Yesterday, I published a story on three separate occasions where the world nearly ended. You could consider this essay a follow-up, because I’ve learned something bizarre from these stories: the most consequential work in human history has never looked like what we think “productivity” looks like.

The Three Times the World Nearly Ended
The Three Times the World Nearly Ended Ordinary people chose to do the right thing and saved us all. We barely remember…
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Petrov: 23 minutes of decision-making saved billions of lives. Then he went home. Clocked out. Filed (improper) paperwork. Got reprimanded. No reward. Reassigned. Retired early. Nervous breakdown. Died in obscurity.

Arkhipov: Four hours of argument underwater, 50°C heat, carbon dioxide poisoning, barely able to breathe. Said no when two other men said yes. Surfaced. Sailed home. The world didn’t learn about it for 40 years.

The Chernobyl engineers: Fifteen minutes waist-deep in radioactive water, knowing where the valves were because it was their job to know. Then went to the showers. Then continued working. Baranov died 19 years later from a heart attack. Bespalov retired. Ananenko is still alive.

There aren’t any 8-hour days in offices, meetings being attended, logistic reports being sent, KPI metrics being optimized, personal brands being built, or content being created. Every job is a bullshit job.

The Theatre of Productivity

We’ve built an entire economy around the theatrical performance of work that doesn’t actually move the needle. Research confirms we spend 23 minutes refocusing after each interruption, check email 36 times per hour, and achieve actual productive output averaging 3 hours per day.

The 8-hour workday was a 19th-century labor achievement designed for factory efficiency, not knowledge work or creative output. Yet we’ve extended this industrial-era framework to all labour, pretending that sitting in a chair for eight hours equals eight hours of meaningful contribution.

It doesn’t. And we know it doesn’t.

But we participate in a mutual exchange of façade. We pretend other people are doing meaningful things in exchange for them pretending we are. Like a cargo cult that’s forgotten what the original planes carried, we perform the rituals of productivity—the morning routines and affirmations, the time-blocking, the mission statements, the standing desks, the optimization—while the actual work, the work that matters, happens in brief and unpredictable moments that have nothing to do with any of it.

Think about who’s actually mattered throughout history. Most historically significant figures are remembered for singular moments or achievements rather than their broader bodies of work.

Edison for the light bulb (which he didn’t invent), not his recording innovations. Lincoln for saving the Union, not his mental breakdowns or his 25-year legal career where he logged countless billable hours.

The light bulb is a symbol, but it rests on machinists who turned filaments, glassworkers who blew bulbs, miners who dug coal to power the generators, line workers who strung wire in all weather so a rich asshole could flip a switch and be immortalized for it.

Lincoln’s “moment” depended on anonymous clerks copying orders by hand, telegraph operators working through the night, quartermasters doing endless math with grain and boots and horses so the army didn’t starve before Gettysburg.

The people who stopped Chernobyl weren’t executives with corner offices. They were maintenance engineers who knew where the valves were. The person who prevented nuclear war wasn’t the General Secretary or the President. He was a lieutenant colonel filling in for someone who called in sick, trusting his gut over a computer system, making a decision that violated protocol.

We don’t recognize the years of boring training drills he didn’t skip, the hundreds of uneventful shifts where nothing happened, the technicians who calibrated the sensors, the custodians who kept the command centre functioning, the electricians who made sure the backup generators actually turned on. The moment looks like instinct. Underneath it is a decade of invisible competence.

While we celebrate “visionaries” and “disruptors” and “thought leaders,” the people keeping civilization functioning are invisible. They don’t have TED Talks; they have shift schedules. They don’t have nonprofit foundations; they know the one fuse you must not pull, or the one pipe that will flood three city blocks if you turn the wrong way.

Between 1986 and 1989, over 600,000 liquidators worked at Chernobyl. Firefighters, pilots, soldiers, miners, divers, engineers. They put their bodies between catastrophe and civilization. According to one estimate, 25,000 Russian liquidators died and 70,000 were disabled; same numbers in Ukraine; 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled. They were hailed as heroes in 1986. Now they’re discarded and forgotten, their ill health dismissed by authorities as unrelated to radiation exposure.

Chernobyl is just an extreme, radioactive version of what happens every day in non-radiation contexts.

We forget the people who physically absorb the cost of our comfort. The sanitation workers hauling bags at 4 a.m. so the city doesn’t drown in its own garbage. The sewage plant operators managing systems you never think about until they fail. The nurses on night shift turning patients so they don’t get bedsores. The farm workers bent over in fields so your grocery store looks abundant. The line cooks working over hot grills so your delivery app can pretend food just materializes in containers. The janitors cleaning offices after hours so knowledge workers can arrive to a space that feels magically reset.

We call these “low-skill” jobs. A convenient lie that lets us underpay the people we depend on most. There is skill in knowing how to climb into a clogged industrial drain without dying. There is skill in reading the mood of a volatile patient at 3 a.m. and de-escalating without anyone getting hurt.

