, less curiosity, less energy to care—you’re not burnt out enough to stop but you’re tired enough to forget why you started.
So maybe this Labour Day, the question is not how can I be more productive but what have I already survived, because if you really sit with that question properly, you might realise something uncomfortable, which is that you have been doing a lot, more than you give yourself credit for, you have navigated difficult conversations, met expectations you didn’t set, adapted, adjusted, compromised, shown up even when you didn’t feel like it, and no, not all of it was perfect, but it was real and it mattered. We don’t celebrate survival enough, maybe because it feels too basic, too ordinary, but surviving is not nothing, especially in a world that keeps asking for more. There is a line I keep coming back to, which is that your worth is not your output, and it sounds simple, almost cliché, but if it were truly simple, we wouldn’t struggle with it so much, because deep down many of us still believe that if we produce more, we matter more, and if we achieve more, we are more, and when we don’t, we shrink, we apologise, we question ourselves.
But think about the people you love, your family, your friends, that one person who sends you memes at 2am, you don’t measure their worth by how productive they are, you don’t think, “Wah, today my friend very valuable, completed seven tasks,” you value them because they are there, because they listen, because they laugh, because they exist in your life, so why do we apply a different metric to ourselves. Maybe it’s time to reclaim time, not in a grand, revolutionary way, but in small, stubborn acts, like taking a break without explaining it, meeting a friend without checking your phone every five minutes, going for a walk without turning it into a step-count challenge, spending time with your family without thinking about what’s waiting in your inbox, and sometimes just sitting and doing nothing, feeling slightly uncomfortable, and then realising the world did not end. And while we are at it, maybe we can widen the lens a little, because productivity doesn’t just affect people, it affects everything, the way we consume, the way we produce, the way we treat the environment, animals, resources, because when everything is about more—more growth, more output, more efficiency—something always pays the price, and often it is not us directly but the things around us, the environment that absorbs the excess, the animals that lose space, the quiet ecosystems that don’t get a say, so maybe valuing rest is not just about us, maybe it is also about learning to take less, to pause, to not always push for more, because a society that only knows how to accelerate will eventually forget how to sustain.
I realise this is starting to sound a bit serious, so let me lighten it slightly, if life really is like a certain space saga, then most of us are not the main character, we are not out here swinging lightsabers and saving galaxies, we are more like the side characters trying to keep things running, fixing things, holding things together, making sure the ship doesn’t fall apart, and you know what, that matters too, not everything has to be epic to be meaningful. So this Labour Day, maybe we don’t need a big resolution, maybe we just need a small acknowledgment, a quiet one, “I did okay,” not amazing, not extraordinary, not viral-worthy, just okay, and sometimes okay is more than enough. Give yourself a bit of credit for the work you’ve done, for the effort you’ve put in, for the days you showed up even when you didn’t feel like it, you don’t need a performance review to validate that, you were there and that counts, and if you can, give yourself something else too, which is time, time to rest, time to breathe, time to remember that you are more than what you produce, call someone you’ve been meaning to call, sit with your family a little longer, play with a cat, which I highly recommend because cats have no concept of productivity and are living proof that existence is enough.
We like to call ourselves warriors, fighting through deadlines, battling expectations, surviving the week, and maybe that is true, but even warriors need to rest, even warriors need to put down their weapons and remember who they are outside the fight, otherwise what are we even fighting for, so here’s to you, for making it this far, for doing what you can, for trying even when it’s hard, Happy Labour Day, and since it happens to fall on this particular date, may the 4th be with you, but more importantly, may you be with yourself.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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