The plumbers. The electricians. The farmers. The long-haul truckers who move everything you’ve ever bought. The air-traffic controllers whose entire job is to make sure nothing interesting happens. The maintenance workers. The caregivers. The people who actually know where the valves are, who understand the infrastructure we take for granted. These are the people doing work that matters.

Productive in the only sense that actually counts: their labour sustains the comfortable lives of those pretending to be superior. Executives can “disrupt” all they want; if the garbage isn’t collected for three weeks, the disruption wins. Influencers can post optimized morning routines; if the power grid fails on a cold night, nobody is thinking about their journaling habit. Civilization doesn’t collapse because we ran out of thought leaders. It collapses when the people doing the unglamorous work stop or are unable to do it.

The people keeping us alive are not on magazine covers. They don’t keynote conferences. They don’t have productivity podcasts. They just keep the lights on. And if one day, in 23 minutes or four hours or 15 minutes, they make a decision that actually saves the world, it will look from the outside like “just doing their job.”

So what does this mean? If meaningful productivity is functionally impossible to sustain across an 8-hour workday, five days a week… and if the most consequential moments in human history happened in minutes or hours, not decades of grinding… and if the people who saved the world were making split-second decisions—

Then when we waste time or procrastinate, what are we wasting our time from? The answer is nothing. There is nothing to waste your time from.

Let’s say you dedicate a decade of your life to birdwatching. That isn’t a wasted ten years. Neither are the evenings you “waste” binge-watching streaming services aren’t wasted. Or the hours you spend on a hobby that will never monetize. None of it is wasted time.

Because the alternative—the thing you’re supposedly not doing—is participating in an elaborate theatre of productivity that produces nothing except the mutual reinforcement of everyone else’s performance.

You could dedicate a year of your life to mastering French. You could spend every evening watching prestige television. You could build an elaborate model train set. You could learn to identify 200 species of birds. You could read every book by your favorite author. You could get really, really good at a video game.

And perhaps there’s this gnawing feeling that you’re missing out on something larger and more important. That you’re not “self-actualizing.” That you’re squandering your potential.

But that feeling is internal. It’s generated by comparison to a false external standard that doesn’t actually exist. The external world you falsely believe has expectations set on you? It doesn’t. Not really.

Because when something truly consequential needs to happen, it’s going to come down to nothing you can prepare for. Instead, it’s going to come down to:

1. Someone trusting their gut against protocol
2. Someone who happens to know where the valves are
3. Someone being in the right place at the right time This realization presents an existential fork.

Terrifying: Your work doesn’t matter. Your legacy won’t last. You’re one of a myriad in a collection, standing beside dozens or hundreds of others on a shelf. Most people change one or two policies significantly, even those holding the highest positions of authority. Even if you achieve recognition in your field, you’ll likely be remembered for the wrong thing—or forgotten entirely.

Liberating: You’re free. Free from the tyranny of optimization. Free from the performance of productivity. Free to act without consequence because the consequences you imagined—the judgment, the missed opportunities, the wasted potential? Always a fiction you told yourself.

You are not damned by your inability to maintain productivity. You are damned by believing you should.

You can continue participating in the mutual delusion. Perform productivity. Optimize your calendar. Write LinkedIn posts about your morning routine. Attend meetings about meetings. Pretend you’re doing something meaningful while everyone else pretends the same.

Or you can accept that the moments that matter—if they come at all—will not announce themselves with a notification. They will not fit into your calendar.

They will be 23 minutes at midnight when the screens light up wrong. They will be four hours underwater when everyone else wants to launch. They will be 15 minutes waist-deep in radioactive water because you happen to know where the valves are.

And the rest of the time? The rest of the time you’re free. Free to watch birds. Free to binge-watch TV. Free to pursue hobbies that will never monetize. Free to simply exist without justifying your existence through the performance of productivity.

Self-actualization isn’t an external metric. It’s not measured in output or impact or legacy. It’s the feeling of being present to your own life. Of doing what you’re doing because you want to do it, not because you’re supposed to want to do it.

The birdwatcher who spends years identifying species is no less self-actualized than the entrepreneur grinding 80-hour weeks. The difference is the birdwatcher might actually be present to their experience, while the entrepreneur is performing for an imaginary audience that doesn’t exist or an actual audience that doesn’t actually care.

The white bunker walls at Serpukhov-15 are still there. The Caribbean Sea is still there. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is still there, slowly being reclaimed by forest. And we are still here, performing productivity, convinced that if we just optimize enough, we’ll finally achieve something meaningful.

But Petrov saved the world in 23 minutes and got reprimanded for improper paperwork. Arkhipov saved the world in four hours and nobody knew for 40 years. Ananenko saved Europe in 15 minutes because he knew where the valves were.

And then they all went back to their lives. That’s productivity.

Everything else is theatre.